on writing

A writer’s tools

/ Kelly Gardiner

When I speak at schools, kids always want to know all the practical details: do you write on paper or computer, where do you sit, do you use a pen? Other writers, too, like to swap stories and tips. So here are mine.

I can write pretty much anywhere, so I often scribble in notebooks on the train or in cafes at lunchtime. I learned long ago not to mix up all my ideas in one book, so I have separate notebooks: one for each project, and sometimes different books for research notes and fiction drafts.

Part of the ritual of starting a new project is buying new stationery. I like lightweight notebooks – a while ago I fell in love with these fat black journals I’ve only ever seen at Auckland airport, and stocked up, but they are really too heavy for schlepping about every day. I have a small notebook for random notes and ideas. I have even smaller Moleskine notebooks for tucking into a pocket with a stubby pencil if I’m going out walking in the middle of a brainstorm. (If I’m really caught short, I write on old receipts in my wallet, or serviettes, or sticky notes on my phone or Evernote on my iPod.)

I always use a pencil – preferably a mechanical pencil – I have several and for some reason need one for each notebook or task.

I do most of my research and writing on my laptop. I have a wireless router/modem so I can move around at home, work outside or at the dining-room table if I feel like it.

Like most people, I use Microsoft Word (Windows 7). The newer versions have some terrific new functionality and most of us only use a tiny percentage of its capability. One day I’ll make time to expand my knowledge of it, but in the meantime I just tap away, track changes, do rough translations, and use the stylesheets/formatting in a very basic manner.

I use Excel for making spreadsheets tracking action across a novel to help me keep track of structure and pace – sometimes I turn these into graphs so I can literally see the highpoints and slower moments – important if you’re writing action. For Tragedie, I use it to align the known biographical facts with my novel structure (and also the source of the original fact), like this:

Recently I’ve been fooling about with screenwriting, and this is made a great deal easier with one of the screenwriting packages which mean you don’t have to think about the mechanics of formatting (eg caps here, indents there), which are very specific industry standards. Because I’m just playing, I use a free program called Celtx, which although free is pretty good. Serious TV and screenwriters invest in something like Final Draft or Screenwriter.

I keep my references in order with EndNote. (You can also use Zotero, which I prefer for organising references across web and the real world, but for a formal bibliography like my PhD, I use EndNote, because it’s supplied free and supported by my university.) It gathers all resources, downloads bib data from libraries, and spits it all out in the form required for whichever academic journal you’re writing for. You can attach files and links and add your own notes. You can download extensions which adjust the format of bib data you’re importing from certain libraries, or massage your own data into different citation styles (eg Harvard, MLA, etc). I also use a Firefox EndNote extension which is better at saving web references than EndNote Web itself.

Back-up is critical. TE Lawrence left the first draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the train and had to start again. He believed it made his book better – I’d rather not run the risk. So please do back-up your drafts. I have an external hard-drive to which Windows runs an auto back-up every week. I also copy my Writing folder onto a USB drive every so often and keep it in my drawer at work in case the house burns down, and use Dropbox to back up into the cloud. Which brings me to online tools…

Online tools for writers

/ Kelly Gardiner

There is a whole range of free online tools that are useful for organising your work as a writer. Here are a few basics:

Browser
Most of us take our web browser for granted. If you own a PC with Windows like most of the world, you probably use Internet Explorer.
A minority of us use other browsers like Firefox, Chrome or Safari.
Yay us.

Whichever browser you use, you need to know that they have changed a lot over the years and you need to keep updating (they’re free, so why not?). They also come with a great many more bells and whistles than they used to, such as better management of your bookmarks or favourites.

I use Firefox because it’s open source, which means that it has a whole community of people out there who build extra bells and really good whistles that you can bolt on. One, for example, is Gtranslate, which (because I read a lot of documents in French and my French is appalling) allows me to translate any word on any web page into English with a right click.
Another is Add This, which lets me share something I like from any website on a blog or social media such as facebook, or save it to a bookmark list like delicious.
I also have Firefox extensions for programs I use all the time, like Evernote and EndNote.

Make that little search box in the top right hand corner work for you – choose which search engines you use for which tasks (you can get quite different results, you know, searching outside Google), and if it lets you (eg in Firefox) add the option to search sources like Google Scholar or Chambers dictionary. Then you don’t have to go to a site to look something up – just type it into the box in your toolbar.

(Firefox – Dropbox, with Zotero open at the bottom of the screen)


Documents
I use Dropbox for backing up my drafts and documents: it is an online service which keeps your documents (or pictures or anything) in a secure space online. You simply save items to a folder on your computer and Dropbox will synch it up on a regular basis. This means you can also access your documents from any computer, and you can also set it up as a place to share or collaborate with others. Much easier to use than Google docs, if you ask me.

Notes
I adore Evernote. I started using it simply as a searchable database of research notes (like Microsoft OneNote). For example, I can write a quick note about a building in Paris that was around in 1670, maybe include a link to a relevant website, even a picture of it. In a year’s time when I can’t remember where on earth I put that note, I’ll be able to search for it and there it will be. A great deal easier than flicking through card indexes or notebooks. That alone is valuable, especially for people whose writing includes lots of research – you could use it for character biographies or almost anything. But wait – there’s more. Your notes live online, securely, so again you can access them from anywhere – that means that when I’m in Paris walking down the street where that building once stood, I can whip out my iPod or mobile and take a snap or make more notes, and the Evernote iPod app will synch it up with my other notes. Too easy. In fact, it’s a little addictive.


Websites and blogs
A website, at least, is now a given. You have to get one. People will look for you online and if you aren’t there, they’ll wonder what’s wrong with you. It’s as simple as that.

But it doesn’t have to be a drama. You can set up a blog or site very easily – how much time you put into it is up to you.

There are many free blogging platforms. I use Blogger for my blogs, because that seemed the easiest to use all those years ago when I started blogging. It’s still pretty good. You just sign up (it’s owned by Google), choose your blog name and select a design from a wide range of prepared templates. Then add content: blog posts, links to sites or blogs that you like, images.

After several incarnations and countless hours slaving over Dreamweaver, I now just use WordPress for my websites. It’s fundamentally a blogging platform, a little more complex than Blogger but still easy to use. You can post, just like a blog, but you can also create pages which don’t change, menus and sub-pages, and again you choose a template from a range and then add images or change colours or page structures according to your taste. Simple is better.

Both these platforms are free and allow writers to get online with an investment of time and effort, rather than having to fork out. If you know about the technical side of the web, you can make them do extra stuff, but I don’t bother (and I am a professional geek in my day job). I’m a writer, not a designer or a developer. They aren’t the prettiest websites in the world but that’s OK. Up to you.

Both platforms (and others) host your site or blog for free, so you don’t have to pay anyone for website hosting, and both are big stable platforms that aren’t going anywhere (I remember once, years ago, I published my Masters thesis online with a similar service – one day it went bust and millions of people’s websites vanished).

What you might want to do is register a domain name: this does cost money. Say you want your site or blog to be at the web address: http://www.yourname.com. You have to buy the right to that name. But with WordPress you can simply buy the domain name and then use it for your WordPress site by adding a redirect. Easy. And well worth it, even if the domain name itself costs a couple of hundred bucks, because then you get to own a nice, clear and short web address. I think the redirect costs another $12. Bargain.

Social media
I admit I have only just started using social media as an author – literally just in the last few weeks. But I use it as a civilian all the time and have done for years, and work with it as part of my day job. In fact I train people to use it.

So my advice is, don’t go near Twitter or facebook if you aren’t prepared to post regularly, and that doesn’t include telling the world what you had for dinner.
But if you like the medium, you can use it to be involved with readers and other writers, and that can have a promotional effect in the long-run. It’s about engagement with people, not just flogging your latest book.
First thing is to separate out your personal self from your online author self – set up an “official” Twitter feed or facebook page and only post author-type things. Your friends and family may follow you as an author as well as a real person, but you don’t want readers confusing your personal life with your public persona.

Second thing is to use a few nifty tools to bring together your social media, so that you don’t have to keep bouncing from one to another and spend your whole life posting on different platforms. I use Hoot Suite which allows me to write a brief post and then choose which of my social media profiles or pages it appears on.
I also set up a feed from my blog into my facebook page and my website, so that they appear to be updated without me having to actually change pages on the website or post links to my blog all the time.

Third thing is to keep yourself nice. Behave on social media as you would at a school visit or bookshop reading: answer politely, be interested in your readers, ask them what they think – what they read. Don’t grump at people if they leave nasty comments or bad book reviews. Rise above.

Reader communities
I jumped onto LibraryThing early on in its life, and obsessively catalogued a few hundred of my books before I ran out of steam. I have a widget on my blog which feeds up books from my LibraryThing collection, so people can see what I’m reading (or at least, what I read years ago). I still love the idea of it, but haven’t been much involved in it as a community because I just don’t have enough hours in the day. I also recently joined GoodReads.

Both (and others, like Shelfari) are online book geek communities where people share what they’re reading, post reviews, list their own collections, recommend books to one another, and discuss books, reading and writing – endlessly.

Take a look. Often. See what people are reading, what they say about books and what they are looking forward to. If nothing else, register as an author so you can post updates on your own upcoming titles.
For people outside the US and the UK, you may notice that local titles are less likely to be on these sites (and other places like Amazon reviews) but that’s OK. Just know that’s the case and that there will be plenty of people from all over the world reading a huge range of books from everywhere.

It is, apart from anything else, fun. You’ll find a whole lot of books you suddenly must read.
And that’s a good thing. Right?

Those are a few of the tools I use. You will have your own favourites or latest apps and add-ons that get your blood racing. So go on, blog about them.


Superheroes

/ Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

I’ve been watching Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. Pretty much non-stop. For weeks.

Missed it completely when it was actually on TV. Couldn’t have cared less. Didn’t watch Xena. I grew up with The Bionic Woman, Princess Leia, and the original Charlie’s Angels; and nobody, I figured, could measure up to Lynda Carter in her red undies in the superhero stakes. So the 90s superhero phase completely passed me by. Never even saw The Matrix on the big screen (something I deeply regret).

Also, while I quite like action thrillers, I’m not very good at watching scary things, so I’ve never seen Alien.

But since then, you see, there are children – then teenagers – who really want to watch Spiderman or X-Men over and over and you get sucked in and the next thing you know, you’re begging your niece for Buffy DVDs. All seven series.

Now I remember what’s so super about superheroes.

My pirate books were, in fact, anti-superhero. I’d read so many frustrating kids’ books where the protagonist – especially if she was a girl – only escaped the usual near-death experiences due to her amazing and often unsuspected superpowers.

Superpowers suck, I decided. My books will NEVER feature superpowers. In fact, I think I constructed some sort of thesis along the lines of superpowers undermining feminism because … well, I don’t remember the rest and that’s probably just as well ’cause it’s bollocks.

I am, however, still quite happy to argue that many authors let themselves and their characters or plots off the hook with the use of superpowers or paranormal activity. It can be lazy, distracting, pointless. It can be just plain stupid. Read I, Coriander? I rest my case. I’ve mellowed, and am again quite happy to be completely immersed in a well-constructed world of superheroes, so long as that world has its own creative and mythological logic – and not just powers splashed about like fairy dust.

At any rate, Lily Swann, in the Swashbuckler trilogy, quite specifically has only one power that her fellow pirates consider to be extraordinary. She can read. Oh, and she can fence. Both quite remarkable for an ordinary girl in 1798.

She follows the Joseph Campbell-style Quest, as do all heroes, and as many Jungian archetypes a person can muster – they come out of the mythical woodwork while you’re not watching, I swear.

Of course, she is incredibly brave. That goes without saying.
She’s consciously a hero without superpowers, as is Isabella in Act of Faith (out next year) – unless you count education as a superpower which, until recently in the western world, it was. They save themselves and others, including men; they overthrow great powers almost single-handedly; and they – I hope – get all the good lines.

But then, so does Buffy.
Brilliant lines in some pearl-like scripts – scripts so good that I have twice stood and applauded, literally, at the end of episodes – although one of those episodes had no dialogue at all.
For example:

Xander: I’ve been through more battles with Buffy than you all can ever imagine. She stopped everything that’s ever come up against her. She’s laid down her life – literally – to protect the people around her. This girl has died *two* times, and she’s still standing. You’re scared, that’s smart. You got questions, you should. But you doubt her motives, you think Buffy’s all about the kill, then you take the little bus to battle. I’ve seen her heart – and this time not literally – and I’m telling you right now she cares more about your lives than you will ever know. You gotta trust her. She’s earned it.
Faith: Damn, B. I never knew you were *that* cool.
Buffy: Well, you always were a little slow.

It’s hilarious and moving and strong and beautifully written (especially the later series) and scares the shit out of me on a regular basis.

Drusilla: [as The First] Do you know why you’re alive?
Spike: Never figured you for existential thought, luv. I mean, you hated Paris.

Jennifer K Stiller argues in Ink-stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors that the quests of female superheroes are different to those of their male counterparts. Their attributes – and challenges – include compassion, leadership, friendship, family, love, community, and the potential loneliness of those who wield great power. Above all, their stories are about redemption. They usually operate in ways that are not found amongst the Justice League of America or even the X-Men.

The rules about vampire slayers, says Buffy as yet another apocalypse draws near, were made up by a bunch of men, thousands of years ago. Her friend Willow (who happens to be one of the best-loved queer characters on TV – ever) is more powerful than all those men combined. Together they create an army which conquers not only the great evil, but also Buffy’s loneliness, Willow’s insecurity, Faith’s alienation, and the gang’s paralysing fear.

Harry Potter can’t survive without Hermione Granger. Superman’s greatest hero is Lois Lane. It’s Sarah Connor (and her astonishing arms) who terminates the Terminator. Drew Barrymore’s version of Charlie’s Angels kicks ass only when the team is in synch.

There are exceptions – lame chicks who still have to get saved by someone else (I’m looking at you, Gwyneth Paltrow), or whose main aim in life is to look hot in latex in movies aimed at a male audience, rather than inspiring young women (and men) to think differently about female protagonists. In recent years, many of the female superheroes in comics seem to have had breast implants and a ticket to Sleaze Ball 1998. And don’t start me on Twilight.

Perhaps it’s a pendulum that swings back and forth, much like attitudes to feminism. Boringly.

So who knows? Maybe I might have to create someone with superpowers. Some day.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see what Joss Whedon does with Scarlett Johansson in The Avengers.

And most importantly – what will she wear?

Concentrating. Hard.

/ Kelly Gardiner / 4 Comments

This morning was my first trial of a new discipline: Two Golden Hours.
This is the plan. You sit down at your desk, metaphorically nail your feet to the floor, assume the position, and write.
No researching, no looking up references, no fact-checking.
No editing as you go – supposedly not even correcting spelling but I can’t quite take it that far.
No reading articles or searching databases for citations. And especially no emails, no checking the news sites or facebook, no suddenly remembering you meant to reinstall software or reorganise files, no putting out a load of washing or checking the letterbox or feeding the chooks.
Just Two Golden Hours of drafting. First thing in the morning, before getting distracted by any other tasks.
I wrote 1500 words. I’m not saying they’re all brilliant, or even usable, but two key scenes are out of my head on down on … well, pixels or something. That’s normal for a morning’s work but it felt a little more intense, and it’s definitely draft – not processed (much) on the way from brain to Save button. If I couldn’t immediately think of the right word I just chose the closest thing and highlighted it to fix later.
But it was strangely difficult. I’m someone who can easily write for long hours, forgetting to eat and not realising it’s nightfall and that I was supposed to be somewhere. But to do it on schedule is a different matter entirely. I got twitchy. Kept looking at the clock.
It’s important to schedule the time because we easily get lost in historical research, or think we have to find more and more academic references, and working at home also has a whole lot of other dangerous distractions as well. Like morning tea. And afternoon tea.
I try to be at my desk at 9 and work through, just like a day at the office, but it’s easy to get distracted from the drafting by the need to look stuff up. And then you realise you don’t know some related thing, so you go look that up. And then you see a reference for an article that might help, so you go trawl for it online. And while you’re doing that you notice this journal you didn’t know about so you kick off the usual searches to see if there’s anything there related to your subject. By which time you’ve forgotten the original problem you were researching and why. And you might be working but you aren’t actually writing.
So I’ve written it into my Filofax: Two Golden Hours. Capital G. Capital H. The capital letters make the two hours a serious commitment to yourself, a thing that cannot be rescheduled or easily forgotten. They are important.
After all, we multitask all day every day, with meetings, and emails, and people asking questions. You have to do stuff and think at the same time. Even on the train, even in the evenings. Focusing your mind gets harder and harder.
Choosing what’s important among all the many options floating around in your brain is sometimes impossible, so the brain opts for the easiest.
I learned about the Two Golden Hours at a handy seminar for postgrads at uni last week: ‘Turbocharge your writing’, with Hugh Kearns from Thinkwell. Highly recommended.
Now all I have to do is to put it into practice.
I will do that every Thursday and Friday morning. I would do it every single day if I could, but unfortunately I have to earn a living – which is, as we know, quite a different thing to being a writer.

Space cadet

/ Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

Yesterday I had a day off.

Granted, it is the weekend, so I’m entitled. But I don’t usually sit still much on the weekends.

Instead, yesterday I ignored my usual length list of jobs, faffed about for hours, watched two episodes of Buffy in the middle of the day, read a bit, joined the City Library, stayed in my pyjamas until after lunch and ate chocolate. I did not at any point think it was a valuable part of my creative process. I was just a blob.

I didn’t chainsaw the fallen tree or go to the trainer or sort out the compost or do the washing or harvest the winter vegies or make the soup or clean out the chook house or catch up on my research or file my papers or bake banana bread. My partner is away so I hardly spoke to anyone. I didn’t leave the house. Well, I couldn’t, since I was still in my dressing gown.

My brain needed a rest. Space. Nothing.

Serendipitously, Sarah Wilson’s column in the Sunday Age this morning is on that very topic.

When we yearn for more space we want to keep it as … a languid void that exists between us and everything else… it’s the expanse between us and sunset. Or between us and someone we fall in love with while watching them being “them” from across the room.

Quite.

So that was my yesterday.

This morning I woke up with a book in my head. That happens sometimes.

JK Rowling says Harry Potter “strolled, fully-formed” into her head on a long train trip and by the time she got to the station (presumably King’s Cross) she knew pretty much everything that happened to him, including the last line of the last book.

I can’t quite claim that. I should admit that my brain has been riffing on something for ages that I thought was little more than unspoken Dickens fan-fiction.

Now suddenly it’s something else. I’ve had scenes playing in my head, over and over, literally for months and I failed to recognise them for what they are: a new story. It has shape, is filled with dialogue and characters, but I hadn’t given it enough imaginative space – or perhaps distance – to see it from the right angle.

So I wrote down:

  • Marvellous Melbourne
  • Canalletto
  • Bohemia
  • Red herrings
  • Abductors/opera
  • The maid
  • Heidelberg School
  • Bluestocking
  • Sandringham?

Now all I have to do is scribble down the other 75, 986 words. In my spare time.

Not today, though. I’ve got too many jobs.

Researching history

/ Kelly Gardiner / 3 Comments

Many people have been asking me how I researched the historical events on which the three Swashbuckler books are based. What did I do? Well…
1. Immersion
Read novels set in the period. In my case I had already read lots of inspiring nautical adventures such as Patrick O’Brian and CS Forester, but I have read many more since I started the research.
I also had to read all the older and current maritime novels and adventures aimed at children, even if they’re bad: firstly to make sure I wasn’t replicating anything, and secondly to get the hang of the vocabulary and feel of the reading age (9 – 12).
Read history texts until my eyes fell out. Looked at maps, original (or facsimile) manuscripts, engravings, paintings, newspapers and pamphlets – anything. Read other stuff – tangential but interesting histories – because you never know what you might find. I didn’t know about the uprising against the French invasion of Malta when I first started writing book one: I just stumbled across it, and found it so fascinating that it became central to the plot of the trilogy.
2. Detail
Once the narrative and the sense of time and place is clear, there’s an awful lot of referencing, fact-checking and map-staring that has to happen. This can be particularly difficult if you’re stupid enough to set three books on the other side of the world, and live in a city without a vast collection of references on Malta. The internet helps a great deal, of course, and through it I found brainy people in Malta who could answer dumb questions for me.
But the web can also mislead. Many websites (like my own) are written by enthusiastic amateur historians – even Wikipedia. This is a great and wonderful thing, unless you’re relying on them for absolute accuracy. They will sometimes be wrong. So will the professionals, even in books. I read about four different locations for the church in Mdina where the uprising took place, for example, some not even in Mdina at all. I couldn’t be sure until I stood outside it.
3. Tracking
I keep a spreadsheet of real life action tracked alongside fictional action, which includes things like seasonal changes (which wind will be prevailing, for example) and actual events. Sometimes I needed to track the action and characters hour by hour – other times it’s week by week. This is particularly important in books two and three where the characters get more caught up in real life events on Malta, as well as lots of fictional events.
I didn’t keep proper records of where I’d found certain items of information (I got bored with keeping card files, which is what I usually do) and as a result drove myself completely mad looking up things all over again.
4. Stand there
I didn’t feel that everything was right until I could stand in the limestone dust of Malta and feel the sun on the back of my neck and stare at the sea and just – know.
From now on I am always going to base my books somewhere fabulous so I have to go visit. Often.
5. Check everything again
Redrafting can be as much about checking and refining information as it is about language and character. You end up taking out a lot of those historical details that seemed so critical at the beginning, and I spent a lot of time working on how to convey information without it feeling like a history lesson. Looking back, I think I got better at it by halfway through book two.
Even though the narrator, Lily’s, voice is really rather modern, I tried to check the etymology of every phrase and significant word to avoid glaring anachronism. I double and triple-checked maps, dates, language, clothing, food, ship details – everything. I hope. No doubt there’s something stupid stuck in there somewhere.
6. Editing
This is how editing works. The manuscript is edited, then I check it, then it is finalised by the in-house editor, and then typeset (beautifully) and I check the pages again, then they are proof-read, then the editor looks through them one last time.
In the early stages, I can still fix things that I’ve realised aren’t quite right, say if I’ve woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because I’m unable to remember which arm Nelson lost. Editors can ask clever questions like “Why is the candle burning when it’s broad daylight?” (Answer: Because the author is an idiot).
I’m a (magazine) editor by trade, so I do this stuff for a living and my work ought to be flawless – and there’s still a bloody typo on page 89. No, don’t look.

Sandra Gulland, who wrote a successful trilogy on Josephine B, has a great website, and she records some of her less reliable research methods, all of which I also did:

I spent too much money on books;
I collected tacky memorabilia;
I travelled long distances to go to museum shows;
I grew teary-eyed on the cobblestones of Paris…