Self-editing ... six weeks of it.

Tomorrow I start a six-week online Self-editing your novel course - http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Self-Editing.html

It's taken me three years to realise (accept) that I need help.  Not entirely arrogance, although there's a bit of 'shouldn't my book be all my own work?, and I have been aware of each succeeding book that I am improving.
I probably wouldn't have been so enthusiastic either had I not already come across Emma Darwin and her superb and empowering'This Itch of Writing' blog, and done a couple of workshops with Debi Alper at last September's Festival of Writers, run by the folks who organise the courses.
I did, of course, read one novel by each of them - they certainly practice what I hope they'll preach.

Top five non-crime books of 2013

Ajay Close - ‘Official and Doubtful’ 

Read twice within a couple of weeks - flight to the States and on the return.  Intriguing, intelligent.  Characters are rich and interesting - the gradual revelation of Nan's personality and her past is compelling; Danny and Callum well-drawn and their interaction complex. The language, the prose is vivid, original and exciting.  For once, for me, I’d use the word ‘mind-blowing’.


T. Geronimo Johnson - ‘Hold it ‘Til it hurts’
Exceptional on several levels. The language poetic - unsurprising to learn that T. Geronimo Johnson is a poet - and the story totally absorbing, both in Achilles search for his brother and his own self-examination in coming to terms with life after Afghanistan.

Emma Darwin - ‘The Mathematics of Love’

Gorgeous. One of those books you are so conscious of the joy of reading for the very first time that you keep stopping so as to delay reaching the end, and rich enough so as to be able to do so without suffering too much.
And discovering that Emma Darwin practices what she so very well preaches, i.e. the art of writing (although 'preaches' is entirely the wrong word since she is very much an enabler) was a bonus.



Andrew Greig - ‘At the Loch of the Green Corrie’
I should have known. This is about far, far more than fishing. Much more than mountains. Intended as a paean to Norman MacCaig, it says so much more about life and belief and friendship and vision and about Andrew Greig.  Who puts into words philosophies I hold but have barely realised, and never articulated.  

Sophie Jonas-Hill - ‘My Crooked Little Sister’

Many, many delicious phrases, page-turning tension, irresistible end-of-chapter hooks, the dialogue and the descriptions. To say nothing of that trepidation (rare these days) that maybe you've read it wrong and it isn't going to turn out as you hope.

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.

All my trials: Scrivener

A recommendation for Scrivener last week - and a list of reasons why - from Emma Darwin's excellent blog.
I tried it once before when I set myself up for Script Frenzy, but both died within days (my fault - too little preparation of either Script or software) but now being aware of the amount of work it took to sort Not wanted on voyage into sensible order, and that the follow-up will be trickier, I thought it worth a second go.

The video is useful, as is the tutorial, but the best thing is that the 30 day trial is for thirty days, i.e. if you have a day when you don't use it, it doesn't count, you don't have to use it within that time.

One day spent wrestling, back and forth between tutorial and a section of my wip left me scratchy and exhausted, but I think it will, in the long run, be useful, although it needs to be remembered it is an organizational tool rather than a writing tool.

Itch of writing - best found scratch

I've only ever read one 'how to' write  book, and that was more of a how NOT to  

I have also read quite a few folks passing on the rules they have found most useful, with more or less insistence, but the one that really works for me, time and time again, because of the high level of common sense ('there are no rules'), the tone in which the information is imparted, and the relevant examples, is Emma Darwin's 'This itch of writing' - check it out for yourself.