Mary Kelaher tells a gritty story about life in the cast of a family's shadow.


Mary Kelaher

You're over the first hurdle as a writer and you're finally writing consistently. Now what?

Join me as I trawl my way through all the writing tips, promotion tips and publishing tips to try and find the diamonds in the bedrock.

Girl in a field of grass

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Focusing the mind

A solid deadline has a way of focusing my mind. So I have created one.

I have signed up to a weeklong Freefall workshop at the end of October. To tighten the screws a little more I have registered for the one in Perth which is three and a half thousand kilometers away. Then for some extra tension, I have decided to drive there and to hang out around Margaret River for a couple of weeks before the course. All while I continue to write. And check in here to tell you about my progress.

There that should do it.

To get the most out of this workshop I need to have identified the gaps in my story and the parts I need to flesh out some more.

To do this I must have my action/reaction sheets, my storyboard cards finished, all my hand written notes summarized and character profiles fleshed out with the information I currently have about before I go in three weeks. Otherwise I will be wasting my time and money.

Nothing like a bit of pressure.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

The essence of a character

I've just started filling in the Character Profile sheet for Nancy and its killing my character. This sheet is pretty detailed, but it doesn’t bring out the essence of who she is or what she has become.

Its just a fact sheet. And facts in a story are pretty boring. Also, the age of my main character changes throughout the story. She is introduced at six and we say goodbye to her at sixty. So to describe the "Current Family and Relationships", well that’s what the books is about.

Her current family and relationships between the ages six to fifteen, fifteen to twenty one, twenty-one to twenty-eight and finally at sixty change.

As I'm reading through my notes, I feel there are details about Nancy that would better tell who she is at a particualar age than her overriding familial and social relationships and where she lives.

Although I can see the value in knowing this. It is sucking the life out of what I already know about my character by pulling it out of nowhere, or making up right know to get the task done rather than wait until it folds inself into the story through my research and writing tasks as what has happenend thus far with the information I currently have.

An example.

By twenty-five my main character, Nancy, is so bitter that to be around her is like being bathed in acid. Her bitterness has seeped into every nook and cranny of her body and every aspect of her personality. She is so caustic that even when she is alone, the muscles in her face pull at her mouth so tightly it leaves the uncensored look on her face just a twitch away from a sneer.

I feel as though I have a lot of information about my characters in my story that better shows their distinctive personalities and, thus, bring them life on the page. But this information does not translate neatly into the character outlines I have found around the place.

Solution.

Create new character sheets that capture the essence of who they are rather the facts and dry details about there life.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Story bits

When I started sorting through all of my notebooks looking for the bits that would fit into the action / reaction sections for the first chapter I got a bit of a shock. There is so much material.

I'm not sure which would be the quicker way to sort it all out. To type it all up and file it into directories labeled Beginning, middle, end, to finish all the action/reaction sections and then go through and map the content I have to each one. Or to keep reading to find the bits I need to for the first chapter.

The problem with typing it all out is that I tend to edit it along the way and this is time consuming. A lot of the notes are bits of character development, bits of showing, bits of telling what the story is doing and bits of nothing really worthwhile. So I start fixing it up as I go; moulding into a story and it takes ages.

I see draft 0.1 as the general gist of the story. Almost an outline of an outline. So I don't want to spend a lot of time getting bogged down in the perfecting the writing. Particularly the descriptions. Which is what is happening.

I just want see the logic of the story, how it hangs together and how the characters, settings and plot fit together. I am hoping from this that the characters will start to become more distinctive. At the moment, I only have a ghost image of most of them. Nancy, Charlie and Freida are the only ones that having have a bit more substance.

Ok. What to do.

I think I might fill out the action/reaction cards from my notes, but not number them. Just describe the basic conflict/emotion of each action and which plot theme it supports. From there I will fill out the action/reaction sheets with the essential information out of my notes and the character profiles where appropriate.

I'll give that a try and see how it goes.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Bits and pieces

Yesterday, I started sorting through all of my notes for the bits and pieces of the story that would fit into the scenes outlined in the action / reaction section cards for the sub them abandonment. To my surprise, it now looks as though I have enough content to start writing my synopsis and the beginnings of what looks like a chapter.

Using this journal to create some type of accountability and to record my thoughts throughout the novel writing process is working really well for me. It has really sharpened my focus and has helped seeing what is working and what isn't a lot easier.

Writing this novel is starting to get really exciting. Over the last few days, I put together the synopsis and manuscript templates, and created the title page based on the standard outlined in Even Marshall’s book.

All of a sudden my novel feels real. I haven’t felt so much positive energy around anything I’ve been working on for so long it’s a bit ridiculous. And sad.

It doesn’t feel as if I’m on a treadmill of just producing page after page of text that is supposed to all magically fit together as a story anymore. It now feels like I’m crafting a story. It is like I am both recording what comes up about the topic during my writing tasks and creating how the story hangs together or how the story will be told with the action/reaction sheets.

I love this job.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Words and structure

When I sat down to do my hour of freefall yesterday, I found I had run into an problem. I wasn't sure what I needed to write about to add to the story.

I was rummaging through my memory trying to think of where I could add more content when I realized that I really needed to do was to put some structure around the story I have already.

It is time to plot the current story using the action and reaction cards, so I can see how what I have already fits together.

So, for the next couple of days I'll be dropping the freefall and focus on plotting instead.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Promotion shomotion

Promote your novel I read. Get out there and set up your web site and start a blog. Get readers interested and involved so you can tell an agent or publisher that you have an audience when you send out your query letter.

It all sounded so innocent. Something quick and easy that I could put in place and then get back to the real task of writing my novel. Alas, it looks as though I have fallen into the sticky maze of threads that is the World Wide Web.

After knocking up a quick web site (Mary Kelaher) and starting this blog, my attention turned to getting my blog read. It is this task that has left me scouring the horizon for the path out of the maze and back to my novel writing.

My attention turned to getting my blog under the nose of potential readers so I registered my site on my first blog directory, which led me to another and another...

Two weekends later and I’m still finding them. And registering. Of course.

Add this to trying to understand pinging, RSS feeds, trackbacking, tagging and all those other essential tools I need to hook into in the name of getting my name and novel noticed by readers, agents and publishers, day after day is being whittled away by staring into my monitor in a vain attempt to rescue my attention from the spider web and guide it back to the task of writing my novel.

Hmmm, promoting my novel is starting to sound like a seriously time consuming aspect of the novel writer’s job. That’s probably because it is.