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.

Write it now, part 17: Tolkien’s lessons about writing a best seller

How do novels become not just sellers, but best sellers – and hyper-sellers?

Hobbit Market, November 2012. I had to lie prone to take this picture. ‘Get up,’ She Who Must Be Obeyed insisted. ‘People will think you’re dead.’

Quality’s important, but not always a criteria. Seldom have I read a novel as incompetently researched and clumsily styled as The Of Vinci Code (I know what I said). I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, nor do I want to, but I’m sure somebody’ll comment about what I am told is, well, derivative dribble.

I posted the other week about how genre becomes popular because it keys into changing social ideals – and last week about how types of genre become specifically popular on the back of particular social trends.

The best-sellers are the ones who float to the top of those heaps. The thing is, they’re usually transient. But every so often a book transcends that – becomes not just a best seller, but a lasting best seller. A classic.

Something everybody has at least heard of – even if they haven’t read it – and which stays in the public mind for years – even decades.

Like The Lord Of The Rings. In just a few heady years during the late 1960s,  J R R Tolkien’s epic effectively mainstreamed fantasy. His mythos was embedded in western popular literature even before Peter Jackson’s movies (filmed in my country and my city, bwahahahaha) catapulted his creation to stratospheric popularity.

Hobbit market, November 2012 – Tolkien, mainstreamed.

An astonishing achievement for a modest and retiring Oxford don who had to be nudged into finishing anything for a publisher.

Tolkien never planned it that way. His publishers didn’t anticipate it either. The book he presented Allen & Unwin with in the early 1950s was barely publishable – they broke it into three parts to spread the risk, and a glance at early print runs reveals it shifted only a few thousand copies.

Then, in the mid-1960s, it took off. Kicked into life by a pirated American edition, followed by Tolkien’s authorised edition. It kept on selling. And on. And on. And on….

What happened?

His themes struck chords with a new generation, particularly the idealised pre-industrial England of the Shire and the hippified, natural Earth-spirit lifestyle of Tom Bombadil. The link between Bombadil and counter-culture values was lampooned with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer in Bored Of The Rings.

Rohan. No – central Otago. No, Rohan…oh, I give up…

This was a generation that read a lot of fantasy, partly because fantasy had become an element of their fabric of escape. Tolkien met their need on both counts. Genre tastes, in short, had caught up, though his own motives were different in many respects (eerily, also similar – every generation found reason to object to industrialisation).

Other authors tried to imitate him. Tolkien, in short, had created a new genre, about a generation ahead of its time.

Hutt River or Anduin. Well, maybe the houses are the give-away.

As if that wasn’t wonderful enough, the book gained an enduring public audience. Part of that was due to the way that 1960s youth ideals were mainstreamed. Part of it was the scope of Tolkien’s vision, engaging symbolisms at a fundamental level. And that wasn’t surprising. He was trying to write Britain’s missing mythology; he wrote to fundamental themes – capturing our cultural framework in soaring battles between total good and utter evil; the symbolisms of mythic heroism.

All was given a dimension that ordinary people could identify with, through the ordinariness of the hobbits – little folk who, inevitably, were more heroic than anybody could imagine.

A stunning achievement. And not something that can be easily repeated – certainly, I suspect, not by design.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next time: getting down to the nuts and bolts of novel writing.  More humour, more writing tips – and, well, more. Watch this space.

Jack Kerouac, cafe racers, writing and style

Another WordPress blogger suggested a while back that Jack Kerouac was the ‘café racer’ of writers. She was right, of course.

Ducati ‘Paul Smart’ 1000LE, one of only a handful imprted into New Zealand. In some senses it’s more stripped sports bike than classic cafe racer. I took this photo for a book I was writing on bikes in 2008.

That got me thinking – as good blog posts should. Cafe racers were simple, honest motorcycles, quintessential cool. They captured the freedom of lifestyle; road legal bikes you could race on the track. For me you can’t go past the Vincent Black Shadow. The first superbike and, for me, quintessential café racer. Those beasts could drag-race jet fighters – and win, at least until the jet took off. They appeared in 1948 and weren’t beaten for speed until Kawasaki turned up with the 750 Triple in 1973.

The message I got from the post was that Kerouac’s style – his approach, his authenticity, the feel – relates to writing in the same way that café racers relate to motorcycles.

Those three words again  – cool. Fast. Authentic. Kerouac was all these things. There was no doubt about cool.  The beat crowd defined it.

Speed? Kerouac blew On The Road through his typewriter in three weeks. And his stories were fast, too; On The Road, again, pushed at breakneck speed. Authentic? Kerouac went steps further than Hemingway when it came to authenticity. Sometimes what he wrote was literally real.

His was a quest for self in a youth generation who had spun out of the Great Depression and sought all the joy they could find in life.

He wrote real. Authenticity to himself; authenticity to reality as he saw it. Just like a café racer and the riding experience.

Can we learn from this? Absolutely. If we can find something that symbolises our style, like the café racer symbolises Kerouac, what can we then learn about ourselves?

Extending the point (as I always do), I wonder about other writers. J. K. Rowling, for instance, who I’d classify as the ‘family car’ of writers – a bit cliched in terms of ideas, but absolutely solid, reliable and competent (I can hear the scream from the Harry Potter fans…but I mean, magic wands and school stories? Reinvented cliche…but still cliche.)

Or Robert A. Heinlein, who was always looked on as an SF writer but really was an American writer, generally – tackling all the issues that needed tackling. Another realist. Solid. Conservative, yet with a twist that got you thinking. Full sports bike, maybe – Ducati? As opposed to someone like Michael Moorcock, whose writing I’d envisage more like a trail-bike – scorching off on his own very interesting direction with eager joy.

Who’s your favourite author…and what mode of transport – with lifestyle – do they remind you of?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: writing by layers

One of the techniques I use to get structured written content assembled quickly is to write it in layers.

If you’re daunted by the complexity of what you have to write – be it non-fiction or the complexities of a novel with of its character arcs, plot, dialogue, need for pacing and so forth, try this.

I’ll often start with the skeleton of a chapter or sequence – the main thrust of what I want to say.

Then I’ll go back and add a layer – add nuances to the argument, build points or add detail. It might be a particular type of detail, for instance.

Then I’ll go back again – and add another layer, like ‘colour’.

About this time I’ll often re-style it around the more complex nature of the content.

I guess the analogy is similar to sculpture or painting – you start with the broadest strokes covering the whole canvas, then go back and detail it in sequence.

It’s the inverse of the method by which you totally finish one part before moving on to the other. The advantage is that it gives you that structural overview from the outset.

Does this work for you? Have you ever tried this approach before?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 13: novels and novelability

In this series we’ve been exploring writing in all its forms. Today we’re starting a detailed look at one of the most popular forms of writing – fiction.

Jane Austen. Public domain, from http://www.wpclipart.com/famous/writer/writers_A_to_D/ Jane_Austen_coloured_version.jpg.html

Fiction, and particularly novel writing, is the writing that attracts the most interest. It’s where most people start. I was trained in it myself, way back when. Most ‘how to write’ training today is geared towards fiction, and I’ve noticed that a lot of online discussion is predicated on the assumption that any book being written will, by default, be a novel.

Not all books are, of course. But it’s true about a lot of the books that are written these days – and certainly that’s true of the books being self-published on Amazon.

Fiction is also where the money is. The only billionaire author, and most of its millionaires, are novellists.

So where did the ‘novel’ come from? The form we know and love today emerged in the late eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift had something to do with it. So did Jane Austen – she, in fact, is often regarded as the inventor of the novel in its modern form. That’s not quite true. But certainly she helped shape it. Specifically, she found new ways of engaging reader emotion – she created interesting characters and set them to interact on a stage identifiable to the audience.

In her classic Pride and Prejudice (1813) the main emotion was – well, pride. By modern standards Austen’s style was pompous, even clunky. Check this out:

“She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so  great man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still  more strange. She could only imagine however, at last, that she drew his notice  because there was a something about her more wrong and reprehensible, according  to his ideas of right, than in any other person present…” (Pride and Prejudice, 1813)

But that was perfectly acceptable in that age; Austen was a great novelist, a great story teller, and we can but lament at the way her premature death cut short her career.

Nor was Austen alone. In 1816, Mary Shelley took novel writing in different directions with Frankenstein, effectively a foray into science fiction. Novels, it seemed, did not have to be ‘real’ in order to engage their reader – indeed, one of their appeals was that they allowed readers to escape.

By the early nineteenth century, then, the modern novel was fairly on its way. Understanding how the novel journeyed over the next 200-odd years is handy to know if we want to write one – because it allows us to understand how the form has always been shaped in the specific by contemporary need, contemporary ideal – and it is still changing. Next week.

Meanwhile, do you have thoughts on why novels are such a popular first stop for people wanting to write? The creative urge? Expression of a story? All these things? I’d love to hear from you.

And have any of you seen  ’Ink and Incapability’, from Blackadder The Third (BBC 1988).

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: Write it now – the evolution of the novel; also more funnies, more writing tips, and some highly refined geekery.

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.

Write it now, part 9: seat-of-the-pants writing and why it’s got to have structure

There is a wonderful scene in This Is Spinal Tap, the ‘mockumentary’ about the world’s loudest heavy metal band, where they end up performing ‘free form jazz’ at a zoo. The improvised song is, of course, horrible – and deliberately so.

Music usually needs structure. Experienced musicians can improvise – they know what’s needed to create structure on the fly. Or they’ll be working inside a known structure (let’s say, 12-bar blues) which, by nature, gives form.

The same is true, too, of writing. To me, ‘seat of the pants’ writing – ‘pantsing’ – as it is called, has huge advantages, because it lets the mind wander creatively. It has a freshness of expression you can’t get any other way – and which can also be lost, if you’re not careful, by repeated revisions.

But it also carries huge pitfalls. Aimlessness is the big one – ‘pantsing’ without knowing where the story, character, argument or whatever is going. To me, that risks sliding into the abyss of ‘writing as personal entertainment’, if we’re not careful – people writing as a pastime because it’s more fun than watching TV or playing Sim City.

The thing is, material produced this way is NOT likely to be usable in a published book. Why? Because a book – any book, but especially a novel – must have certain structural elements before it is publishable.  And a novel written by pure ‘pantsing’ – free-form writing and seeing what happens – almost certainly will not have that necessary structure.

So how do published writers do it? Many do – and did – write by apparent ‘pantsing’. Look at Isaac Asimov, for instance, who wrote his novels essentially full-formed in Draft 1.

What they were actually doing was pretty much the musicians’ method – the structure is actually there, they’re simply improvising around it, without leaving the tried-and-true form.

Asimov himself said so in as many words – he always knew the end point – where everything was going. Otherwise, he explained, you got lost. And if you read Asimov’s stuff, it’s structurally all spot on. In other words, he pretty much had the plan of his book in mind all along, and stuck to it.

My take is that ‘pantsing’ is an essential part of writing – any writing – but it doesn’t reduce the need for proper structure. The answer is a balance. Create the macro-sized structure – in effect, the framework. Know where you are going, in general. Then ‘pants’ the specifics. That, too, will get more structurally formed – on the fly – as your experience grows.

What’s your take on pantsing?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: ‘write it now’ – the world of macro writing structure; more sixty second writing tips, funny science geekery, and more.

The Acme Instant Logline Generator

All novels need a logline, sometimes also known as a hook line – a single sentence that describes the plot and acts as a sale pitch to agents and publishers.

The form is usually “[Character name], [character description] has to [action] in order to [result].”

The result usually has an emotional content. Hard to winnow your story down to it? Try this. Begin with the logline instead. All you need, in fact, is a six-sided dice. Roll once for each variable and complete the sentence:

1. Roger Dodger the old Codger,
2. Peregrine Hyphen-Hyphen Folderol,
3. Snoot,
4. Adele,
5. Eric,
6. Heinz Dasistwirklicheinesehrdummelangeswortistesnicht von Abernatürlichistesjaabsolutichdenkeso of Sehrgutwerdeichgehenundhöreaufmeinekraftwerkalben,

1. a world-renowned horologist,
2. a rock god,
3. an up-and-coming railway enthusiast,
4. a truck driver specialising in cab-over series Macks,
5. an unemployed random-generator writer,
6. a rodent exterminator,

has to

1. win a challenging drag race
2. build a box-girder bridge with a toothpick
3. write a vampire fan-fic novel
4. learn how to sing and dance
5. cook a souffle
6. defeat the evil Thog monsters from Planet Zil

in order to

1. become the Ruler of the Universe.
2. rescue beloved from certain doom.
3. be home in time for tea.
4. get to Buckingham Palace and receive a knighthood.
5.  audition for ‘America’s Got Talent’.
6. finish up at the beginning again, only better for it.

Have fun.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: the three sorts of editing

Editing is as much a skill as writing. It’s one authors have to master – and it’s also a specialty of its own. Done properly, editing can require at least as much time as it takes to draft the original piece. There are three main types:

1. Revision editing
This is, I think, what authors usually mean by ‘editing’. It involves re-thinking the draft text – pondering it, adjusting words, and deciding how to re-cast if necessary.

2. Proof editing
Somebody other than the author reads the finished MS for sense, meaning, consistencies, grammatical accuracy, and offers corrections. It’s demanding; the proof-editor has to be skilled enough at writing to offer fixes in sympathy with the author’s own style. Some publishers also put the book out for fact-checking, a separate process again, at this stage.

3. Line editing
This is the final step before publication. The work is carefully read, ideally by somebody who has never seen it before, for ‘literals’ – literal typographical mistakes, missed full stops, bad spaces and so forth.  Usually this is done twice. The ideal process involves two people; one reads aloud, the other cross-checks what they hear against the proof.

How much time do you usually allocate for editing? Do you break it down into a system? How do you tackle this one?

Copyright © 2013 Matthew Wright

Write it now, part 4: beware the death trap of illusory competence

So far in this series on the A-Z of writing, we’ve looked at why people write. Now we’re moving on to what it takes to be a writer – what does learning to write actually entail?

As I’ve mentioned before, writing is a skill like any other. The usual time it takes to master a skill is 10,000 hours. About 1,000,000 words, for a writer. Yeah, lots of zeroes – but as I said last time, it’s a passion. It’s going to be fun. The learning never stops. Not ever. If you think you’ve ‘learned’ how to write, guess again. True writers are always learning, even the experienced ones. I’ve been in the business for 30 years – and I make sure I push the edges all the time.

There is a four-stage psychological model for learning, invented by GTI employee Noel Birch, nearly half a century ago. A journey from ‘unconscious incompetence’ through ‘conscious incompetence’ to ‘conscious competence’ – and, finally, ‘unconscious competence’.

It makes a lot of sense, but to me it’s not an exact fit for writing; writing encompasses many skills, all separately learned, and the skills may be at different stages. Writers not only have to learn the ‘craft’ of writing, they also have to be skilled in the subject they are writing about. Writing also has a hidden pitfall right at the start – the ‘death trap of illusory competence’.

1. The death trap of illusory competence.
Some of the basics of writing – grammar, especially - are taught as life skills at school and often get extended in the workplace. Good stuff. But it’s not the whole skill writers need – a trap, later, for those wanting to go further. I’ve found people who have an interest and want to write about it, thinking they already know the writing part. Or they’ll decide to ‘become’ a novelist as a fun retirement activity.  ’How hard can it be? I did High School English…right?’ Or they may think ‘I read a lot, therefore I know how to write’. To me, that’s like ‘I listen to Beethoven a lot, therefore I know how to play his piano concertos’- see what I mean?

The results are often awful – but the writer isn’t informed enough to know. In fact, they may well think they are very good. The technical name for this, I believe, is the ‘Dunning-Kruger’ effect.

I got my first writing gig when I was 18 – working for the university newspaper. Like most of my fellow students, I thought I knew what I was doing. So I thought. Actually? No, I didn’t.

2. Scrambling up from the pit of doom.
Some people plunge down that death trap and don’t even know it. But a lot of writers do escape – or even avoid it altogether. One of the tools for it is self-critique. There can be an epithany, or it can happen slowly; but one way or another, the writer realises how much they have to learn. And maybe gets frustrated. But  thinking your own writing is terrible is the first step to improvement. And a honed sense of self-critique is a sign of a potentially great writer.

I remember being at this point. There was a day when I made a specific decision. ‘My stuff’s no good. I’d better figure out how to get good.’

3. A view of the sunny uplands of writing joy.
After a while, the elements are there, but the author has to consciously think through them. (‘I need to add a metaphor here…done. Now I have to add an adjective. Done.’) The styling can be wooden, or the writing process itself very slow. Thing is, learning to write is a LOT more than simply knowing the techniques. The key to it is doing the hard yards – to applying those techniques, writing a lot – as in, every single day, even if it’s only for 15 minutes – and making them part of your soul.

4. Confident and competent writer.
This is the 10,000-hour, million word point. Suddenly all the skills become part of your soul; they become automatic. Usually this happens first with the mechanics of style. You think of an idea, and the words emerge. Your writing sings. That lets the author focus on content – and one day, hey presto, that all clicks together too. Writing becomes fast – and good at the same time.

5. ’How did you know that?’
There is a further step that comes only from experience. Pride goeth before a fall. Do not think you have learned everything. You haven’t.The process of learning never stops. It can mean learning from someone else, or attending specialist courses-  but it also means being able to self-analyse, to figure out what’s needed. To discover – to move forward and to be abstract. The writer learns not to define self-worth by what they write, even while pouring emotion into the work.

So how do writers go down this road? Every individual journey is different. It’s also do-able and not daunting at all, if it’s approached step-wise. This series is designed to help you along the way, whatever stage your writing may be at.

But I’ll share one of the secrets now. Actually, it isn’t really a secret. It’s OK to make mistakes – providing you figure out how they happened and what to do about it. That’s how you learn things.

Actually, that’s true of everyday life.

Any thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013