I'd better believe it!

No, not the report of a survey which reported that '36% of women prefer to have a tidy house to having sex' - done by a cleaning company, that's clearly biased! - but that I can do hooks, revelations, turning points - whatever is the preferred term for those things to insert in a novel to maintain the reader's interest.

In York, at the Festival of Writing, I heard the term 'reward reader's for their investment' for the first time. Their investment of both money and time, which has to be paid for with my providing them with interesting, entertaining, unputdownable characters.  The best way to do this is to have the above-mentioned hooks etc. scattered judiciously throughout, adding a page-turning element.

Now, I know that my Prediction Fiction serials (Pages tabs above), which are only a hundred words long, more often than not end with a hook;  which more than one commenter has referred to as a 'killer line'.

So why am I struggling so to scatter them throughout a novel?  And have the plot hang together?

Psychic Distance

Probably the best, i.e. most useful/exciting, workshop of the lot at York, for me, was Debi Alper talking about Psychic Distance.

Debi and Emma Darwin spend an entire week on the topic in their six week on-line course 'Self-editing your novel', which runs three or four times a year via the Writer's Workshop, but even the single example she made us attempt was an eye-opener.  And not only for writing, but reading too - I could recognise Psychic  Distance in action in Lesley Glaister's writing, and now know that it is one of the main reasons books totally fail to sparkle.

More information here:
http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/psychic-distance-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

More useful, by far, than just listening was being told to do an exercise using Psychic  Distance.  We were given ten minutes in which to describe the reaction of a soldier just returned from war as he meets his father for the first time, handing him a photograph:

Steps.  Five of them.  Will I be able to manage them, with half a leg and the other barely functioning?  I’ll look bloody silly if I fall, land on my arse.  

Though it wouldn't be the first time he’d’ve seen my fucking arse either, from what Ma said.  Then I had all my fucking bits too ... but O Christ ... he doesn’t have a fucking clue who I am.

I grope for the photograph, leaning on the concrete wall, half my mind taken up in the looking at him.

Although I do already use it instinctively, it was hard to do, and the follow-up - the ignorant father's response, even harder:

Another wounded soldier.

You can only do so much, and this one so young, no more than twenty, twenty-two perhaps.  The age that ...

No.  Impossible ... even though his eyes are so like Mary’s.  So very much like hers, blue of cornflower.  Too long since they smiled at me.  I was a bloody, bloody fool ...

What?

What’s this? ... A photograph?... Mary ... oh Mary.

York day 3

At home I prefer to eat alone, but mealtimes here have been stimulating and the perfect example of how, if you sit yourself alone at a table, within five minutes you've been joined by three more folk and quickly find yourself discussing, for example, daft names for detectives, going blind and (inevitably) What Agents Say.

'Tension' followed yesterday's 'Pacing' - a bandying about of words such as conflict, claustrophobia, deadline and morality and a warning not to skim the surface of interleaving events.  Then, 'How to write a sentence' with some yet-to-be-properly-perused handouts.  Followed by the art of plotting.

Also some mild encouragement to continue with my second wip, utilising lessons learnt from the first, which, since it is a far less weildy plot might be simpler.   I say 'might' now rather than the 'should' I used yesterday, since I have been thinking for an hour on the balance/interweaving of plots and sub-plots and trying to decide which of the three main characters should become the mainest of them

Inevitably, if you choose all workshops on similar themes there is overlap.  Some are more properly called lectures, the giver of them reading from prompt cards, some (the best) get us working so the lessons they impart are better understood, but the hard work, enthusiasm of these and the behind-the-scenes work of the organisers - as well as the staff at York University itself - could not be faulted.

S.J Bolton, whose work I so much admire, said when her book is finished, before final submission, she takes four or five days to read the whole thing aloud.  I've just tried that with a couple of paragraphs of mine and seen where they stumble (although at times I think a case can be made for internal reading to be different from aloud)  She also talked of the desperation to see her books upon bookshelves, to the extend where it hurts to go into a bookshop.   I don't have that, not that burning passion about anything really, but I DO want to write the best book possible so I will write and re-write and by the time I'm done the desperation might be there.

After all Sheila Hancock is writing her first novel at the age of eighty!

Now to absorb all I have learnt.

York day 2

Didn't get back to sleep after 3 a.m. wakening so some of the day was a little blurred at the edges.
But Adele Parks address was so stimulating that I did not suffer for long - as she said herself, a ballsy, go-getting lady who has certainly put the effort in and deserves everything she's achieved.
Then I got waylaid by buying books ... whoops.
But one was by Adam Close, who I belatedly realised was Eve Seymour, who so kindly commented yesterday on my wip and who did an excellent workshop on 'Crime and Pacing' - in an over-WARM room (a rarity).
Second highlight of the day - and sufficient to revive me when I was flagging - was Debi Alper's 'Psychic Distance' - basically the best way to add life to writing and lack of it the reason so many books fall flat.  I'd bought one of her books too ...
And the evening Gala Dinner and much wine and conversation ...
                                                                          ... and so to bed.

York, day 1

Wet, wet and cold - it wasn't meant to be like this - and weird to have folk with unknown faces coming up, addressing me (by an almost unrecognised name, chosen in a hurry) and introducing themselves by unknown names.  As one of the ~50% who have a photo of myself on the WordCloud blog, I've made it too easy.  But friendly, yes indeed.

Both my one-to-ones this afternoon.  Both giving me the same message:  must be either/or.  Romance+crime is not marketable.   Also many, many useful points about too diffuse a start, over-long sentences, unidentified MC.  One was given with a lot more warmth than the other, with sweeteners such as I can write, and I do dialogue well - with humour!  Sweeteners enough to have me awake at 3 a.m. planning how to kill off at least 30% of my darlings so as to improve/rewrite.  For the fourth time.

Festival of Writing at York

Later today I'm heading for York.  My first Festival of Writing.  Pushed into it by a conscience which kept reminding me that my New Year's resolution was, deliberately vaguely, 'do something about finding an agent.'  So, at 2.40 this afternoon I have ten minutes with an agent.  Later, another ten minutes with a 'Book Doctor'  Both have had, since the middle of last month, the first 3000 words of what used to be 'Not Wanted on Voyage', is now 'A Step So Grave' - taken from Robert Louis Stephenson's ‘Virginibus Puerisque’:   'Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness’

The programme for the weekend is stuffed with workshops, discussions and opportunities to meet other agents, writers and I, who am so used to solitude, will have to adapt to being surrounded by people, a great many of whom are much more adept than I at social communication.   Yet there will be at least as many of the same mind as me, since writing is a solitary occupation. 

I'll maybe be a bit frustrated too, since the follow up novel - working title 'Susannah Elphinstone' since that is the name that came first, but likely 'Longer Shadows Reach' - is going well,  But a break will likely not harm it.

Hopefully I'll be reporting Good Things.