Write It Now Part 18: Logline, the writer’s best friend

I figure a logline is one of the best friends a writer can have. A good one will help sell your manuscript to an agent or publisher.  What’s more, loglines are also brilliant writing tools.

A logline is a one-sentence description of a book. Its purpose is to tell the agent or publisher why the public want to read the book. To do that, the logline doesn’t recount the plot; it describes the character arc – in effect, the emotional effect of the book on the reader. It works for non-fiction, too, but it’s usually used for fiction. In novels or plays, the usual form is “[character name] has to [do something] in order to [achieve exciting goal] and so [develop as a character]”.

It has to grab the person reading it at once and convince them why they should represet or publish the material. The keys to writing a good logline are active language and being able to hone in on why people want to read the story.

“Halfling hero has to face dangers to drop a magic ring into a volcano.”

Uh…yay, but no cigar. OK, try this:

“Unwilling halfling has to find the courage to face the power of the Dark Lord in a quest to destroy a cursed ring that threatens the world.”

There’s character dynamic, purpose, drama, and the stakes of failure are clear.

Some books don’t render a good loglines, because they don’t meet the requirements of dramatic convention. Yet that convention, like it or not, is what sells. The only cure is to re-write the book.

Is there a way to avoid that re-work? Sure. This is where the logline comes in as a writing tool.

Got an idea for a book? A phrase – ‘In a hole in the ground lived a…’ for instance? Excellent. But don’t start writing the novel from that (yes, I know someone did…) These days the bar is slightly higher.

Sit down and write the logline. Make those the very first words you write on a book. Make it the real thing – grippy, dynamic, all the stuff you think you’ll need to sell the book. If it looks lame – well, that’s a good litmus test as to the book itself.

If you have a Good Idea half way through? No problem. Loglines can be revised. But it’s important to sit down and look at the whole structure of the book if you change direction part way. More on that next time.

Meanwhile, do you use loglines? Have you ever sold a story or book with one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013 

Coming up: more writing tips, Neanderthal geek adventures with Amazon – and more.

Writing is quality-to-time, not word-count

I am often bemused at the way we measure writing, these days, on word count.

Software rates us on it. Contests pivot on it. You can get widgets that graph word-count on a progress bar. It has become a goal of itself.

All of which, to me, stands against what writing is all about.

When I see someone announce – let’s say on Twitter – that they’ve just written 2000 words, I often say to myself ‘great, but were they the right words?’

And how much more time will be needed to get the finished words?

Let me explain.

To me, the goal of writing is to evoke emotion in a reader. That happens not through word count, but through content. The actual number of words is almost irrelevant in this sense – what we have to look for, instead, is the right words. Do they convey the message? Do they do so with proper structure.

So where does word count come in? It has two places. Structurally, word count is important, because the word count tells you the scale of the work – and from that, you can work out the scale of the relevant components. But it is not a goal. Writing isn’t about words; they are simply the vehicle for ideas, concepts and thoughts.

At professional level it is also a standard measure on which everything from books to  features can be commissioned and paid for. It means publishers can budget production to known scales, and it means authors can budget time, based on how long it will take to complete a piece with x-number of words.

That’s the other issue. Completing a piece to length is a very different matter from writing that number of words.

If I draft a book of 70,000 words, that’s great – but I know there’s a lot of work yet, even on those 70,000 words, before I can submit the MS to my publishers. Even when a complete manuscript goes to a publisher, there may yet be 100 hours spent going through it on my part, checking editorial changes and publisher proofs, or answering queries. All of which is essential to completing the book – and none of which adds word count.

What are your thoughts on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more writing tips, ‘write it now’, geekery and more.

Why I don’t like the Caveman Diet

A few years ago I was introduced to the ‘Caveman Diet’.

The theory goes like this. Civilisation is an eye-blink in our history, and we’re not adapted to the things we eat today, which make us ill in consequence. We should be eating the same food that Ugh Ugh the Cave Man scoffed in 35,000 BC – raw nuts, grains, fruit, vegetables.

To which I said then – and still say now – rubbish!

Not only are humans geared to eat cooked food, we look like we do because of it. If we had to munch raw nuts, fruit and grains all day (and it would take all day to get the calories), we’d have jaws like an orang-utan. (I had breakfast with one once, but that’s another story…)

The science is clear. An ability to control fire – which may have begun 700,000 years ago – allowed early hominins to cook. Cooking reduces the energy needed to digest food, increasing the yield. One side effect was the drop in tooth and jaw size. It was also reflected in biochemistry.

As for the ‘cave man’ diet – well, there wasn’t one. A  lot depended on where people were. Even today, African hunter-gatherers have a wider range of foods available than people living on the edge of the ice sheets.

Neandertal family group approximately 60,000 years ago. Artwork by Randii Oliver, public domain, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The diet near the ice sheets was typified by that much maligned character, Cucu! the Neandertal. About ninety percent of the Neandertal diet was meat, and big game meat at that. Get this – Cucu! the Neandertal would head out armed with a heavy thrusting spears, and go into combat with mammoths and rhinocerii. Seriously. Skeletons have been found with upper body injuries identical, in form, to the ones rodeo riders get while steer wrasslin’. (What’s Neandertal for ‘yeeee-haaw!’?)

I’ve ridden elephants. There is no way I would want to go into combat with one, armed only with a spear. As for rhinos…well, uh…

The other issue is that there’s no return path to Ice Age foods for us.  We’ve selectively bred everything we eat today, and studies have shown that our biochemistry has adapted to suit. Today’s main wheat strain didn’t even exist 100 years ago (the guy who bred the super-wheat we use now only died recently).

The ‘cave man diet’, in short, is fantasy. Paleo-nostalgia.

So why does it work for some people? Part of the reason is that modern foods contain additives. Commercial chicken, for instance, is full of antibiotics, so if you’re intolerant to penicillins, it won’t do favours. All sorts of issues follow from immune system dysfunction – so, on the cave man diet, some people feel healthier.

So does this mean we’ll eventually adapt to being able to lie on couches with our Game Boys and TV remotes, surrounded by the detritus of chips, pizza and cola drinks?

Well, maybe, but something tells me not.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Writing lessons – amps to 11 with Pink Floyd!

A few years ago She Who Must Be Obeyed and I were sitting quietly at home watching the 483,986th TV re-run of The Sound of Music. It was a hot evening. The windows were open.

Julie Andrews got up to sing. And suddenly the room filled with sound. The anti-Sound Of Music. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Undistorted. In our lounge.

I thought it was the neighbours. But it wasn’t. It was someone four doors down and over the back fence, who wanted to fill the evening air with Messrs Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright at planet-engulfing volume.

Impressive. We were 75 metres from source. Yet the whole was crystal clear, balanced, without a skerrick of distortion.

The panel of one of my analog synths… dusty, a bit scratched, but still workable.

Usually, when someone whips amps to 11 all you get is the bass whoomph, which isn’t audible next to the speaker. It’s to do with the way the wave generates.

But not this. I’m talking perfect fidelity. That meant it was a really, really good sound system – set up by someone who knew precisely what they were doing. The secret word might be ‘Perreaux’ (Google it).

And they used this to play Pink Floyd. Sub-zero cool. What made it doubly amazing was the quality. Pink Floyd span the gamut of amplitudes and frequencies. Meaning that not only technically pure sound but also intentional distortion has to be amplified without further distortion, then conveyed over distance. I cannot say how amazing that was, to me at least.  (OK, I’m a geek… hey, it’s the 21st century. Geeks won the war for cool. Get over it.)

Welcome to the machine. We abandoned the Trapp family and went outside. Probably other neighbours hated it. But hey…

All this has a point when it comes to writing. Quality counts. Anybody can whip the amp to 11 – which in the writing sense means splurging out words.

Anybody can write. It’s taught at school, apparently. Can everybody write like Hemingway? Certainly not. And that is the issue. Getting to Hemingway level means evolving skills beyond the point of ‘unconscious incompetence’ into the tortured realms of apprenticeship – of ‘conscious incompetence’, of ‘conscious competence’ – and then ‘unconscious competence’, when writing is second nature.

Possibly all to a soundtrack of Pink Floyd. I like that idea. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 15: the rise and rise of the genre monster

One of the big literary inventions of the nineteenth century was one that transformed the novel-writing scene. Genre.

When novels first emerged in the early part of the century they were, as often as not, social commentaries. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was typical. So were Charles Dickens’ various stories. They were joined by others that we might , indeed, call ‘genre’ – notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But for a long while these things were few and far between.

Jules Verne, public domain from Wikimedia.

That changed with the commercialisation of novel writing – with the advent of the steam driven printing press, with the advent of mechanisms for mass-producing and mass-selling novels to the rising urban middle classes of the developing world who had the leisure time – and the spare cash – to buy books and then read them.

One of the earliest genres was science fiction, a device for social commentary. Jules Verne introduced the world to it, using his ‘science fiction’ stories –really, travel romances – to lampoon national cliches; German stern-ness and order (Professor Lidenbrock/Journey To The Centre of The Earth), American go-getting (From the Earth to the Moon) and British reserve (Phileas Fogg/Around The World In Eighty Days) among them.

H. G. Wells used science fiction for social commentary towards the end of the century. When five British Maxim gun crews slaughtered 1500 spear-wielding Matabele at the Battle of the Shangani river in October 1893 – and another 2500 a week or so later at Bembese - the world was horrified.  ‘Whatever happens/we have got/the Maxim gun/and they have not,’ Hilaire Belloc intoned in The Modern Traveller, a little later. From that also emerged Wells’s The War Of The Worlds, a remarkably slim book pivoting on one question; how would the British feel if a superior technology descended upon London?

Detective stories flourished. Conan Doyle effectively popularised and defined the ‘short story’ format for them at the end of the nineteenth century – giving the world one of its most iconic and enduring literary characters in the process.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, Americans thrilled to their own genre – westernsl, celebrating the myths of frontier. A form epitomised by Zane Grey, who spent periods big-game fishing in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.

The point was that popular genres changed as society changed. Cowboy stories went in and out, detective stories rose and fell. Science fiction, which began life for social satire and comment, retained that function into the twentieth century – but became a way of popularising tech-wonders.

If anything, genre change is moving at hyper-speed on the back of the web revolution.  We have to keep up with – and ahead of – the trend if we’re to succeed.

Urban fantasy, anyone?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

ANZAC Day 2013: remembering why we fought

It’s ANZAC Day this week in New Zealand – 25 April,  our equivalent of Memorial Day in the US or Armistice Day in Britain.

It’s iconoclastic. Most nations remember their military dead on days when a war ended – typically, for Commonwealth countries, 11 November, when the guns fell silent over the Western Front in 1918.

But not New Zealand and Australia. Here we remember our war dead on the day we began our first big overseas military campaign, the ground assault on Gallipoli that began on 25 April 1915.

The day is tied into our national identity. That wasn’t always the case. When the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) embarked on that campaign it was to do duty for Empire – for Britain, a country we called ‘home’ even though most of our young men had never been there.

I used to write histories of our twentieth century wars. In my final foray into that field, Shattered Glory (Penguin 2010), I explored the virtually spontaneous celebrations on 25 April 1916, the anniversary of the landings – at which time the Gallipoli campaign was turned, by sleight of hand, from an ignominious defeat (which it was) into a triumph of New Zealand’s contribution to Empire.

It became nationalist towards the end of the war, a spontaneous focus for grief flowing from the terrible death toll of the Western Front, New Zealand’s most lethal campaign of all time and the definition of what the First World War meant, socially and historically.

Of late, 25 April has become New Zealand’s de-facto national day – a moment to remember those who gave their lives – the young men who were never wearied by age.

To me it is also a day to ask a simple question. Why? Why did they go to war?

It is easy to suppose that young men were fooled by Boys’ Own images of war as glorious, a superior sports event that showered honour on soldiers, family and especially school.

I have found letters and diaries suggesting that this may have been true for the Boer War of 1899-1902, our first military campaign. But not the First World War. Not really. Most of the young Kiwis who went to fight even in 1914 knew what war entailed, even if they had yet to learn the true lethality of industrial age fire-power. That lesson had been driven home by 1916; and certainly most of their sons were cynical enough in 1939, when Europe again plunged into war and New Zealand’s young men flocked to sign up.

They did not go because it was glorious. They went because it was necessary.

We forget how close the world was, then, to a new dark age. In the 1930s democracy was but one of three competing systems, and it was on the back foot. In New Zealand of the day, the government of Michael Joseph Savage opposed fascism wherever it stood, even at risk of annoying a British government that felt appeasement was a cheaper option. But Savage was right. So was Winston Churchill, a politician, writer and historian who knew very well what both Nazi and Communist flavours of totalitarianism stood for. But such voices of warning were not heard until almost too late. And for a while in 1940-41, as Britain and her Comonwealth stood alone as the last main bastions of civilised western democracy outside the United States, things stood on a knife edge.

New Zealand’s part in that war took our fighting division from Greece to Crete to Egypt to the Western Desert to Syria, to Libya, Tripolitania, Tunisia, and finally Italy and – in the last hectic days of the struggle – Trieste. They did so under a remarkable commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO (3 bars), etc. (It is nearly a decade since Penguin published my biography of this incredible man; I still think it is one of my best books).

Other Kiwis fought with our navy, with the Royal Navy and with the Merchant Marine. Still others fought in the skies, with the RNZAF and RAF among other services. And we had a presence in the Pacific, where a New Zealander, Major-General Sir Harold Barrowclough, led forces that included a US contingent under Richard M. Nixon. Yes, that Richard M. Nixon.

All this was done not for glory, or rewards of heroism, but because it had to be done. Whatever it took. The alternatives – a world dominated by Nazi evil, fuelled by what Churchill called the ‘dark lights of perverted science’, were too horrible to contemplate. And we knew it.

Today we must remember those who died to make the world a better place, safe for democracy - who helped make the modern world what it is. Both here in New Zealand – and around the world.

Please join me in remembering them.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: a plan a day keeps the panic away

Ever been overwhelmed by the enormity of your writing? By the sheer scale of the task? Its complexity – especially as you start getting out to book length?

It’s something every writer slams into sooner or later. Especially if you’ve got a publishing deadline – one agreed with a publisher, or one you’ve created yourself to release a book.

There’s the writing, the revising, the proof-editing, the line-editing, the typesetting, the production process, the marketing plan the – aaaargh! You get the picture.

To me the answer’s in the planning – in identifying what has to be done, setting out the dependencies, identifying the critical time-constraints, then systematically working through them.

The twist I put on it – which I’m sure I’m not the only one to envisage – is that this works to any scale. Not just the big-ticket project of a book, but even figuring out how a writing session is going to proceed, before plunging into it.

It means I can figure out when and how I’m going to deal with correspondence, social networking, revisions, editing, the writing itself, and so on.

At that level, fifteen minutes sorting out what has to be done that day can save hours of floundering later.

Even ten minutes, actually. Time well spent. I find it’s handy. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 12: disentangling that idea splurge

Over the past few weeks we’ve been exploring the way writing is structured, with an ever-closer focus.

My account of the ‘musket wars’, published by Penguin in 2011, was pretty hard to structure – took a lot of re-working via the ‘shuffle the pages’ technique – to get a lot of simultaneous social concepts into a single readable thread.

This last post on structure takes us to the deepest level – the way paragraphs and sentences are arranged.

One of the biggest problems most writers have to face is translating the way we actually think and imagine things – which is usually as a ‘simultaneous picture’ – into writing, which is a single linear thread.

It’s failure to tackle this problem, I think, that produces non-fiction in which half the side-points are relegated to footnotes. And fiction riddled with flash-backs.

The key to the problem is deconstruction – being able to take that ‘simultaneity’ of ideas and fit them together in linear form. What comes first? The approach we looked at last time – ‘organising principle’ – works at this level too.

The best starting point is that old adage of starting big and moving on to detail. Say you’re describing a scene from a character’s viewpoint. Their first impression will always be the big picture, moving on to the details as they notice them. The nature of how they notice those details may be a reflection of their character – remembering that fiction is a way of taking readers on an emotional journey.

It’s often harder in non-fiction, where the organising principle may not be chronology, but a theme or idea. Different components have equal weighting in the big picture – making it difficult to figure out which one might come first. But, again, organising principles help.

The key point to bear in mind for all writing – non-fiction and fiction alike – is that it is taking the reader on an emotional journey. And sometimes, the nature of that journey can itself become a device for ordering the content.

Next –  look at some of the nitty gritty of novel writing, genre content and other stuff.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more sixty second writing tips, inspirations, geekery – and a spot of history.

Sixty second writing tips: being professional

I’ve always said that professionalism counts for writers. Publishing is a business, so is writing, and professionalism gives an edge. To me it is:

1. Competence – understanding the field, what’s needed to write well, and being able to do it (a lot of my recent blog posts are about how to do this part).

2. Reliability and committment – honouring the spirit of agreements.

3. Accepting responsibility. If you’ve made a mistake, admit to it.  Understand how it happened – so you know not to repeat it next time.

4. Abstraction – I’ve said it before, and it deserves repeating. You are not your writing. It does not define your self-worth. If you get criticised or knocked back – don’t take it personally.

5. Modesty. You do what’s needed, get stuff done – and maybe some amazing stuff. But don’t let it give you airs. There is no room for a sense of self-superiority in this field.

Do these work for you? Do you have a definition of professionalism?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now: part 11, introducing the organising principle

In the last few weeks we’ve been exploring the ways writing is structured. Last week we looked at large-scale structure – the big-aim content defined by log-line or thesis.

This week we’re moving on to how that is done – the detail of how these over-arching ideas are translated into written content, chapter by chapter or – if it is a short piece – paragraph by paragraph.

Like the over-arching structure, the broader content starts with a single sentence or phrase, which we might for convenience call the ‘organising principle’.

This principle tells you what to include when translating that over-arching idea into a longer work – what’s relevant to the thesis or logline, and what isn’t.  It also offers ways of organising the argument – or the character arc – or the theme and idea.

Take Bill Bryson’s recent book At Home, which is about domestic lifestyles and how they’ve changed through time. To do that, he takes the reader on a tour of his own house, room by room, exploring its history. The organising principle is the fact that he is doing it room-by-room, in sequence. He doesn’t do it floor by floor, or cover dozens of houses, house by house – he’s doing it room by room, in a single house.

This is very distinctive, and through it Bryson efficiently tells us a much broader story. That combination of content and organising principle is what gives the book its angle – and sets it apart from every other book on housing and lifestyles.

That’s true of fiction, too. Take Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows, for instance. The theme is Grahame’s take on the nature of different classes in his Edwardian-era society – especially the working classes (Rat), the bourgeoise (Mole),  and the nobility (Mr Toad). The key logline is Toad’s character arc – ‘Mr Toad, through a series of adventures, is taught by his friends how to be a reformed character.’ However, Grahame’s organising principle is episodic; Toad’s character arc – and the subsidiary arc of Mole – unfolds through a succession of self-contained short stories (actually, I believe, starting life as letters to his son).

So – the ‘logline’ tells you what you are doing. The ‘organising principle’ tells you how to do it. It’s plannable too, and means novellists don’t end up barking up the wrong tree or following dead-end plot lines that fail to advance the story. And non-fiction writers get to achieve what are often elusive in that genre – relevance and angle.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: the real Moon hoax, translating simultaneous ideas into linear writing; sixty second writing tips – and more. Watch this space.