The Word Cloud

The Winner of our Joke Competition has only recently been subjected to a rather in-depth 'probe' from the gorgeous Debi & Emma. It has left his work in a near perfect state but unfortunately he is still quaking in a corner and not up to another session with them!

With the blessing of Guero Davilo the Cloud is passing the prize to the next best joke...so the new winner is Steve for his tattoist joke:
Bernard goes into a tattooist’s.
“I’d like you to tattoo my girlfriend’s name on my penis. Can you do that?”
“I can,” says the tattooist. “But it’s very painful. I’ll have to give you an anaesthetic. What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
“She’s called Wendy.”
So the tattooist does his stuff, but when Bernard comes round all he can see is a ‘W’ and a ‘Y’ on his cock.
“Don’t worry,” says the tattooist. “When you get an erection, your girlfriend’s name will be there in full. If you like, go into the toilets in the back and check it out.”
So Bernard goes into the toilets, does what he has to do, and there is his girlfriend’s name in all its glory. He’s very pleased. But just then another chap walks into the toilet and he’s got ‘W’ and ‘Y’ on his cock as well.
“Is your girlfriend’s name Wendy?” Bernard asks.
“Naaaah, mine say Welcome to Jamaica and have a nice day.”

Brace yourself Steve - Debi & Emma will be heading your way!

Thanks for all your variously silly, cheeky and witty entries for the joke competition. After much guffawing and chuckling the office has decided that the joke from Guero Davila was the one that tickled us the most!

 So Guero, you now have the absolute pleasure of a Prose Probe from our fab duo Debi & Emma.

Special mention goes to Steve for his Tattoist joke and Barb for her Four Fonts... we really did like them all.
For all those who weren't so lucky don't despair, Emma and Debi's fabulous self-editing course is still bookable, still has space enough for you and still stars the gorgeous gals themselves  just pop along to their super-fandabulous SELF-EDITING course

You all know about lovely John Taylor's brilliant success. So thrilled as thrilled can be are we that we want to sprinkle some more of that WW support and editing dust.

So we've called on our prose-magicians, Emma & Debi, to wield their editing wands - in full view - on the Word Cloud. Yes, that's right - they've agreed to do a one-off, fine-toothed-comb Prose Microscope job for one lucky Cloudie, on the Cloud, to be visible to ALL.

Great idea! But then we thought... how do we pick someone...? We love you all as our own. We have no favourites. Hmmm... this is tricky...

Thursday afternoon... January... We need more smiles! So send us a silly joke to be in with a chance of winning! The joke that makes the WW office laugh the most will secure the prize. We need all entries to be with us by Monday morn. Please send your funnies to  - info@writersworkshop address.

The winner will be announced on Monday afternoon.

Come on Cloudies - we need your jokes!!

The Writers' Workshop Office

From the party that broke out on the Cloud yesterday, you would think I was a published author, but The Blackbird Effect does still have a journey to travel. What has been great for me is the support of so many people who know just how hard it is to get a book this far. At every stage, there have been people who have kept me going, and while writing is by nature a solitary profession, I think those other people are vital, and not just for support.

A story is just words without a reader, and to truly write, we need also to listen. Something that makes sense to me may be nonsense to Harry or Skylark or Whisks. While I can’t claim to have been inside those three remarkable heads, I have had quality feedback from them and from many more people.

I’m going to try and outline the journey the book has taken to give you an idea of just how many people have been involved so far.

The Blackbird Effect grew out of the ashes of two previous novels in 2007, retaining two characters who became the narrators, after an Arvon course showed me that those novels were my apprenticeship. I needed more of a challenge, and focussed on the relationship between two sisters.

In 2008, another Arvon course with the novelist Kamila Shamsie confirmed that I was onto something, but that the problems I had set myself were immense: two first-person narrators, unreliable in different ways, one past-tense, one present tense, and a cyclical structure that borrowed more from musical form than anything resembling a traditional plot.

That summer, after years of cuts in the service we could provide for adults with learning disabilities through the county council, I finally decided that enough was enough, and after 24 years, I couldn’t be part of such a service. I left, and gave myself, optimistically, a year to write my book. It was great fun: I did a lot of research and went through three drafts in the year. Key advice came from workshops with poet Glyn Maxwell and two workshops with the lovely Tiffany Murray. For the first time, I began to believe that this wasn’t just me following my dream, but a book with a serious chance of success. However.

That was the however moment. To stand any chance of getting published, I would have to stop playing around with an experimental novel, and give it a traditional structure. I looked around for help and found a friendly inviting website called The Writers’ Workshop offering a self-editing workshop in the Oxford Union in February 2009 - not as an add-on to a literary festival, but as an intensive day’s work.

I booked up, and found two extraordinary tutors, Harry Bingham and Emma Darwin. They sent my confidence sky-high by loving the voices I had created. But voices have never been my problem, and I left knowing that I still had a long way to go with structure and plot. I had a string of great scenes that didn’t have much cumulative effect when added together.

I felt I needed more specific help, and was slightly surprised when my wife agreed to me paying for a full WW critique.

The result was a bit of a shock, because for the first time I met an editor who didn’t really ‘get’ my main characters. But that didn’t matter: Daren King gave me some very helpful guidance on creating a progressive plot through the book. Maybe it was a bit much to ask a young contemporary novelist to enjoy my purposely insecure and ‘soft’ characters. His review and many further comments from Harry helped me shape the material in a completely different way. Essentially, this was a new book.

2009 was the year when I launched myself as a professional storyteller, and so much less writing got done, but I had wonderful encouragement from something new: this very Cloud on which we all sit. Here were a bunch of writers going through the same agonies as me!

2010 was the year of the first York festival. Putting faces and voices to a cupcake, a Derbyshire fell and various other mysterious icons was great fun. And it was the first time I met a fiery-haired writer called Debi Alper who had been a source of wisdom and encouragement long before we actually met. Late in the festival, I read a passage to a big, slightly sozzled audience in a literary death match that included Harry taking black humour into a morgue, amongst others.

Meetings with agents suggested that yes, I was a good writer, but my ‘son of’ book wasn’t yet polished enough.

I left York with a plan of action for a project that had stagnated for a year or so. Later that year was Harry’s Getting Published day, to celebrate the launch of the book that told me everything I needed to know about the interview I’ve just had this week. Another ten-minute session with Debi confirmed that now The Blackbird Effect was really getting there, with a much-improved opening chapter. “Be ultra persistent,” she said.

I sent that draft out to agents, with a mixed response: one positive, helpful rejection, six refusals and several no-replies.

I let it lie for a few months while I began a new writing project, taking the manuscript to York 2011 with the intention of focussing on small publishers and forgetting any grand designs. But everyone still liked it. Julie Cohen gave me some great advice on pacing. In my attempts to make my project into something like a conventional novel, I had given my narrators alternating chapters to avoid confusion. But my writing had evolved, and she suggested I go back to my original plan of intercutting the voices, and see if it worked. Bingo! What I couldn’t manage before was now easy. The icing on the cake was winning a free editorial review as one of the most promising manuscripts at the festival.

And all of a sudden I had two editors! Jill Foulson carried out my winnings: a rigorous critique, instructed to look at it clinically as a commercial proposition. And I also began exchanging manuscripts with Skylark, finding the sharing of material with a trusted friend incredibly valuable. The two editorial processes dovetailed. Skylark’s many smiley faces on passages that worked for her - not to mention her rude comments when my character simply couldn’t see that she was hopelessly in love, or trust her own feelings, were an amazing confidence booster. And Jill’s comments were easy to work with. Again, I didn’t take them all at face value, but took the criticism and found solutions that worked for me.

I felt quite smug when I showed the manuscript to Harry in December. Until it came back with three points to look for in the easiest edit I have ever done. It took less than three weeks and trimmed 5,000 words-worth of baggage off the book.

Harry suggested that Juliet Mushens at PFD might like to see it a week ago today. She read the book cover-to-cover (not that it has covers yet) in one evening, and now I have an agent. But still, as ever, there is just a little more work to do to the manuscript…

 

All those people named above have contributed to The Blackbird Effect, and so have many others. Today, I had a storytelling session with my friend Hayley. Hayley can’t read, but if this book gets as far as publication, her name will be on the dedication page, and she and her friends give me plenty of reasons to keep on writing. If you have a manuscript that seems to be taking a long and winding road, I would suggest that it could just be the one that works for you.

"She stood up and stepped forward, something, quite possibly panic, or maybe terror, coursing through her. She stepped again and glanced to the sky, glancing up at the stars, whilst glancing and looking. That feeling, panic or terror, coursed through her, and she stepped back this time, and glanced over to her companion, who glanced back to her and stepped back, too. Indeed, panic coursed through him, as well. 'Hell!' she thought. 'What the Hell is going on?', and glanced up to the sky again. And took another step, this time forwards, whilst her companion stepped back. 'Hell!' he thought, as fear coursed through him, threatening to suffocate him. "What the Hell is she playing at?'. So they stepped together, glanced at the sky together, and THEN GOT THROWN IN THE BLOODY BIN FOR BEING CRAP!!!"

Oh, and don't forget 'ing ing ing ing ing ing ing ing ing... standing, stepping, listening, running, jumping, kissing, fretting, glancing, panicking... bloody inging everywhere!

Tee hee - okay, it's an exaggeration, but as you might have guessed, I've been identifying my crutch phrases - and that just about sums it up. Stepping, glancing, panicking, coursing and hell, uh, ing. What does that say about me, I wonder?

So - anyone else got any crutch words or phrases that crop up everywhere in their writing? Willing to share any tips (apart from find and replace - done that!) to go into writing physiotherapy to get yourself off those crutches?

I am not an expert in many things, so what I recount here is not to be taken as my giving some authorative advice on anything (my type o's should assure you of that) but what I have written below are just my my musings on my process of writing.

Although I have been writing on and off for 30 years (My first series of books being a hand illustrated collection on graph paper, stapeled together - what one might call self publishing) - it is only now that I have learnt how it is that I write.
I have found the cloud invaluable, and also the crits which I have managed to scrape the pennies together for, and my main issue has been to remove the back story from my current story. This is the issue people flag up again and again, and they are right - or rather, they are right but I am wrong, in that I had always thought that I was showing people a finished piece - but I wasn't.

 What I do I realize, and what works for me, is to write everything at first. To write every drop of back story into the narrative as it's told - but what I have learnt is not to think that is the story. It isn't, it's the roots of the story, and like roots, there are hundered of strands all slowly coming together. What I then do, is go back and decide if each piece of back story is needed to make the moment work, or has it served it's purpose already. By this I mean, I know the back story, I have worked it out, it has coloured the plot by is it's existence, so do we need it, or just the effect it's caused. Like a stone dropped in a pool, you need the ripples, not the stone.

Each edit is a quest to whittel away the back story, while understanding what it does to the front story ( if that's even a phrase) - so that what remains is crucial to the plot, entertaning and informative, but not cleggy. I think I have, in my most finished one, reduced four pages of the story of my MC and how she met her ex-husband to these lines

  ' I remember my younger self, crossing this road. Still wearing clothes bought in England and striding along in borrowed purple shoes on my way to meet Geoff. 

‘Wow,’ my friend Haike said in her rich, German accent after she met him ‘you really traded up!’ I could never afford shoes good enough to meet Geoff in, until after I had.'

Which I think tell you pretty much all you need to know as far as the book goes. The more intricate version is very interesting, very well written, and enjoyable to read, but not the point - the point is I needed to write it to know what happened, so that I would know how it changed her future.

I'm working on the start of a new one, and I am doing the same thing - I am letting the MC tell me his story ( doing it as a guy!) and I'll let him talk and talk for pages and pages and I won't worry, because that's his job. My job is to edit what he tells me untill it's a book. I feel more like a biographer, at the end of the day.

I recently started editing my MS for what I hope to be the last time, before I send it off to the workshop for a read over.

 

I have set myself a goal of a chapter a week. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot but I have a lot of other stuff to try and stay on top of as well. Plus this way I can really take my time and give each chapter a lot of attention. It’s just going to take me a while overall.

 

I’m up to chapters 6 & 7 at the moment, but every time I sort a chapter out I give the chapters behind it a once over to make sure my tone flows and that my tenses stay the same (it’s a really bad habit of mine, switching tenses without even realising it). But when ever I give the earlier chapters a read I keep changing things, I keep re-editing them.

 

I know this is a fault of mine, I’m never happy with anything I produce and really have to beat myself up to say “Right Kate stop now it’s finished.”. So I was just wondering if anyone else has a similar issue and if so is there any way for me to know when something is finished.

 

If I keep going like this I’m going to be working on the same MS when I’m 60 L

I am a hunter. I carry an enormous bore elephant-gun. I am a caricature of every big-game hunter you ever saw. I'm like Teddy Roosevelt standing on a dead tiger grinning in a sepia photograph. I'm like that guy in Jumanji or a bearded Hemmingway.

Pith helmet on, twirl of moustache, cue Elmer Fudd-like stalking.

I'm going into the manuscript jungle. I'm going to push the Elmer Fudd metaphor one more time: 'Sshhh! I'm a-hunting wordits.'

I need all my senses. First the loudest ones; they should be the easiest to find. Out there amongst the thousands of trees there are the smiling, grinning fools, gurning away, shrugging their shoulders and raising eyebrows. You can hear them by their protracted sighs and laughs and their constant wandering eyes looking at people sternly - Blam! - (got one of those Lees right between the eyes) or worse and horribly - Blam! - 'rolling' their eyes all over the place like ghouls. I recall Ian Fleming always rolling Bond's eyes across the room. Monster. I shudder and move on.

Next, the time-wasters. You can catch them easily as they're so slow but they're noisy too. They click doors shut, walk across rooms, brush their teeth, open then close car doors Sometimes you can catch them as they look in the mirror and describe themselves – Blam! - got one as he was making coffee and looking for the sugar - Blam! - another one; tying his shoes.

Now the Tells. Deep in the jungle now but again these guys shout at you but they learn fast. One moment they'll express how they love someone very much or say how sad they are then run away feeling that is enough. But once they learn to keep quiet...suddenly - Blam! - (damn Lees again. And that guy's the worst of them. Where does he come from? He's awful yet there are hundreds of the buggers.) those Tells are adapting everywhere. Now they're showing me things instead. Worn out portraits in wallets, shirts that don't fit or have frayed cuffs, broken toys or unworn children's shoes. I can't touch them now; they're protected.

My God! A herd of Lees! They're everywhere! See how quickly they run! Then they crawl slowly to confuse you or scream loudly. Better reload! No! I'm all out of exclaims. I've been firing them all over the place. Now they're too weak to have any effect. I roll my eyes up into the face of a widely grinning Lee. I'm done for. He stabs me brutally, painfully. He watches me die sadly. Thinks inwardly on what he's done. Damn! Forgot to bring my POV grenades as well. Oh, no: I'm having a flashback! I'm not even in this one!  

 

Well, this is odd...

Since I started revising my story, I've become quite good at being ruthless. I'm actually quite proud of this; even though it's hard to see so much hard work being consigned to the ether in a fraction of the time it took to create, the fact that I can do this now without wanting to sob is something I view positively. If I get 'The Niggle', then it's a case of 'stand up to reworking or die' - no prisoners are taken.

This happened to chapter 8. I think I knew when I started writing it that it wasn't working - it was the only chapter I didn't finish properly, but I hadn't learned to listen to 'The Niggle' at that point and so I just kept going. And, as sure as eggs is eggs, when I came to re-read it back, 'The Niggle' became more of 'The Big Fat NOOOOOOOO!!!!!', and so I scrapped the lot, alongside a lot of the chapter 7 set up and the subsequent sub plot that followed it. It was a lot of writing to scrap, but once that lump was cut away, I did feel better.

So, although happy with getting rid of the excess flab, I also had a huge, gaping wound in my story to suture. Whilst the sub plot was cut (something I am now deliriously happy about, since it has freed of juggling too many balls at once), there was a character that still needed introducing and a whole set of questions that needed setting up. So I had a think and realised that I could make a later scene make more sense if I wrote this new chapter in a specific way.

As I was writing it, I had a sneaking suspicion that the scene was a bit twee, and wasn't sure whether I liked it or not. But since I tend to feel this about near enough everything I write, I figured I'd write it anyway and see what became of it - after all, the sneaking suspicion turned into 'The Niggle', I could always delete it and start again. And I'd even had another idea just in case this one did turn into 'The Niggle' and needed to be banished - RESULT!

After I wrote it, I decided - like a good girl - to leave it to rest. I went back to other chapters, did loads of work on those, found a greater sense of exactly what the story needed and my perceived doubts about this new chapter grew. Without even reading it, 'The Niggle' began to slink out of its lair, and with a heavy sigh, I began planning out yet another chapter 8. I knew there were a few things I  wanted to keep, though, so I steeled myself to wince and printed off a copy and, red pen in hand, prepared to cannibalise what I could.

But life is never that simple, is it? As I read the re-write, another feeling crept over me. It was insidious and wholly unexpected. A 'Niggle' of another kind, in fact. Far from disliking the chapter, I... liked it?

So now my Inner Critic is in a total tizz. It wants to hate. It really, really does. I can feel it there, boiling away, trying to summon 'The Niggle'.  But 'The Niggle' doesn't want to come out and play. And for some, weird reason I cannot fathom, this has unsettled and confused me more than when I need to cut stuff out. I'm used to the Inner Critic sitting there with her arms crossed, giving me a disapproving shake of the head whilst tutting under her breath. What I am not used to is her sitting there with confounded look on her face, trying to justify her bile but failing to do so.

Which leads me to one conclusion and one conclusion only: writing is a strange, strange fruit indeed, and something I don't think I'll ever fully understand. Ever.

And you know what? In a way, I'm kind of glad of that... ^^D

EDITING.


I'm sat in silence reading aloud my hard copied manuscript and everything sounds rubbish and wrong.

That is all.