1001 words forward

Hey readers,

We've got a treat today as I have interviewed the brilliant Scarlett Archer about her new book '1001 First Lines'. So, wiout further ado, let's start at the very beginning!

Do you consider the first line to be an important part of a story? If so, why?

I think it's one of the most vital parts of a book. When I pick up a book I want it to catch me. Given I'll wait a couple of paragraphs but I'm essentially looking to be seized by the opening line. It's like hearing someone for the first time, you immediately get the impression of what they're about from the way they talk, the way they say their words, the rhythm that they arrive, and how the words mingle in amongst one another. 

Do you find first lines easy to come up with, or challenging? Do you have a technique, or a ritual, that you go by to make it easy?

It's definitely one thing I love about writing. I know a lot of writers who hate starting a story but the first line is an inviting challenge. It's beginning the great meal I'm cooking up! I don't find them easy to come up with but I enjoy thinking about them. They don't frustrate me. As for a technique or ritual I give my intuition a lot of room to take charge. I don't force it but browse through inspiration and let things build. Normally something will eventually come along, even if I force myself to sit down and begin I've given it enough space to have something ready. 

What consequences, if any, do you think there are in having a badly written first line?

I put the book down. The end.

What's your favourite first line that you've ever read? And can you recall a worst?

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." - The Gunslinger (Dark Tower Series), Stephen King. It was the moment when I realised the power of a first line because I picked the book up in the book store, read it, read no more but bought it straight away and went home and demolished the whole series.

What is one of your own best first lines?

"Aroset put a bullet into his head." Clean, immediate conflict, someone's gonna die.

We're all sharing here! What's one of your worst first lines?

"Oh my God, what the hell is Brett doing?" This beginning grates me to the core. All I hear is a whiny teenager, probably because that's exactly what I was at the time I wrote it!

Do you have any suggestions for other authors on how to write a great first line? Have you heard any great advice yourself?

I think one of the best things I learned in writing in general was to bring action in to the present. Make it punchy, and alarming. Don't be afraid to shock your reader! 

What are some things a first line *shouldn't* be? What are some things that you've read in first lines that really rubs you the wrong way?

Info dumping. No matter what the genre of the book- and it happens more often in things like fantasy and sci fi, which is probably why I don't read a lot of it- it shouldn't start with a hill and a half of information.

 

Scarlett Rugers (writing as Scarlett Archer) has just released a book 1001 First Lines which is now available at Amazon! You can purchase a paperback, .lit, .epub, .mobi and PDF versions here: http://www.1001firstlines.wordpress.com.

She has been writing for over fifteen years, completed over eleven novels, and her main drive is in speculative fiction or its contrasting opposite romantic comedic novels. She has a passion for studying the art of story telling and is a grand lover of movies. Her focus in work is book cover designs which enables her to put all her energy in to the area she loves most- literature. You can get in touch with her about getting a book cover designed for you athttp://www.booksat.scarlettrugers.com

To read my interview by Scarlett check out  http://www.1001firstlines.wordpress.com

What do you think about first lines? Got any favourites or ones that completely turned you off a book?

Divide and Conquer

2 Words Forward


Divide

I'm probably not the best person to ask about this but it is definitely worth consideration: how do you divide your time between writing and the rest of life? In the past few weeks I've discovered one method: if you give yourself goals then you make the time to write. It started with two calls for submissions that were due within a day of each other. While scheduling travel and adventure I made time for my writing and, therefore, managed to submit to both of the journals I was going for; one successfully, the other I haven't heard from yet. Whether I get in to both, either or none is not the point, though. The point is that I managed to give myself writing time and that made me realise that I could do it anytime I liked. Which, of course, hasn't effected me in the least. So I found a couple more journals to submit to. I'm sure it can work in other ways; scheduling by calendar or setting an amount of time per day. I'm equally sure that these things haven't worked for me so I'll just keep chasing journals for the time being.

1 Word Back


Conquer

There are some things we as editors are out to conquer: bad spelling, incorrect grammar, those roadblocks that stop the reader in their tracks. I've recently found something much bigger and harder to overcome, however, and that is editing confidence. It's hard starting out in any industry but I feel that editing is harder still. Every other job that I've done have had clearly defined lines: receptionists should answer the phone within three rings, you should use apply pressure with a cloth to stop bleeding, a single shot of coffee should take fifteen seconds, etc. Editing, on the other hand, is very fluid work. Aside from absolutes like spelling and many aspects of grammar we wrestle with questions of style — the sentence may be grammatically correct but does it flow? Is it easy for the reader to follow its progression? Is there too much nesting (sections within sections within sections)? This is where there are no real rules; the best that we can do is identify areas where we believe these problems are occurring and recommend re-writes. This is where the fear lies and where we can conquer our demons. For me it was a simple choice: I weighed up the thought of incurring an author's wrath against leaving something out which should be noted. I decided to leave nothing out and recommend everything I deemed necessary. This is the victory. Editors of the world believe in yourselves and put those recommendations in!

Big Hurricanes and Small Flurries

                                                  Picture from here



2 Words Forward



Big Hurricanes

Hi blogees! I've been remiss in updating to lately but to be fair I've been travelling (see last entry) and have been busy writing my fingers to bleeding stumps. Well, not literally but I have been writing some fiction so I guess a little hyperbole won't hurt.
My hurricanes took the form of an article about dystopia and a short short story (1000 words). I started my work on the essay over a month ago but work had stagnated as I searched for a way to organise my findings. It turned out that I wrote the entire essay in two days and edited it in one. I know there are some of you out there who will be aghast at what appears to be sloppily quick work but my research was already done and I always end up with a fairly clean first copy requiring only small amendments only. I covered a reasonable swathe of literature in the short article (I've put a list below in case you want to get your dystopia on!) and found many agreements between them allowing me to cover themes, as well as real-world examples of these themes.
The short short story, therefore, was not something I was prepared for. Having finished the essay on the day it was due I had twenty-four hours to get the story written and edited. It was tricky on two fronts: my usual word count for a short is 2000 so I was required to condense my usually succinct form even further. The other difficulty was that it was themed, the theme being 'bones'. I meditated on this for several of my sixteen hours (I slept during the twenty-four) and came up with ideas that appeared to be hackneyed and not suited to my style. I google-imaged every word I could think of regarding bones, eventually landing me with some old Dutch paintings which I favoured years ago. I felt the hours ticking by and, despite my best efforts to put myself in the right space, I was no closer. The tipping point came while making my third cup of tea for the day - I decided to take my mind away from creating a full story and just create an introduction which I liked in the hope that the rest would come and come it did. In two hours I had a complete story which had organically turned into my usual style and favourite genre (I'll give you a clue as to the genre - I just wrote an essay on it!). Two hours later and with the help of the lovely Aimee I had an edited story and a submission done. I discovered two great things during this time: I can push myself and still come out okay, and submitting work is less scary if you do it regularly. I'm ready for the future!

1 Word Back


Small Flurries

Here's a literary pun for the girls out there but if you're a boy I'm sure you'll get it too. If Americans call full stops periods then I must be Cormac McCarthy for most of the month and Ernest Hemmingway for a few days. Okay, it may have resulted in a lame joke but it got me thinking: editing for foreign publication is a lot harder than editing for your native audience. For one thing, if I write that the microfilm my fictional spy is carrying around (do they still use those?) is a bee's dick or that the only palm tree in Gundagai is as subtle as dog's balls on a budgie then I expect Aussies to get that (side note: why are all of my comparisons forming from genitals today?). It's not just the spelling and, in some cases, grammar which may change over borders but expressions may be misunderstood. Consider the television show Kath and Kim - we find it hilarious because we know these people but perhaps the reason why it flopped in the US is that they didn't get our expressions. If this analogy doesn't work for you think of Waltzing Matilda. Words like coolibah, billy, jumbuck, billabong and swagman do not make sense to people who have never heard them before - it's pure Aussie which makes it another language to outsiders. So, if you're considering writing for a foreign audience consider your lingo or else us editors will have the red pencil out!

1,000,000 websites back

Welcome to the SOPA special edition of my blog.

While I cannot do anything directly to prevent these laws passing (I am neither a Senator, Congressman or even an American) I am a citizen of a great little nation I call the United Countries of the Internet. My citizenship papers are the trails I leave on this blog, facebook, twitter and many other sites. As a proud member of this nation I feel it's only fair that I exercise my democratic right and let my voice be heard.

So, what is SOPA?

The premise of SOPA seems very fair; let's stop all of the people who are making pirated material available on the internet. In the interest of full disclosure I would like everyone to know that I have accessed pirated material from the internet. I don't do it often and I frequently buy things later if I like them but I am not innocent in this conversation. I am not, however, protesting the removal of my right to pirated material - I think that's totally fair. It's the other aspects of the SOPA that I disagree with.

So, what's wrong with SOPA?

SOPA does not merely wish to target sites that enable access to pirated material but any site which may have used any material that could be considered copywritten. Here's an example:

This picture is from my favourite Disney movie, The Great Mouse Detective. I might chose to use this if we're talking about the paths we take when we write and the origins of those paths (many of my stories, while not in the detective genre, involve murders and police investigations). I would add the photo to illustrate my blog and to perhaps jog some peoples memories as it is not one of the big Disney flicks. If SOPA goes through I am now fair game. Yes, I provided a citation for the picture but that was just another blog, not the Disney Corporation. In that way I just used their material without their knowledge (I did not ask first). Am I harming the Disney Corporation by doing this? I don't believe so but they may see my blog as bad publicity for them.

What will SOPA do to me?

Here's the kicker. The US government will have the authority to order Blogger to remove my blog. They can do this despite the fact that I am not American and this blog is not run out of America. This is what they are legislating - the right to remove anything from the entire internet they do not agree with regardless of it's origin. They will give Blogger five days to comply. They don't even have to prove that I am using copywritten material - they can remove my blog on a suspicion. It is then my duty to argue my case to them - I am declared guilty by a foreign country and must prove my innocence.

So, that's what all the fuss is about and that's why I'm angry. If you're reading this and you are American please contact your local politicians and tell them that they have no right to bear their legislation on foreign entities. If this legislation is passed I'd just love everyone out there to dob me in to the powers that be - I'd love to be test case to prove that America does not own the internet. Just to make sure I'm using enough copywritten material here's a picture from Toy Story 3.

If you want to know more click here for a great gif that explains the restrictions SOPA will impose on your favourite websites.

Road tripping and the loss of words

2 words forward

The road less traveled

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost

I have always looked fondly on the quote above; I've done some weird things in my time and I feel that they were good experiences. In the past few days I managed to do something quite weird again and I was once again rewarded. The weird part about it was that I did it backwards - last year for National Novel Writing Month I wrote an as yet untitled capitalist dystopia. In my novel my protagonist was on the run and he proceeded to skip the state. I knew when I was writing it where he had begun and where he ended but I chose not to name places to give the piece a floating feel. I did, however, this week take on a massive road trip which went the same way as my character's run, that's the backwards part; I wrote first and experienced later. The wonderful thing about this is that I'm in the process of a re-write which will now be coloured by my additional knowledge of the route my character took. We never stop learning about our pieces but it's always better when we still have time to incorporate that knowledge.

1 word back

I lost my words

So my road-trip resulted in me staying with two wonderful people who are now married. Yay! One of these people comes from Europe and her sister and a friend were also down from the home country. This is how I lost my words. I had forgotten how easily I had slipped into a pigeon English while I was overseas and communicating with locals but when I was surrounded by the lovely people from Europe I did it again - I lost my words. My sentences became shorter, my speech slower and my grammar jumbled in the same way that there's was. It was really weird. I've only been back a couple of days and I am still noticing a tendency to avoid abbreviations and I literally had to look for several seconds before I could remember the word abbreviations! I never realised how much I took my language skills for granted, nor how hard it must be for others to slip into my language (although I've been learning another language for a while now). My words will come back but I've learned that I can't take them for granted anymore because I know they can go, too. Now it's time to flex my vocab with some word games, else I'll lose them again!

Sing for poetry!

2 Words Forward

Singalong!

I was inspired by this article to look again at the place of music in the writing process. It's not the first time I've done it - one of my first short stories was written with my ipod on shuffle and the rule that I had to include something from each song in the text (The storyline was based on the first two songs I heard - Elvis Costello's 'Poor Fractured Atlas' and REM's 'Talk About The Passion'). In more recent times music has taken a bit of a back seat to my writing - I drive better now that I have a better idea of how to write and a better understanding of my plot-line at the outset. Yet, music is and I believe will always be a great way to kick yourself out of a rut. Stuck for the next twist? Put on music and mull on the ideas that come with the songs. Need a character name? Behind every song is a musician and some songs even have central characters. There's always a place for music and writing to coexist. What are we writing but a spoken song? What are they singing but a story?

1 Word Back

The poetry of language

I also came across this article (thanks to Ray Duell for posting it on facebook). Go ahead, read it. It will probably take some time as it's long and built to trip you up. I'll just go make a cuppa and come back when you're done ...
Done? Good.
Don't you hate the English language right now? How could it be so cruel as to spell the same sounds in so many different ways or to spell different sounds the same?
So, on behalf of the entire English speaking world I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone who tries to learn this as their second language because there is so much of it that doesn't make sense. I'm sorry to anyone trying to teach it because the rules have so many exceptions they can barely be called rules at all. I'm sorry to anyone whose first language is English and are trying to learn a second language: many of our rules don't apply anywhere else so you probably have the worst possible foundation for learning another language. I'm sorry to all of my fellow editors - I know how hard it is to remember all of those little twists and turns of our language and how many hours you spend sifting them out of a large document.
World, I'm just sorry about the whole thing. It's beautiful and magical but it's illogical and screwed up. Anyone for Esperanto?

Wave of the future!

2 Steps Forward

A Year of Action

Welcome to 2012. Now what? It's already the fourth of January and I've done nothing! I'm so pissed off with myself. Luckily a friend of mine put up a very useful list to remind me of the important things. What have I taken away from this article (apart from the fact that I ripped it off to use in my blog)? There are two things that struck me in the head at point blank like a frozen fish (gratuitous Monty Python reference). Firstly, voice. Your voice is your voice. My voice is my voice. I often write in another voice as practice but when I write a piece I want to use I write in my voice and I was surprised to find that this is not the way everyone writes. So the moral is to write as you because you're the only one with your voice. In a larger way the several sections covering procrastination won me over. This article makes me remember something very important - if you want to be a writer then write. It's so simple but so often forgotten as we avoid a snag in a plot or an unsatisfactory character and don't end up writing a damned thing. So, I said to myself, if you want to call yourself a writer then your writeriness will now be measured in words, not procrastination. I think tonight will be a writing night!

1 Word Back


20twelve

Numbers. If you spell it with a '3' you get a cool tv show that died too soon. Otherwise, in their normal guise, numbers are the forgotten characters of our writing. So what are the rules with numbers? Well, mostly numbers are left to stylistic choice. All of the following: 04/01/2012 (Aussie), 01/04/2012 (USA), January 4th 2012, 4th of January 2012 are acceptable. There are also variations on these that are fine - the important thing is to make sure that all numbers of the same type (ie. dates, times, general numerals) are consistent. There are, however, some guidelines for general numerals in Australia which can be found in the Style Manual. Amongst these are the suggestion that numbers under three digits be spelled out in letters, while those three digits or larger can be written in numerals. Once a number gets larger that hundreds of thousands they can be abbreviated to both letters and numbers (ie. 1.5 million, 2 billion). Of course there are also rules for the phrasing of money and currency and mathematical sums but these are for another time. In the meantime make sure you're following the same rules all the way through and you should be okay.