Taking a break

Just a quick post - I won't be updating here very often over the next three months or so. I'm getting married in November (having got engaged at the end of July!) and so I'm busy with wedding preparation and not having much time to spend on writing.

I have started a blog about my wedding if anyone's interested - A November Wedding - and I will be updating here every so often, but probably won't ge back into a regular updating pattern until the new year.

WriYe - Keep it tight

Using the Wrench on Your Writing - Tightening Prose
Every word in a short story counts. If it's not moving the plot forward, it's not worth it. Many magazines and short story markets have very rigorous word count limits. So how do you go from writing novels of 50,000 words or more to a short story that has to be under 5,000? What techniques for brevity have you found helpful? How do you tighten your prose to make it still shine, but also carry the point quickly and succinctly? How do these techniques also help your novel writing?

I've never tried to turn a 50,000 word novel into a 5,000 word short story, and I can't imagine where I would start if I wanted to, but on a smaller scale I do a lot of editing for brevity.

Some sorts of story call for long, drawn out, flowery descriptions, but others need to be sharp and quick. Action scenes are the ones I tend to edit most for this, because I often find myself writing too much description so that it loses its impact.

So my top four tips and methods for brevity:

1. Read it aloud. If you stumble over a word, chances are your reader will too, so take it out or replace it with something else.
2. If your sentence is longer than two lines (in font size 11 on an A4 page) then it may need revising.
3. Double check your descriptions to make sure that they're necessary and that they're not repetitive. I asked my brother to proof read something for me once, and his first comment was 'well I gathered she's got curly hair, then'. When I went back to it, I found I'd mentioned the character's hair at least three times in 10 pages.
4. If in doubt or you don't know where to begin, a second pair of eyes could help. Get someone you trust and who has a good grasp of the language to have a quick look over what you've written and flag up any bits that seem to drag or feel 'clunky'.

Trying something different - WriYe

Breaking Outta Your Box - A Challenge and a Topic
Every year, WriYe has the Breaking Outta Your Box challenge. It's intentions are to get every writer to try something new and see what they can learn from writing in a genre they're not used to at all. I know some of you bloggers have done it so give me some feedback this month. Did you manage to break the box? Did it help you in any way? What did you learn?
 
I've given the BOYB challenge a go a couple of times,but I have to admit it hasn't been a great success. But even though I haven't been able to produce fiction I've been happy with, I have learned from the experience:

• I learned the genres that I don't enjoy writing in.
• I learned more about scene setting when I was writing about situations other than the 'real world'.
• I learned that it's fun to try something different once in a while, and because it was something different it meant that when I went back to my other bits of writing, I was going back with a new perspective and more ideas.
• I learned that I can't write about zombies! ;-)
• I learned that change is good and can be fun.

Those dreaded deadlines - WriYe

The Looming Doom - Deadlines
We've all had deadlines to face - whether it be yearly like WriYe, monthly like NaNo, or weekly like LWS. How do you face your deadlines? Any advice to help meet them? Any advice on what to do when you miss them?

I find that deadlines come in two varieties - ones that are very soon and ones that are a while away. Once I know when something is due I can handle it appropriately.

• I make a list of what I need to do - the overall target and any smaller parts of that task. For example, if I have a story to write then completing the story is my overall goal and to do that I have to complete so many chapters or words. If it's for submission somewhere then it will also need proofreading for spelling and typos, then editing, then proofreading again.
• Make the targets realistic. I am not going to be able to produce a 10k story in a week if I have meetings every night and I'm working a full time job. However, I could probably produce a 250 word piece of flash which would only require me to find 30 minutes of writing time each day instead of three-plus hours. If you consistantly set targets that you don't hit then it's easy to get demoralised.
• Finally, once all the lists and targets are set out, prioritise what needs doing first and be prepared to move things around if necessary. If you're writing to meet a deadline for a competition you really want to enter, it's going to be more important than the poem you've had kicking around for the past month that's just for fun. And the school project that has to be in at the end of the week has to take precidence over the competition entry, because sometimes life gets in the way of writing.

My favourite children's books

As you know, I love children's books, both as a writer and as a reader. In my opinion, the best children's stories are those that stick with you into adulthood and have the ability to transport you back to your childhood when you reread them. This is a selection of some of my favourite children's stories with the reasons why.
 
The Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton comes in for a lot of stick as a writer, but I've always enjoyed her stories. They are simple, fun, and have some likeable characters even if the stories lack depth and are, in some critics' opinions, terribly written. My favourite series by Enid Blyton is the Malory Towers series. I went to a girls' school with a brown uniform myself, so I think it was always a bit of an escape for me into somewhere that was sort of the same as my own life but much more exciting.


The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
This is one of my all-time favourite books. I got this when I was about eight, and I loved reading all the descriptions of Moonacre and the people living there. It was a Carnegie Medal winner in 1946 and apparently was J.K. Rowling's favourite book as a child, but more importantly than that it's a wonderful story that mixes fantasy, history, romance and a little but of religion in a fantastic book that I would recommend to anyone.


Ronia the Robber's Daughter by Astrid Lindgren

Ronia was one of the books my mum read to be as a bedtime story. I particularly remember it because it was the first book that she was reading to me that I snuck out and read ahead once it got to the exciting bits. I haven't read it since I was seven or eight, but three parts particularly stick in my mind - the part where Ronia and the boy are leaping across the gap at the top of the tower, the part where Ronia gets her foot stuck in a hold and the creatures that live there come out and demand 'Woffor diddun do it?', and the part where Ronia is exploring the corridors underneath the tower.
Just thinking about it is making me feel nostalgic - I may have to go and have a look on Amazon to see if I can find it again.

Purple Prose - WriYe

The Most Flowery of Language - Purple Prose
Okay, so what do you consider to be purple prose? What is it? Give us an example. Do you love it? Hate it? Find it tolerable or small doses? Or do you think all shades of violet wording should be destroyed?

Again, lots of questions to answer this month!

Okay, so what do you consider to be purple prose? What is it? Give us an example.

The word that springs to mind is 'flowery' - lots of descriptive words or decoration of plain text. It's what turns a woman sitting on a bench on a lawn into a seat with rustic wooden slats worn smooth by years of use as the woman with long, blonde hair, highlighted by the sun, sits there reading well-worn pages of letters, her bare feet in the bright green mown grass, the blades tickling her toes. That's actually not flowery enough really. It should also have smells, colours, and the way the sunlight falls through the nearby trees on to the grass.

Having said that, another description I've seen for purple prose is that it 'consists of words and phrases that sound stilted, overly descriptive, or cliché and is derived from a reference by the Roman poet Horace.'

Do you love it? Hate it? Find it tolerable or small doses? Or do you think all shades of violet wording should be destroyed?

Lots of people will say you should always avoid purple prose, but I like it when it's in the right place. If it's just description for description's sake then it annoys me, but when it's used to set a scene, or when a whole story is about the descriptions, then I do really enjoy reading it. I'm reading Affaire Royale by Nora Roberts at the moment, and her descriptions I think really do go as far as purple prose. She paints a wonderful picture of her settings which can often stretch to a page at a time, but they're always tied in with the story and not just there for the sake of it. She can really make you feel as though you're there in the story with the characters, and I think the main reason for that is the way she describes things - she uses colours, feelings, weather, what things are made of and how they interact to paint wonderful scenes.

Review: Lessons in French by Hilary Reyl

Rather like The Devil Wears Prada, Lessons in French follows the story of a young woman in her first job in a big city, working for a vaguely eccentric, very talented and exceptionally demanding boss.

Set in 1989 as the Berlin Wall is about to come down, the story is about Kate, fresh out of university in the US and about to start her dream job as a ‘little-bit-of-everything’ in Paris for the world-famous photo-journalist Lydia Schell.

Once set up in her tiny rooms - for which she has to pay rent out of her meagre salary - Kate has to deal with the eccentric Schell family – grouchy teenager Joshua, delicate princess Portia, distracted husband Clarence and flighty Lydia – while juggling her love life (Portia’s ex-boyfriend Olivier), friends (down-to-earth Christie, over-emotional Claudia and gay cousin Etienne), and trying to figure out exactly what she wants from life.

I found it easy to lose myself in the story, which brought the streets of Paris and the eccentric characters vividly to life, and Lessons in French would make a great summer holiday read for someone wanting a light hearted story to put in their bag and take to the beach.

• Lessons in French by Hilary Reyl
• RRP £7.99 (paperback)
• Published by Harper (this edition due to be published May 23, 2013)
• ISBN-10: 0007446268
• ISBN-13: 978-0007446261