*sigh* all I get to do writing-wise at the moment is Inventor Tips & Tricks...
*shakes fists at work*Anyway. I found this article on the web. It's a transcript of an interview done on the ABC a while back. Thought that many writers here might be interested in reading how Isobelle writes her novels:
Isobelle Carmody:
I used to tell stories to my seven younger brothers and sisters, and I had to control them because I was left alone to look after them, and the best way to do that was to scare them into submission.
So I used to tell them horror stories, and I think I learned probably a very strong sense of audience, a sense of audience control, and a sense of liking audience control. And I also used to have them act out parts of the story which I would make up as we went along, and I’d say, ‘OK, we’re all running away from an orphanage.’ I used to begin with us in an orphanage because I hated my Mum, so I used to kill her off in every book I write or story I wrote back in those days. Seeing them act the stories out and making it up as I went along, I think I have a strong sense of audience and I also think that there’s a strong sense of oral storytelling.
I was 14 when I started Obernewtyn, and I’d been telling stories and writing stories before that, but that was the first book I had published, so I consider that the beginning of my writing career. But I didn’t just finish it, you know, when I was 14, obviously. So the book basically grew and grew, formed a shape that had been when I was 14, and it kept going until I was about 21, and each time I rewrote it got a little better than the time before.
Not just because I was rewriting, but because I was elaborating and reconsidering, and being a voracious reader I was seeing that other people did this better, or that was a much better way to begin or to end or to handle a certain situation, and I was constantly being enriched by all of that.
And I didn’t send it off in all those years, and I didn’t send it off because I didn’t think it was good enough. It wasn’t as good as the books I was reading in the library. I didn’t show it to anyone, I just could tell that myself.
THE SPARK
Isobelle Carmody:
My life seemed so intense, my own personal life seemed so intense and so busy in a vacuous kind of way, the way childhoods are, I just felt like I needed time to think sometimes. I used to wish everything would just stop so I could think, and it sounds mad to say it, I used to like lying in bed and just thinking, about, I don’t even know what I thought about, but I used to have this delicious sense of ‘Oh now I can think for a bit’, if I woke up early and I didn’t have to get up straight away.
For me fantasy was a way of stepping back from the real world in order to think about the real world. So I really see it as a very philosophical medium; I mean why use a dragon, why create a dragon? In many fantasies the writer will not be able to tell you why: it’s because people have dragons in books. But a dragon is naming the un-nameable, it’s trying to put a name to something.
I mean if you want to talk about beauty and purity, if you want to talk about honour, if you want to talk about courage and friendship, those are ideals, and you can make humans act them out. But if you want to talk about them as pure things, you can invent a thing which signifies that thing, and make it live. And so sometimes it allows you, as I said, to name the un-nameable as well.
SHAPE AND BALANCE
Isobelle Carmody:
If you think about the most detailed maps, you can have an incredibly detailed map which tells you the name of every building, the dimensions of it, where the trees are, but it still won’t tell you what it feels like to walk along that road on a particular day, what thoughts will go through your mind, what people you’ll see, what will happen to you. So the map is like the story plan; it should be sort of somewhat rigid, it shouldn’t try to live because if you create a plan and try to make it live, you have nothing left over for the book.
So a plan, to my mind, should always be very short, very simple and very basic, the more basic the better, and the rougher the better.
Then when you start to write again, I also believe it’s very good to write that rough too. I’m not of the school that believes that you should perfectly hone the perfect sentence, because I think then you move the focus of writing away from what you have to tell and into how you’re telling it.
What you say must be more important than how it’s said, because it’s only the vessel, in a way. I know writers will disagree ferociously, and they work in a completely different way.
I think we’re talking about a particular kind of writing here, and I think that when kids write, or when young writers write, and they would ask me for advice, that would be what I would always say: write as fast as you can, don’t worry about wonderful adjectives, don’t worry about beautiful sentence construction, in fact don’t even worry about your grammar, just get it all down.
And then once the idea which should be burning you, is down, that’s the next stage. Another point is that from the point of view of the map stage, the planning stage, to my mind it’s much better to keep it in your head rather than write it down.
I know I’m disagreeing with a lot of current thinking in schools, but the minute kids, or anybody in fact begins to write something down, you really hate to change it, because you think it’s perfect.
Also kids a lot of the time, don’t know how to write a plan. In fact, I wouldn’t know how to write that kind of plan either. My idea of planning is just to think a lot about what you’re writing, and if you possibly can, to talk a lot about it to people, because it should obsess you to that extent, you should bore the hell out of everybody, and therefore your writing actually is sucking up the world, and therefore becoming more real because of it, which is what it really should do.
So the fiddling shouldn’t happen at the creative stage, it seems to me.
One really good way to write down a plan that stops you from beginning to write the story too soon, is to draw a time line. If you draw a time line, and down that time line on the beginning of the time line you mark a line, and you write next to it the first thing that happens.
So you have a story idea: the day my dog died, it was hit by a car. So at the top of the thing you wrote, I got up in the morning, you write a line, and you wrote Got up in the morning. And the next line would be Heard having breakfast, and the next line you would write you’d just put a little mark on the line and you’d write Heard the sound outside, and you continue to do this then, and you try to go a little beyond the story in either direction.
And then you look at your time line, now that will almost always not be a story, it’ll be too long, there’ll be too much detail, possibly in the middle there’ll be too much fat in the story, and at this stage, rather than dealing with hundreds and hundreds of words, it’s very easy to say, OK, I want to see him get up in the morning, for whatever reasons you have. You might say Well actually, why am I getting up in the morning? Why don’t I cut the getting up in the morning and start with breakfast? But I also want the fight he had with his Mother, but that actually happened later in the day, so why don’t I take that fight and I’ll move that up there?
So you redraw a second time line, where you just write the order of things to happen. It’s also very easy not to get lost when you’re writing a story. You know, once you’ve written that little plan, you go from this thing happening, straight into the next thing happening, straight into the next thing happening.
So that time line I think is a really useful way to begin a story and actually not get lost and plan it very well, and allow yourself to rearrange the story without losing those preciously honed words that you may have written.
GETTING PUBLISHED
Isobelle Carmody:
The most important thing is to get it out there to readers, and given the trend towards big publishers swallowing up small publishers, therefore less new young writers are being published, means that that’s the traditional road, the road I took, straight to a big publisher, is actually not so easy to take. And in fact I wouldn’t say don’t take it, I would certainly say take it, but also look at other options as well.
Self publishing used to be something people would sneer at, it’s not something to sneer at at all nowadays, and sometimes, if it’s good enough, if it’s a good enough production and especially if it’s a group of people, if you can get the right kind of sponsorship, sometimes it does lead you to those bigger publishers.
Also sending your short stories to competitions is a really good way to have your work out there. And that’s good to have your work out in the world. When you have it sitting in a cupboard in your room, so many people do that and it just never goes anywhere, you have to send it out. But I wouldn’t send it out too soon.
There’s so much emphasis in schools now on publishing your work, that I think it’s almost not a good thing, because it suggests to kids that it can be done easily and quickly and that there might be quick ways to do it.
There is no quick way to write a good book or a good story. Most good things take time, and so therefore you should rewrite maybe quite a few more times than you think you should before you would ever send it off. Send it off then, and try those various avenues; those are good ones, and getting your work published in magazines is also a really good way.
People notice those things, and it might surprise you, but they do. If you’re going into it because you think you’ll make money or you think you’ll be famous, forget about it, you know, it’s just not worth it, you may as well go and make money in some ordinary job, because you’ll make more ultimately.
You have to love it, and you have to love it so that you would do it no matter what. Those are real writers, people who will do it no matter what because they’re the only ones that will last long enough through all the rewrites and all the stuff that comes in between, to make it right to the end.
From:
http://www.abc.net.au/writers/radioep7.htm