Rachael Green Books

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September 2018
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How do you choose ideas?

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G’day, all.

Question: How do you choose ideas? And don’t whine – I NEVER have any good ideas. Or those I get dry up about three paragraphs into them.

That is, seriously, rubbish. If you cannot come up with one idea in half an hour, then you really aren’t trying.

Buy a journal that is only for ideas. This can be a simple exercise book or a you-beaut, cost-an-arm-and-a-leg one. Just get one. Then go through your days to come and see where you can steal that half-hour on all of them for as long as you like.

Now to make your life really difficult.

Take one half an hour. If you are honest, you can find this time. Maybe you will have to forgo that exciting TV program where the plane is fallen out of the sky and you just have to know who survives. Most of us have some gadget or other which can tape the episode, or there are channels which have these shows on repeat or have one big binge of replays over the weekend. Or if you MUST watch it in real time, use the ad-breaks to think/brainstorm.

It really doesn’t matter what you come up with. The idea is to come up with 10 ideas. 10? Yes, 10. But they’ll all be junk you scream. They may be at first glance. But give each of those 10 ideas thought for another half-an-hour after you have finished writing them down.

You don’t have to think about them as soon as you have written them. Use the half-hour you have(hopefully) blocked out the next day to do this. If you can see straight away that the idea is really rubbish, then you can move it to a folder and keep using that half-hour for further shaving down the ideas.

Once you have finished your half-hour with one story or another and are sure you have something going, choose the one you like best and begin to write it. If the story goes a little haywire, stop that one and transfer your attention to another of the remaining stories. When you come back to it, the roadblock may just have magically removed itself.

Doing this exercise should not only remove the barriers you are having on one story, but you should always be working on one of your ideas.

Do NOT limit yourself when you are thinking. If you need a different atmosphere then get it. Go for a walk if your phone allows you to make notes and write down what ideas pop up. Or text to your computer at home. There are a thousand ways to keep track of your ideas these days. You can always carry a tiny notebook and grab your half-hour anywhere you want. All of us have breaks at work now and it is easy to take a drink with you so you don’t have to go anywhere when you are there. Or take a stroll near some plants or trees or greenery. For some reason, doing this sort of stuff seems to always bring forth ideas. Too many authors have credited it for it to be false.

By grabbing that half-hour, you can not only come up with some great ideas. You should, after a bit of practice, be able to develop 2 or even 3 stories at a time. And because Kindle especially stories can be any length, you do not have to panic about your length. You may have 1 that you can quickly see will fit a short story of 5,000 words, another that can just make 500 words, and yet another which may go for 70,000 words.

If you are going into the territory of 70,000 words, and you are fairly sure you can finish it, then don’t take any of your other ideas out until you have finished at least 1 of the 3 you have hopefully begun. Keep working slowly at all of them, but aim to have 1 finished by the time you are comfortable with stealing that half-hour.

And, remember, it is not really stealing it. What it is doing is making you responsible for your own actions. Washing machines are so smart these days, all you really have to do is put in, add some liquid or powder, select a few buttons and take the clothes out of there when they have finished. How many hours do you take out just to watch some program which has its twin sister on another station? Are you really going to miss anything, apart from the chance to get your writing career up and running? After all, you can also buy the series and binge on it anytime you like.

So get that exercise book or proper journal, find your half an hour – it can be in 15 minutes parts- and really put your brain to work. Nothing is off-limits unless it is something you are not comfortable with and then it is simply relegated to the useless folder. NEVER simply throw something you have thought off out. I have said this before.

You can ALWAYS brainstorm what it is that upsets you and rework it.

I will expand on this post at another time.

Now go find your half-hour. 🙂

Why wait to edit?

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G’day.

We all want to make a living from our writing. That’s a given. If it is not, then you should have a very good reason for writing to take the place of that dream. Otherwise,  you are just spinning your wheels and growing frustrated and tired.

There is more than one problem to this scene. Sure, you think that everything you write is gold. That’s normal. It is very much like having your first child when you finally get a piece of writing completed. Everything about it is perfect. Never mind that the child may have skin tags which need removing, or looks as though he/she may develop a squint. These are things you can deal with after the euphoria of actually having the child in your arms  has worn off.

In the deepest part of you the thought of doing anything at all to improve this gorgeous creature which you have created is blasphemy. It is perfect the way it is.

Unfortunately, others will not see your creation as perfect. Missed punctuation, bad grammar, unless it is deliberate, anything that interrupts the flow of the work can throw a reader out of your story and they often develop a subconscious reaction which is to deliberately look for these mistakes.

When this happens, the reader even more often will spot another typo and decide that the book is poorly written and quit reading it immediately. Added to that reaction is often a bad review. The story may be quite well written, the characters believable, but small mistakes can ruin the best manuscript. There are too many books already on the market that are pretty much perfect which they can read. These may not be as good in story as yours, but they don’t throw the reader out by being poorly written.

You should put your manuscript in a drawer for at least a couple of weeks, no matter how keen you are to introduce your creation to the world. This time allows you to forget about it to a certain degree and you will see your piece from a different point of view because the raw feeling of production is gone.

You will be able to see mistakes more easily. Now is the time to bring an editor into the act. Having an editor straight up the day you finish the story is never a good idea. A good editor will make suggestions as to how you can make the writing stronger, as well as pick up the bits that are not grammar-correct or punctuated properly.

If you hand the script over to an editor straight away, their comments may hurt you badly, although they are just doing their job. Giving yourself this break allows your emotions to settle down somewhat.  Stephen King in his excellent book “On Writing” encourages writers to leave the script mature in a drawer before looking at it again after it is finished.

Admittedly, this process adds time, which most of us don’t have lying around in great heaps. Fill in this time by reconnecting with family and friends, starting another book, simply returning to the living world. If you can’t do this, however, the best thing to do is to outline another book. When you are wrestling with new doings and characters, the first book tends to recede into the background and you can look at it with a less passionate eye.

I am as guilty of wanting my darlings to shine in public as anyone else. But I have also learned that getting a cutting comment on one of my books which I rushed out without doing any cleaning up of it was not worth it. The problem? Several commas were missing. It hurt deeply. The commenter made not one remark on the actual story.

Lesson learned.

 

 

How do you handle a character who decides to take over?

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G’day.

A couple of months ago, I was writing a story that I was enjoying telling. One that I had no idea where it was going, but it was fun just to run with it. The characters were doing their own thing, which is usually always enjoyable because you are not trying to make them fit any particular pattern. Then one character suddenly started demanding more and more space, which was not the general idea. He wasn’t even the protagonist or the antagonist, for Pete’s sake!

A lot of writers throw their hands up in horror when this happens. They have a plan in mind and their characters will do as THEY want them to, not what the character appears to want to do.  By forcing the character to do what you want them to do, the story almost always becomes stilted and artificial and it shows. This usually results in the writer throwing the whole thing out. Or, if it is published, the reader leaving vague reviews which are neither positive or negative, or they lose interest quickly.

There is no need to have this happen. Take a good look at the story. This is when putting that particular story away in a drawer for a bit – maybe a week or so – then coming back to it and seeing it from a fresh perspective is the best way to move forward. Stephen King advocates putting that manuscript away for as long as it takes to get involved in a new story and then going back to it because the story and the characters are blurred in your mind’s eye by then and you will  have developed some detachment.

We favor all our creations.  New writers can be hopeless with removing a character they have made or has grown a life of their own. They have no desire to ‘kill’ the character.  There is nothing wrong with this. The only thing that can go wrong is removing that character from the world of story completely. You will have wasted someone who could fit in another story perfectly.

Never get rid of a character completely. You can always find a story to fit them, just maybe not that one. A mentor of mine said to never throw any of your work away. She was right. If you can, make files and keep those characters in there for another time. There are plenty of apps available these days to do this and not clog up your computer.  In anyone’s lifetime, they will have more ideas for stories than they can ever write, so having a character on tap, so to speak, is a gold mine in reserve.

If you cannot bear to cut the character back severely, then see if you can reorganize your story so it takes the side of that character. But ensure you do this early in the story, so it flows easily. By watching what your characters do, you can see when they are about to make a break for freedom and either cut them back sharply or allow your story to follow the usurper.

But perhaps the best thing you can do is to make two stories out of the one. If you have a list of story ideas in another folder, see if any of them will fit the character and carry on. This can save you from that awful block which can appear when you have poured your heart and soul into a story and have nothing anywhere left to work with.

In other words, don’t waste any of your work. You can always cannibalize story ideas, mix and match and always have something to be working on without simply sitting staring at a blank screen or a pad. Stories are fluid. They are not set in stone. Or at least not until they are half-written. But, at the same time, they have a destiny to get to; the path to there may be filled with interesting by-ways and paths that called to be explored.

However, that is another path that we will explore another day. For now, we will concentrate on what to do with a character who decides to take over the story. Before you do anything with him or her, explore them thoroughly. Can they actually be a better choice for your protagonist or villain? If they are and your story would be stronger by using them instead, then change it and save your original character for somewhere else.

This is all part of the learning curve that writers go through at one point. Some may say that by designing your characters before you start your story you won’t have this happen. Probably it won’t. But perhaps your story won’t be as good as it could be if you don’t at least look at the option of substituting one of the characters for another, or removing one altogether.

It is your story, first and last. And, as such, it should be the best you can make it. We have all read a book or short story where the characters are two-dimensional and wooden. How much better that story would have been if some other character had been the protagonist or the villain.

Something to think about anyway!

What’s your take on it? I’d love to hear!

 

 

What’s with titles?

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G’day, all.

Do you find it hard to write consistently? You have great intentions of writing your blog every day, week or month? You have all your noted in place, drink beside you and it’s all systems go. You have the perfect title.

In theory.

In reality, this perfect setting never happens. You stare at a blank page first. Then you consult your notes. You write a title that will do until you finish your post or whatever. You hate the title, so you erase it and write another one. Okay. So you are writing. Nothing earth-shattering, but at least you are putting down a word or two.

Unfortunately,  that is ALL some of us do. For minutes or hours. In the end, we have spent a lot of time doing absolutely nothing. Okay, we came up with a brilliant title – maybe. The trouble with that is going to be that your article or blog post or whatever is going to have to match it in your mind.

Correction.

It does not have to. Okay,  so the title is supposed to be brilliant to catch viewer’s eyes. We never cease being told this. But, where the rubber meets the road, has the title ever been the reason you have kept reading? No, I didn’t think so. Titles are there to do a job. But in the end, if they have grabbed some eyeballs, then their job is done. They simply have to get those eyeballs to move to the next sentence to see if they were truthful or not.

But the title does not have to be brilliant. Workable, yes. Interesting, yes. Give a little information about what follows, yes definitely. Certainly not unrelated to the content. Someone who looked at your title thinking to find out more about having contented dogs is not going to be happy to find the post is all about keeping pigs for instance.

Give your post/article a working title, if you must have a title to begin with. This gives you something to make your innate tidiness satisfied. You can always change it at the end. Personally, I like to title my work at the end. I simply use a working title first so it satisfies that odd little glitch I have in my skull that says I have got to have SOMETHING at the top. Nine times out of ten, I will change it, either when I have finished the writing, or if I suddenly have an epiphany while I am writing which relates to the topic.

This, I firmly believe, comes from our schooling, when we had to have a title before we began writing whatever. There is NOTHING to justify having one now, as grown-ups. Titles are limiting.

Titles are limiting when you first start writing. So use a working title instead.

This allows you to concentrate on your words and not try to fit them around your title. Play around with titles if you must.  But do that at the end of your writing. NOT the beginning.

Copywriters often leave the title to the last and get all the parts of their copy done first. Only then do they go back and work on the title.

Sometimes a part of your writing will jump out at you. When this happens, you may have a ready-made title staring you in the face.

Don’t make your work any more complicated then it has to be. Working titles work fine, even at the end. I am not saying a title is not important. It is.

But they are not the be-all and end-all of your work. They are there to draw eyes and make the brain become curious. That is all.

If your follow-up sentence does not keep that interest, then it will not make any difference how brilliant your title is. You will not keep your audience for long.

A depressing fact is: EVERY title that you can think of has been used at least once. Many have been used umpteen million times, sometimes very well. Other times, not so much.

So your title is important. But not as important as you may think.

Just have fun with your titles. If you think you can get away with being outrageous in your title, then go for it. But ensure your follow-up sentence backs the title up. As most people skim these days, that follow-up sentence has to carry the most weight.

Have fun writing!

Rachael.

 

How to decide what to write

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G’day, all.

How do you decide what to write? Good question, correct? Interestingly there is really no decent answer to this. Write what you love has been an answer to this question for many years, but does it really answer it?

My idea of that is – maybe. Some of us love to read erotic works. However, if you cringe while even thinking about writing this type of stuff, then it will not be a good fit in the main. Your discomfort will come through loud and clear. I happen to fit into the very uncomfortable side of things, but I will tolerate graphic descriptions if it advances the story. That is the ONLY reason. Graphic sex for nothing but trying to put the value of the book up is not my type of pleasure at all. Guess that is the reason I am amongst maybe 100 people who have not read 50 Shades of Grey. 🙂

Anyone can write something if they put their mind to it. It all depends on how they feel about it. Stephen King wrote stuff that sounded like Raymond Chandler at times when he first started out. Then he developed his own unique style. Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer both surprisingly wrote romances interspersed with their mystery murders and Regency novels. Of course, they used pen names, or Agatha Christie did. Her romance name was Mary Westmacott.

What interests you? As a kid, I loved the usual fare of Enid Blyton and horse books. ( I wish the Police of Whatever had not stuck their noses into things that were not insulting to whomever and had these banned.) But I also snuck off with my Uncle’s collections of Adam and others which had stories in them certainly not suitable for little girls. The female displays of those days were very uninteresting to a little girl of 10. But I devoured the stories in these magazines and consequently gave myself nightmares.

So I had a varied reading history. I was also known for reading the ingredients on the back of the Cornflakes packets, long before this became required reading for those watching their waistlines. But that was when my secret stashes became low.

These days, Harry Potter is still all the rage. Until some clown takes exception to something in it. Why do people install thoughts into children’s minds which were never there in the first place? The idea of reading  I thought, was to let your imagination free. Which is why fiction appeals so much. These days our imagination is crippled by do-gooders who which to dictate what we do from waking until we go to sleep, what we eat, drink and recreate with. Never mind murder your darlings. Murder your imagination and thinking for yourselves instead.

These days our imagination is crippled by do-gooders who which to dictate what we do from waking until we go to sleep, what we eat, drink and recreate with. Never mind murder your darlings. Murder your imagination and thinking for yourselves instead. And this is good for us?

Stephen King makes a very good point when he describes his characters too. He supplies a base for you to imagine from and lets you run with it. Rarely does he give great blobs of information about the person, yet you can clearly see them in your mind’s eye. See this when you watch a movie made about one of his books. Jack Nicholson is about the only character who seems wholly taken from a book of King’s. The Shining is not a pleasant movie. Nor was the book. But neither were meant to be.

So what has all this to do with how you are going to make up your mind what you are going to write? It isn’t going to give you a direction. If you took as that, I am sorry. All I wanted to show you is you don’t have to choose one genre above another to start with. Often you will find that the genre chooses you after a while. Romance is highly desired as a wide genre. But like a good jigsaw, there are many components to make a whole. Straight romance, erotic, lesbian, gay, young adult, the romance section is very wide. If romance appeals to you, fiddle and experiment.

If you are really determined to make a mark, then you should be using all the gadgets you can use without going overboard to find something you want to write. These may include Google analytics or the numerous programs that can point out a niche that is low competition, high desire. But don’t just go out and blindly write a book before at least doing some research. Use all the available tools that you can afford or those that are free(some of these are worth more than those you pay for) to get every edge you can.

But never lose sight of the desire you had in the first place. You can please some of the crowd, no matter how small. If you want to write a book on the mating habits of gnats, go ahead. You will certainly not become rich, but you will meet someone’s reading desire somewhere. But if you want to make some money put some work into researching and finding a niche that resonates with more than one other.

The days of simply pleasing yourself and hoping to appeal to everyone are dead. Select a small demographic of people, further select something that appeals to this selection, whether it be fairy tales for children, financial studies for retirees or young romance for teenagers and see where you go from there. By small, I do not mean 10 or even 100. Picture these people in your mind. Roald Dahl wrote for children, but publicly said he disliked them a great deal.

You can do the same if you can keep this from showing. 🙂