I just finished the terrific (and hilarious) book, Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, and was struck by a pang of wistfulness for my one remaining unfulfilled ambition – to see the earth from space. Now you would think that a book that described in laugh-out-loud detail the perils of weightlessness on a whole range of bodily functions would be off-putting but instead it provides a refreshingly inspiring vision of why we crazy humans yearn to burst free of our own atmosphere.
I was reminded of my own childhood ambitions of becoming an astronaut (crushed sadly when I realized I would need at least some modicum of mathematical expertise!). I confess my childish ‘list’ of career options was a distinctly motley collection. Writer was always top of the list (thankfully!) but after that there was actress (Cate Blanchett and I were in the same high school class after all :)), political journalist (for many years my mother had visions of me coming back from various war-torn regions in a body bag), astronaut and then (far, far down the list) politician (!). So on earth did I end up being a lawyer? Probably because people managed to convince me that I should follow a career path which would at least have an outside chance to making money.
Reading Packing for Mars reminded me once again that only when we humans follow our passions can great things be achieved. Anyone stepping back and looking objectively at manned space travel would think it madness – though no doubt someone looking objectively at the probability of publishing success would conclude the same! – but nonetheless we continue to pursue our dreams. Despite the fact that I have been able to pursue my #1 childhood ambition, I still have a yen for the possibility of space travel. The thought of seeing earth-rise is still tantalizing. I suppose I had better hope that either NASA suddenly needs someone with my meager skill set on their Mars base or that I make a cool few million dollars so I can hitch a ride on Virgin Galactic.
So what do you think, have I any shot at being the first recovering-attorney-historical novelist in space? What crazy childhood ambition did you have and do you ever still yearn for it once more?
Category Archives: Clare Langley-Hawthorne
Juggling Multiple WIPs
by Clare Langley-Hawthorne
Now that I am getting settled once more,(if you can call waking at 3am each day getting settled!), I am finally getting back to finalizing edits to my current young adult work in progress. After nearly two months on the road with little opportunity for writing, I am eager to get back to work. I also have a number of new ideas floating around which I am impatient to start. When I met with my agent a few months ago he raised an interesting suggestion – that perhaps I consider juggling multiple WIPs at once. While I have certainly managed copy edits while writing a new project, I have never actually juggled two WIPs and I am intrigued as to the practicalities of having more than one active project on the go at once. To be honest I am a bit of a linear writer, tackling one draft at a time, but now I am seriously considering the possibility of trying to complete multiple WIPs simultaneously…and I need some advice.
- For those of you who have juggled multiple WIPs, how did you handle it?
- How did you divide your time and deal with the development process for each?
- Were you able to retain a sense of balance?
- Was it easy to keep each ‘voice’ unique or did the projects blue or affect the others?
All and any advice on juggling multiple projects will be gratefully received (!) while I try and wrap my head around getting back into the swing of writing once more…I have to tell you though moving countries plays havoc with your schedule:)!
The Homeward Stretch
My family and I are on the homeward stretch after visiting over ten national parks in the West over the last seven weeks. We’ve made our way from Yosemite to Yellowstone and are now in Denver en route to Tucson. Hard to believe, but this time next week we will be on a plane crossing the Pacific on our way to Australia (!). We are certainly on a huge adventure but, as we still have only limited internet connectivity, I will have to wait until next week’s blog to give a full round up of the trip. Suffice to say we had an incredible experience and one that I hope my twin boys will never forget. They have some fourteen junior ranger badges to remember it by at least! So stay tuned for my full account over the next few weeks…
In the meantime, a question for you – what was the most unforgettable journey you have ever taken? How has it influenced you as a writer? Is there a trip you would love to take and, if so, where? I have warned my husband that Africa is next on my list but I have to say I would be quite happy to retrace our steps from this trip – the national parks are awesome and a true reflection of this amazing country!
10,000 Hours
Firstly, a belated welcome back to fellow blog mate Kathryn. I have only just got back on-line (why is it that free wi-fi at most places just means ‘it-doesn’t-work’ wi-fi???) and I was thrilled to see she posted this week. I am sending out good vibes from Moab, Utah, where my family and I are camped for the moment.
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers on my iPad and have been musing over his proposition that it typically takes really successful people about 10,000 hours to master their expertise. In the book he does a pretty good job of dispelling the myth of most ‘overnight success’ stories, arguing that innate talent alone is not enough and that most truly outstanding people have a rare combination of talent, opportunity and support to get where they got. They also had to work damned hard – like 10,000 hours – to get that far.
That got me thinking about some of the most successful writers around and I would bet most of them would agree it took many, many years of honing their skills to get them where they are today. As for ‘instant success’ stories, JK Rowling always comes to mind but I have to confess I don’t know how long she toiled at writing before she found that one great idea for the Harry Potter series. I do know she was on the brink of poverty and wrote in a local cafe to keep warm, so things were clearly by no means easy. Is she an exception though to Gladwell’s outlier thesis? What about other so called ‘overnight success stories’ in the fiction writing world? Did they put in the 10,000 hours but we just don’t know it?
What combination goes in to creating the true ‘outlier’ writers? Talent obviously. Determination for sure. Hard work, of course…and luck, lots of luck. But what else? I wonder what Malcolm Gladwell would find if he studied the world of fiction writing…I suspect he would see a similar pattern to the other areas he examined. But do you think 10,000 hours sounds about right? What else do you think is needed to be an ‘outlier’ writer?
Romance of the Grand Canyon
Still on the road and up to the start of week three of my family’s two month national park odyssey. We’re camping at the north rim of the Grand Canyon and I am hoping, as I had to schedule this blog post ahead of time, that the romance of the view remains (though with kids in tow the prospect of romance is always pretty remote!) I have only ever been to the south rim so it is an exciting prospect to be on the less travelled side of the park, although I am still concerned about how I can ensure neither one of my children actually fall into the canyon (at 5 they are daredevils…) But my question for today is all about romance…what in your view is the best kiss in crime fiction?
For me the answer is easy, Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night, not because it is particularly passionate but because the lead up to it was so terrific (the Latin that Dorothy L. Sayers throws in is annoying but I forgive her the pretension). I love having the tension build across books and to reach a satisfying ending, such as that in the Wimsey series. Many other series find that the kiss spells disaster as sexual tension fizzles from then on.
So what is your vote for the best kiss in crime fiction??
It must be love, Ebook love..
You’ll have to bear with me as this is my first effort blogging on the iPad and it feels rather weird – but I have to get used to it as my family and I are embarking on a two month camping odyssey taking in most of the national parks in the Western United States. Tomorrow we head to Sequoia National Park and then Yosemite to start things off. Although I hope to be blogging from the road, there will be a few Mondays where we will be of the grid – but I am hopeful that my trusty iPad will keep me on track. Let’s just call it an adventure.
The one thing I do know for sure is that I am now an official ebook convert. I have to confess I initially viewed ebooks with trepidation. I was fully wedded to my paper book world – until now. Yes, it’s official I’m in love…okay and perhaps just a little addicted to my iPad.
It’s been only a couple of weeks and I have already amassed over 30 iBooks, 5 kindle ebooks and 28 Barnes and Noble ebooks. Now most of these are freebies I admit but still, it’s getting to be a bit of an addiction – believe me I am trying to be restrained! I just can’t help myself. I have also found myself trolling through the free ebook titles on all the sites – hey, you just never know when I might want to read that historical western or that paranormal erotica… Interestingly enough my major worry with ebooks used to be how to differentiate between the legitimate versus the self published but now I am actually browsing I find it is easy to see the distinction ( call me a snob but I haven’t downloaded any books from smash words as yet). To me the fact that publishers are giving me the chance to read titles like John’s No Mercy is great marketing and already I can see how free ebook samples can lure new readers in.
I also love how I get to carry a mini library wherever I go. On a recent flight I could keep my kids entertained with a variety of Beatrix Potter books complete with illustrations and it felt reassuring to know that I could read a number of other books in an instant if they wanted me too. In the past I have been weighed down by all the books I have had to carry.
Okay so enough of the love fest – what excites me is how technology has reinvigorated my love of books and, even more importantly, my children are just as excited as me. The reading experience has not been lost at all – just made a teeny bit cooler. So what piece of technology has done the same for you? Do you remember the thrill of the Walkman or watching your first VHS movie? What technology do you think will help reignite the passion for reading?
Time shifts, Genre Transcension and Author Betrayals
by Clare Langley-Hawthorne
So I just finished my first e-book – The Passage by Justin Cronin – and what an experience it was. God only knows how many pages (Amazon’s kindle app fa
ils to tell me) but I must have wracked up 780+pages in 48 hours. I literally couldn’t put the book down – but now, a mere 5 hours or so after finishing it, I started reading some of the reviews and a couple of the more unfavorable ones started to tweak a nerve and that’s when it hit me – this author did stuff that is usually totally taboo, stuff that usually sends a book down the big toilet – and yet it worked. The book still had me up all night turning the pages…This author broke the rules and managed to transcend the ‘genre’ by writing a literary thriller/horror/post-apocalyptic novel that did many of the things we tell young writers not to do – and he pulled it off! That alone (in my humble opinion) is worth blogging about. So what did he do?…Let’s take a look at the short list…(NOTE: SEMI SPOILER ALERT – NO REAL PLOT DETAILS ARE DISCLOSED BUT STILL, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!)
- He did an introduction that contained so much backstory that most of as TKZ would have nixed those first few pages. He then continued to meander and tell the tale with very little in the way of relevant action that even had me wondering – where the hell are we headed with this?
- Then- after nearly 100 pages he promptly kills off almost all the characters and makes the reader time shift 100 years or so into the future. All the characters I felt really invested in promptly disappeared in an instant, only to be replaced by new characters whose backstory had yet to be explained.
- He continued to ‘tell’ whole chunks of backstory for each of his characters – No doubt he has literary chops but still, there was a lot of the old ‘telling’ and not a lot of the old ‘showing’.
- He told much of the critical ‘action’ scenes as email/diary entries which diluted their immediacy. Hell, he even ended the story on one…speaking of which…
- He ended the book on such an ambiguous note that even I was asking myself why I had just spent 48 hours reading the book -until I realized it was book 1 in a proposed trilogy and then it all (kinda) made sense. (But boy, what I rule breaker to leave a gripped reader confused like that!)
- He had a critical character who pretty much did nothing proactive in the entire book except via telepathy and dream sequences.
- Almost all the plot (and many specific scenes) were derivative of stories that had come before (The Stand, The Road, 28 Days)
Yet, despite all these ‘broken rules’ I was still totally gripped – for two days the book lingered in my mind and wouldn’t let go. It had that undefinable something – an epic quality – that transcended all its faults.
So have you ever read a book that has done the same thing – which flies in the face of convention (and falls into many of its cliches) and yet still flares with its own ineffable brilliance? A book that transcends both genre and all the (so called) ‘writing’ rules?
For me, it may not be The Passage – there were many things about that frustrated the Hell out of me (including many of the ‘broken rules’ listed above) but I have to say, it’s been a long time since I was so engrossed in a book that its ‘inner world’ seemed like a constant presence – one that I was both dying to get back to and yet whose story I was desperate to end. What book can you say last did that to you?
My New Toy!
I’ve been giddy with excitement since Friday when I took possession of my new iPad and, although I haven’t bought all the apps or go totally crazy in the iBooks store, I have to admit I’m hooked. I bought it mainly because I wanted an e-reader and since the iPad offers both iBooks as well as the Kindle, it was a no-brainer for me. I also get to feed my NYT crossword addiction! Since my family and I are about to embark on a two month camping/national park odyssey the iPad is also going to be a much lighter (and let’s face it much cooler) option than lugging round a bag full of books, DVDs, DVD player, laptop etc.. The only tricky thing will be working out how to blog with it on the road.
Now I’m an old-fashioned Luddite when it comes to most technology but I have to say, having spent just over two days with my iPad, I really do think that it marks the start of some great changes to come. We’ve blogged long and hard about the whole e-book phenomenon but I know once my parents are like ‘this is cool’ the world must be changing! (for the record my parents are antiquarian book collectors so the mere fact that they are even remotely impressed says something). So here’s my initial verdict on the e-book capabilities of the iPad:
- As my husband had already bought and loaded my own books on the iBookshelf it was very cool to see my books in e-book format 🙂
- I like the fact that you just turn the page in an intuitive way that mimics the feel of reading a paper book. The colors and picture resolution are great (Winne the Pooh was already loaded) and I can see me reading an e-book to my children without feeling disconnected from the physical experience – so far it feels just as cozy reading to them from the iPad (despite the fact they fight over who gets to touch the screen and turn the page).
- I liked the iBooks store but I confess I wasn’t overwhelmed by it. Searching is a bit laborious and there were a lot of titles I couldn’t find (including some of my fellow TMZers) so I think this will take some time to become optimal.
- It was, however, way, way,way too easy to buy a book. I think I downloaded 10 free classic books and 5 paid books it about 10 minutes (seriously they may need to have an ‘e-books anonymous’ society for me!) But this is great news for authors. I can well imagine publishers vying for advertising/space on the ‘featured titles page’ once the iBook store becomes a bigger player in the market.
- Which leads me to what I think will be a great ‘game changer’ – once Amazon and iBooks start eroding the power of big chains like Barnes & Noble I can imagine publishers will be able to diversify and niche market some of their lists better than they can presently (at the moment my understanding is they have very much a ‘will B&N buy this title’ mentality when it comes to acquisitions).
- I was extremely excited to be able to download many of the historical books I use for research so I can read them in a portable format. I used to have to troll through them on my laptop which was very cumbersome.
- Many publishers already have their own apps so readers can go directly to them (My publisher, Penguin USA, for instance, already has one) which is great (though not much different to what’s already out there on the web) but I can see scope for these apps to be expanded which can only help authors.
- Already there are some amazingly cool apps that have created terrific visual/interactive content for books (Alice for iPad for example) and I look forward to many more that attract new readers (never a bad thing!)
So all in all, I give the iPad a big thumbs up. It serves my purposes well and has me finally entering the e-book age (which is a miracle in and of itself).
For any of you who have iPads what’s your verdict? Are there any new apps/developments that you think could really improve the e-reading experience? I can’t wait for historical books to have links embedded in them so I can really get the most out of my research (video links, costume designs etc. would be way cool). I was also thinking that our own JRM could produce a great ‘chicken army’ app…So what about you all, any great book app ideas???
Write what you love not what the market does
I thought I’d follow on from Jim’s terrific post yesterday about writing with heart, and discuss an issue that is just as important in my view – writing what you love and not what you think the market will love. It drives me crazy when people say “you should write a romance – you’d make more money that way” or (even weirder) “You should write erotica – it’s really hot (no pun intended) right now.” For some reason there always seem to people wanting to make ‘helpful suggestions’ on what you should write – usually by pointing out the ‘hot’ genre on the current bestseller list, as if that is all it takes. Hey, if you just added a paranormal element to your mystery, shazam, you’d have it made.
If only it was that easy…For many wannabe writers the thought of becoming the next J K Rowling or Stephenie Meyers is enticement enough, as is the belief that somehow if you write to what you think the market wants, your future will be secure. Wrong.
Setting aside the obvious (that by the time you’ve written what the market loves now, the market has already shifted to something else) there is something more fundamental at stake. As my agent always says, you must write what you love. Why? Because it shows.
It shows if you are writing a romance when you think it’s ‘easy money’. It shows if you write a YA fantasy when you really want to write contemporary thrillers…If your heart isn’t in it, the readers will know you’re faking it.
I did a course in Australia years ago on ‘how to write a romance’. I admit I did it as a lark and in the mistaken belief that ‘anyone can write a romance’ (I cringe now when I think of my attitude). I had never actually read a Harlequin romance before I did the class, and once I had, I realized I didn’t enjoy them at all. They weren’t my thing. So why did I think I could write one?? It wasn’t until the end of the course that I realized my mistake: it felt fake, and then the realization set it, I was writing a romance for all the wrong reasons.
When I came to the US, I did another class and this time I fell into a different trap. This class was full of so-called serious writers and I felt the constant pressure to prove my ‘literary merits’ (when given everyone’s ego was impossible – the only way members of this class felt good was by putting other members down). So then I faced another hurdle – how could I write what I loved when all I was worrying about was making sure what I wrote was ‘literary’ enough.
It took a while before I could set aside my misconceptions (that I should write what will sell, that I should write something ‘worthy’ etc.) Eventually I sat down and wrote what I loved, what I actually wanted to read, and you know what, it showed…(and, thankfully, it also got me published!)
So what about you? Have you ever felt pressured to write for the market, or to switch genres just because there was money it in? How have you dealt with the ‘helpful’ suggestions people make which means putting the market ahead of your heart?
Relationship Driven
After last week’s mini-discussion about character-driven versus plot-driven novels (and the difficulty involved in distinguishing one from t’other) I started thinking about what really gets me hooked in a good book. Sure I like characters that I can care about and plots that keep me turning the page, but what I most often find keeps me glued to the page is the evolving relationships in a book.
I admit, I’m a hopeless romantic, but when I speak of relationships I don’t necessarily mean the lovey-dovey kind. For me, I want to see the sparks fly on all kinds of levels – because (as far as I’m concerned) it’s conflict and thwarted objectives that make relationships between characters come to life. I just finished a very light regency era mystery/romance which disappointed on the relationship level precisely because the conflict was never really evident between the two main protagonists (that and the fact that I had to wade through pages and pages of the most ‘awesome sex ever’ escapades which defied belief). This got me thinking about what I look for in a novel when it comes to the critical relationships in the story.
One of the key relationships we often look for in a good thriller is between the antagonist and the protagonist – whether it’s a serial killer and an FBI agent or a police officer and his suspect, I want to become invested in a real ‘cat and mouse game’. I want to see a relationship develop between these two opposites that intrigues as well as satisfied. If only one of these characters is sufficiently interesting to hold my attention then no matter how much this character might drive the plot, I will probably still feel let down.
Of course, many times I am looking for a good romance to develop alongside the mystery, and this is where (in my humble opinion) many mysteries and thrillers fall down. The relationship is either way too obvious and heavy-handed or so underplayed as to be totally underwhelming. I want chemistry (!) and both the promise of a romantic relationship as well as the seeds of doubt. In a mystery series the evolution of key relationships are often the most enjoyable things to watch – though as ever writer knows, once those relationships become ‘consummated’ all too often the fizz and the thrill of it all can die.
So what do you look for in terms of relationships in a thriller or a mystery? Are you like me hooked by relationships in a story? Do you enjoy seeing these evolve over a series or do you to see character relationships as ‘second fiddle’ as long as there’s a ripping yarn to be told?