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

Write it now, part 14: what a Dickens about novels

As we saw last time, the modern novel had its genesis in the late eighteenth century as a literary form designed to carry the reader on an emotional journey.

During the nineteenth century writers refined that and took it in new directions. But perhaps the biggest change came with the way writers published.

Charles Dickens, 1858. Public domain, from Wikimedia commons.

It was the culmination of a 200-year evolution. For a long time, publishing was ‘self-publishing’, and those who wrote needed to be independently wealthy. That changed during the seventeenth century, when it became possible for writers to earn a living by being paid to write. At first this was frowned upon; paid authors – mostly, it seems, working for newspapers in London’s Grub Street – were known as ‘Hackney’ or ‘Hack’ writers, a term that remains today as a derogatory moniker for a bad journalist, or a writer who appears to write for the money, not the dream. Pretty much the meaning it started with.

Those with a yen to write books still had to self-publish. Publishing houses would take money in return for producing the title. Or they might accept a title and buy it from the author, who earned nothing more. That changed with the emerging rights of authors under copyright law, but it was a slow process. The road effectively began in Britain in 1714 with the Statute of Anne. Other developments followed in Germany.

Authors did not begin to assert real rights over their work until the nineteenth century, though copyright was still far from ‘modern’ form. But from this emerged the royalty system. By this the author licensed somebody to use (publish) their intellectual property. In return they received a fee – a ’royalty’, which was a percentage of the returns on the sales. The publisher took on producing and marketing the work.

This was entrenched by the late nineteenth century and remains a keystone of mainstream writing today.  (I’ll post on the transactability of these rights and ‘moral right’ soon).

The popularity of reading -  hence opportunities for writers – grew as society changed. The rising middle classes of the nineteenth century Britain, in particular, had the leisure time to read. Many of them were also educated enough to be able to read - also new. Into this burgeoning market exploded something else – the steam driven press. Suddenly readers could get newspapers and books relatively cheaply and in bulk.

Writers had a good deal to say by this time; the nineteenth century was an age of ideological ferment as the world shook down from the trauma of the industrial revolution. Some of the world’s greatest literature emerged from the mix, and the doyen of them all was Charles Dickens, whose novels were serialised and who became the hero writer of his day. The public couldn’t get enough of his stories, at once serious, funny, sad, happy and always imbued with a razor sharp social commentary.

But behind people such as Dickens – or for that matter, Jules Verne, Charles Dodgson and Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) were a host of lesser novelists, authors of the ‘penny dreadfuls’ – stories that appeared, serialised, in news-stands. Stories to be read once and disposed of.

And then something else emerged; genre. Stories of a particular type written to meet a specific market – something possible only as the audience for books exploded into life

Next time.

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

Sixty second writing tips: getting the right title

Earlier this week I emailed a book off to Penguin. It was contracted in 2004. It’s taken a while to actually finish, for various reasons.

I supplied it with a working title – the final selection is the publisher’s prerogative, by contract. The marketing departments usually have the most input, when all’s said and done. It’s not easy. A good title has to:

1. Sum up the whole book in two or three words – maybe with a subtitle, if it’s non-fiction, to qualify the snappy phrase.

2. Capture the reader’s imagination instantly.

3. Be memorable.

The point being that in this day and age, when it ‘s possible to self-publish, the burden of meeting those criteria falls squarely on the author.

My tips for doing it are:

1. Derive it from the log-line – er, you DO have a logline…don’t you?

2. Try two or three combinations – let them sit for a few days before finalising.

3. Don’t be afraid to get advice from beta-readers.

Something usually floats in. Usually. Do you ever have trouble finding titles for your material?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this weekend: ‘Write it Now – part 8′ – and watch for my take on Russell Crowe’s UFO.

Write it now, part 3: passion and learning – the writers’ toolbox

I thought I’d start today’s post with a story about someone – not me – who attended a course on writing childrens’ books.

The average age of the audience was about 60. Most, it seemed, had retired and decided to ‘become’ childrens’ writers, mostly by picking up a pen for the first time and writing. After all, childrens’ books don’t have many words. They’d written letters, diaries, corporate reports and so forth. How hard could it be? So they were asking questions about whether to have the publisher contract read by a solicitor, and how much advance to negotiate.

‘No no’, the facilitator said. ‘Before you can sell anything, you have to learn how to write.’

Fact is that writing is a learned skill like any other. It takes as much time to become fully competent as to become a concert pianist, or a surgeon, or engineer. By this I mean, ‘make it part of your soul’ – unconscious competence. Doing the mechanics of it without thinking – allowing you to focus on the quality. The typical estimate to get there for any skill is about 10,000 hours. Writing is no exception. It includes time spent receiving formal instruction, even if you pick up self-learning after that (most writers do). Most of it is time spent on your own, writing.

Typically, a writer will push out about a million words to get unconsciously competent. Often these are exercises. Usually the process is completed as they swing into their publishing career -  two or three books in, even.

Now this is a typewriter I didn’t wear out – my trusty Adler Gabriele 25, bought new in 1983. It survived. Partly because it is built like the proverbial. But mainly because I switched to computer. I still typed around a million words on it, many of these exercises that weren’t published, but which did teach me to write.

I did that. I wore out two typewriters along the way. But wait, I can hear you saying. What about passion? The satisfaction of writing – the pleasure? Sure, absolutely. Passion is essential. And you have to find it satisfying, too. The feel-good factor. That’s certainly why I write.

I think passion translates to a drive to get that competence. To do the hard yards. To be prepared to take lessons. To write. And then throw away what you’ve just written. And write some more.

What’s more, today’s market demands more than just competence as a writer. It’s a crowded world and authors need a whole toolbox of skills. That applies whether you’re self-publishing or going the traditional route. It includes – but is not limited to:

1. Learned and practised writing skills including style, structure, content and ability to write to a specified length.
2. An expertise in the topic they’re writing on (be it fiction or non-fiction).
3. An understanding of the market – how crowded is it, what will work, what won’t, the likely audience. And how to sell the book into it.
4. An understanding of proofing processes, systems and publishing mechanisms.
5. A professional approach – meaning the written material isn’t used to define your sense of self-worth.

It sounds daunting. But it isn’t. Not when fuelled by passion.

I’m going to cover the items above as we go along.

Passion and learning. And that begs a question. Are writers born or made? I think it’s ‘both’. People are born with the aptitude – they want to write; they have to write. But they still have to learn, if they want to succeed. And that learning never stops.

 What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: Summer inspirations, more on kindness, and sixty-second writing tips.

Write it now, part 2: do you write because you have to?

Welcome to part 2 of this series on the A-Z of writing. In these initial posts I’m exploring the foundations of the art – what writing’s about (emotion), why we write, and what’s needed to learn about it. In a few weeks I’ll be moving on to some of the tips and tricks that writers use – some how-to posts, and a lot more.

Today – why do writers write? It’s not an idle question. Do writers write because they’ve chosen it as a hobby – a pastime, or entertainment? Or something more serious?  I figure there will be as many answers to this question as there are people who write.

To me, writing is about doing. It is more than a pastime, though I do pass the time with it – and enjoy doing so. And for most people who write, I think, it is the doing that counts. Writing – practising, learning, doing – is the priority. Committed writers push at it, barrel out text, push projects to completion – make it happen. They will keep pushing – looking for agents, looking for publishers. Some even make a living from it – if they’re lucky.

They write because they have to.

I think that applies to most writers who make a career of it, whether they write fiction or non-fiction, whether they freelance as journalists or focus on books.

The pertinent question is why. Why is writing a compulsion?

Personally I don’t identify myself as ‘a historian’ or ’a writer’, or anything else. Writing is what I do, not what I am. I think writing is an expression. It is a way of sharing. It is also, I think, a way of understanding the world, and for expressing that understanding in ways that cannot be conveyed in speech. It is a way of communicating concepts – often flawed, maybe, but a way. To some extent, too, I think writing acts as a way of recharging the batteries. Know what I mean? Writing suits, I think, people who are more introverted than not.  Sometimes.

Everybody has their own reasons why they write – what pushes them. Why they have to write. But there is,  I think, always going to be a commonality. Maybe a surprising commonality.

Why do you write? Do tell. I figure we’re going to find a lot of like-minded people.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: Inspirations – the city rising from the wreckage; more on kindness; sixty second writing tips, and more.

Write it now, part 1 – so you want to be a writer?

So you want to be a writer, eh? Not a bad choice of career. There are worse ones. There are also better paid careers. But then, you’re not in it for the money, are you?

My Adler Gabrielle 25 – on which I typed maybe a million words in the 1980s. See the shine on the keys?

Welcome to my new blog series ‘Write it now’ - an A-Z of writing. I thought this year I’d share some of the tips and tricks that have helped me write and publish over 500 feature articles and 50 books, some 2,000,000 words or thereabouts, over the last 30-odd years since I had my first break, aged 18, with my university newspaper.  Here’s the list.

Each week, I’m going to publish another post covering a different aspect of writing as I see it. And I’d love to hear from you – what you think of these ideas, whether they’re helpful, and whether you’ve got thoughts of your own.

We’re all in it together, you see – writers.

First, a bit about my background. I formally trained in fiction writing at the local polytechnic and, later at university, was fortunate enough to get key writing lessons from Richard Adler, then Professor of English at the University of Montana, visiting New Zealand on a Fullbright scholarship. I wrote my first books as an ‘intern’ with the New Zealand Forest Service a couple of years later – yes, I got paid a salary to write. Later I picked up tips and tricks from a newspaper editor in my home town, and more again from a features editor on the Wellington metropolitan daily, for which I freelanced.

Mostly, though, I’ve written books, published by companies such as Random House and Penguin.

It’s been a lot of fun, and the best is yet to come. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about writing as a profession, about writing as art – and that’s what I’m going to share with you.

How do I see writing? To me, words are secondary. In fact, I disagree with ‘word count’ as a goal. As we’ll see during these posts, it’s simply a tool. And there are many writing tools.

The more important part of writing is purpose. And writing has but one purpose; to elicit emotion in the writer – and to elicit one in the reader. Ideally, the emotion the writer intends.

That’s true of all writing. All? All. Non-fiction included. You’ll see why as these posts develop.

So – in just three words, here’s what writing is:

Writing is emotion.

It’s true. What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: ‘Write it now – are writers born or made?’ Along with other writing-related posts, history posts, and inspirational posts.

Writing is five percent inspiration. The rest is brute force.

I had an idea for a TV show the other day. “New Zealand Hasn’t Got Talent”. A variety show filled with lame wannabes.

But then I turned the TV on and realised somebody pitched that before me.

Joking aside, I sometimes get the impression that writing is viewed the same way. Anybody can write and the first book will whip you up to the limelight and multi-million dollar best sellers with titles like Fifty Shades of Talent Vacuum.

The reality? Yes, sure, one or two people do that. But most don’t. For most, it’s a lot of hard work for very little return.

Plus side of that is that those hard yards turn out good writers. Anybody who can last the distance – who constantly pushes the boundaries of quality, and who knows what direction they are going in, will get there in the end. Maybe not total fame and fortune, but then, who’s in it for that anyway? I’m not.

And for those who do turn into the celebrity de jour? Well,  maybe some do have the talent and skills. But I do wonder. What they won’t have is the experience of actually hammering away at the field. And that does count.

To me, writing is more than flash-in-the-pan. It’s more than a fun pastime that happens to carry the promise of potential riches and fame. And I think people who write because they want the fame, or want the riches – well, they are writing for the wrong reasons.

I think true writers do it because they have to. Because they have an emotional journey to go on, and because they want to take readers on the journey. It is about practise, it is about learning, it is about a lot of hard work. And it’s harder still when you stir in that emotional journey. Hemingway summed it up. You sit down at the typewriter and bleed.

My take on it? Writing is five percent inspiration. The rest is brute force.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing tip: it’s not word count, it’s quality

These days I worry, occasionally, that writing seems to be measured solely by word-count – that blasting out a certain number of words in a given time is an end point of the process or a measure of achievement.

It’s a huge misconstruct. The real arbiter of writing is quality-to-time. Measures of quality certainly include hitting the planned length, which is where word count comes in – but the word count of the first draft, alone, is only a small part of the process.

Let’s look at it this way. You’ve just written 2000 words in an hour. But you may have to spend another three hours revising them, thus reducing your average word count to 500 an hour. Or maybe have to toss them away altogether, reducing the count to zero.

If you look at a book as a project – from blank-to-final text, word count alone becomes increasingly irrelevant. Other than, as I say, a way of controlling scale.

Look at it this way. What’s the better book, as literature – Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea, which is basically a novella and which won him a Nobel Prize for literature – or E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, which has many more words?

HMS Rodney. Weird looks highlighted innovative ways to make use of displacement.  (Crown Copyright expired/public domain)

I’ve got an analogy. In the twentieth century, warship power was popularly gauged by displacement. And at around 41,700 tons (standard), the KM Bismarck of 1940 was  always portrayed as an unsinkable, invincible super-battleship. She was heavier than the 33,750 ton (standard) HMS Rodney of 1927.  Yet when they met, one blustery Atlantic morning in May 1941, Rodney pulverised the Bismarck in 23 minutes, at times effectively solo because the flagship King George V was suffering gun breakdowns. Rodney made better use of displacement. (As a naval engineering geek, I’ll explain the technical reasons, if anybody asks).

That adage is true of writing, too. The number of words is important for gauging the scale of the writing – it’s how publishers commission material, and one of the skills is being able to produce work to that count – just like one of the skills of ship designing is being able to build a vessel to displacement. But the writing has to have the right content. What ultimately counts is what you do with those words, not the number of them. The way I make it work is this:

1. Identify the final word count. This determines the scale of the material.

2. What are the beginning and end points? In a novel, this will be the plot and character arcs; in non-fiction – my history books, for instance – it is the argument.

3. Now content can be planned for spanning across the expected word length. This gives a handle on the pace of the content – the level of detail that can be worked in.

4. What you should end up with is a chapter list with the expected content of each chapter, and a word count for each.

5. Now go and write it, revising the plan as needed if new ideas come along. (Yes, I know this last one is like saying ‘Now go and build the Firth of Forth Bridge’).

Do these ideas work for you? How do you match word count with content? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Beating the post-NaNo Blues, Part 1

November’s over. NaNoWriMo’s over for another year. You’ve got a manuscript, a solid body of work.

First off, take a bow. Didn’t finish? That doesn’t matter. More on that soon. What counts is you got down and wrote something. A lot of people in the world don’t write anything. At all. But what now?

First off, check this out. I didn’t do NaNoWriMo. I had publisher contracts to meet and the time available for writing had to be focussed. But there’s a story therein for NaNo authors.

Just over a decade ago I wrote a one-volume general history of New Zealand (488 pages/120,000 words). The book sold well, but has long gone out of print. Last year I had opportunity to re-publish. Second edition time. The book had to be re-created – the old plates and files are gone – and that created an opportunity to re-work the content.

Some authors don’t do this; they’ll let an old book re-appear with minimal change, insisting that it has ‘stood the test of time’. Yes, sometimes books do stand up. But not often when it comes to non-fiction, and I had good reasons for wanting to revise this particular one. The first edition wasn’t wrong, but 11-12 years is a fair period in the career of a writer. Ideas change. So does writing style. More particularly, it is also a long time in terms of what we know about New Zealand’s pre-history, meaning the first chapter had to be re-written. I also have a pet hatred of history books that ‘update’ the last chapter by adding a hasty list of events. That, to me, is only the first step; history is really about what events mean. Often those trends aren’t evident when events occur, or soon afterwards. So the last chapter, 1985 to ‘the present’, had to be re-written to accommodate meanings evident from the vantage of 2012.

My own research hasn’t stood still either. So I found a lot to tweak, re-nuance, even re-cast, through the whole text. If the book was a house, it was more than just a re-paint, it was a complete refurbishment. And why not? Musicians do it all the time. Wendy Carlos re-made Switched On Bach (1968/2000). Jeff Wayne is re-making The War Of The Worlds (1978/2012). Rick Wakeman has just re-made Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974/2012). Battlestar Galactica got re-imagined (1978/2003). So did The Bionic Woman (1976/2007). These things do not invalidate the old; instead, they give us something new – something more, something we can enjoy anew, alongside the earlier incarnation.

This applies to fiction, too. Perhaps more so - and there is good precedent for a re-imagining. I discover that  J R R Tolkien did this with The Hobbit, which he started re-writing in 1960 along the lines of The Lord Of The Rings. And if Tolkien did it…well, what more need be said?

That is where the old NaNo manuscript comes in. How to do it? That’s for the next post. Meanwhile – what do you think of taking your NaNo MS – or any MS that’s been sitting in a drawer gathering dust – and sitting down with more leisure to re-cast, re-imagine and re-model?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012