Why stories shouldn’t have necks

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Baby Duck has discovered a sudden passion for drawing. Looking at one of the many masterpieces littering the house today it struck me that children’s drawings are a lot like good writing.


This is me. Clearly I need to lose weight.

Apart from that lowering thought, it’s fascinating to see what my little artist has put in his drawing and what he hasn’t. You can see I have five fingers on each hand, since the little monkey has realised what important tools these are, whereas I have no toes. There’s no detail on the body as that’s just the big lump in the middle that all the interesting bits hang off. I have short hair, which is an accurate observation. My face is the most detailed part of the drawing because of its importance. It shows ears (with holes for hearing), eyes with irises and pupils (even at five he senses that the eyes are the key to the whole person) and a big happy smile.

What he doesn’t show is a nose. After all, noses just sit there and breathe which, while essential, is kind of boring. I also have no neck – another dull piece of anatomy that merely connects two more interesting pieces.

In their early drawings, kids only put in the features that have meaning for them. All the good bits. Writing should be like this too. As I revise my novel I’ve been hitting the delete key a lot, nuking all those passages where characters are travelling from one place to another, or making breakfast, or exchanging pleasantries.

Holly Lisle put it well in her One-Pass Revision article (which is one of many useful free writing resources on her site). Writers should “give the impression of reality” without all of the boring detail. “All the sex and violence, passion and struggle. None of the teeth-brushing.”

Down with teeth-brushing, I say. My five-year-old has it right. My story doesn’t need any necks. It can jump straight from the body to the face if it wants to, because that’s where all the good stuff is happening.

Slippery little suckers

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Words can be such slippery little suckers. Tonight at dinner we were talking about the game MindTrap, which is an old favourite of ours. You play by answering questions using logic and deductive reasoning. I love the “lateral thinking” type ones, where you can ask questions to work out the answer to the puzzle. (You know, like the classic “Joe and Fred are lying dead on the floor, which is covered in broken glass and water. How did they die?” The answer: Joe and Fred are goldfish and their bowl has been smashed.) My beloved, not surprisingly for an accountant, likes the maths-based ones, most of which make my brain hurt.

The ducklings were curious so we got it out and read them some questions. One was:

“There are six ears of corn in a hollow tree. If a squirrel can take out three ears per day, how many days will it take to remove all the corn?”

Easy, huh?

Did you say “two days”? Yeah, me too. I knew there had to be a catch, but I never saw it coming. The correct answer is “six days”. The squirrel can only carry out “three ears” per day – but he already has two ears stuck on his head.

Slippery, all right.

Hack and slash

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I’ve finally done it! After a medal-worthy marathon of procrastination, I finally sat down last night and started editing my novel. And it was fun. Take that, hideous opening sentence! In fact, goodbye whole boring first two pages. The first scene, which wasn’t particularly long, lost 1,000 words in a frenzy of hack and slash. Could be a problem if I keep that up, since I need to add about 20,000 words to the total length. I could end up with a short story instead of a novel.

Still, I’m pleased that I’m moving again. I finished the first draft two months ago and have been stalling ever since. My new goal is to finish the book before November rolls around and I start NaNoWriMo and do it all again. In fact, I’d better finish a couple of weeks before, to give me time to think about my NaNo project …

Guess I’d better go do some revising.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall …

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Everyone’s image of themselves is just a little different to the reality. Mine’s a little thinner, a lot less grey. Baby Duck, however, has self-delusion honed to an artform. Yesterday someone asked him what colour he would make his hair in his self-portrait.

“Like yours,” he said to the nice blonde lady.

Vanity, thy name is Baby Duck. Wishing doesn’t make it so. Only a large amount of peroxide could help him there. His hair is light brown – quite an attractive heading-towards-dark-blonde shade, but still undeniably brown.

It reminded me of a classic exchange at the supermarket checkout last year. The woman behind us in the queue was chatting to Baby Duck.

“You look like your mummy, don’t you!” she says.

“No,” says Baby Duck, looking at her as if she’d suggested he had two heads.

“No? Who do you look like then? Your daddy?”

“Nobody. I look like me.”

“Oh. Well, I think you look like your mummy.”

(Mummy finds this type of talk very gratifying. Ha ha! I’ve left my genetic mark on this poor unfortunate child.)

“No, I don’t,” he insists. He prepares to bring out supporting evidence, and I imagine it will be along the lines of “she’s a grown-up and I’m a kid” or “I’m a boy and she’s a girl”, but what he says is: “She’s got brown hair.”

“And what colour is your hair?” asks the lady, because, well, it’s brown too. Lighter than mine, but brown all the same.

“It’s gold,” he says firmly, “and all sparkly.”

Evil brain sloths

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“Where do you get your ideas from?” is a question that published authors get asked a lot. I only hope someday people will be asking me. Karen Miller thinks the question should be “where don’t you get ideas?”. Glenda Larke agrees, and thinks that if you have to ask the question, you don’t understand how writers’ minds work. Justine Larbalestier gets hers from evil brain monkeys. The common theme is that getting the ideas isn’t the problem – it’s the actual turning them into stories that’s hard.

I had an interesting encounter with my brain monkeys this week. They’ve always given me plenty of ideas, but only little bits and pieces. Once they’ve given me the first glimmering of a story they just roll over and go back to sleep, leaving me to figure out all the rest of it alone. I think I actually have brain sloths. Perhaps the monkeys were all gone by the time I got to the head of the queue.

Only this week I tried something different at Holly Lisle’s suggestion (I’m doing her How to Think Sideways writing course). Instead of leaping all over an idea the minute the poor thing poked its head up out of the subconscious and trying to force it into a story, I waited. Boy, that was hard. But it was worth it, because when that idea saw that the coast was clear it called all its mates out to join it and bang! the whole story fell into my head. Obviously I still have to write it, and no matter how complete the idea is, the writing is still where the hard work comes in. But it’s going to be really interesting to start writing a story without that sinking “I wonder what the hell comes next” feeling.

So now I’m thinking I may have maligned my brain sloths. Maybe they’re not a bunch of lazy no-good slackers after all. Maybe they’re just shy and I was scaring them away. Come out and play, little brain sloths! All is forgiven.

So. Where do you get your ideas from?

Calling his bluff

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Demon Duck is only seven, but sometimes she seems much older. The other day her daddy was teasing her by suggesting that he should come to her netball break-up party.

“You can’t,” she says. “It’s only for the girls.”

“I could wear a skirt.”

She eyes him consideringly. “Yeah, that would be worth it.”

And where did she get that evil sense of humour? He only has himself to blame.

The Life of Mammals

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“If we’re very quiet we can observe a family grouping here. The mother is in the middle, with her three offspring piled around and on top of her for warmth. We see them in a typical bonding ritual, their attention fixed firmly on the TV.”

Thanks, Sir David, I’ll take it from here.

As a special treat the ducklings get to stay up to watch David Attenborough’s The Life of Mammals on Monday nights. I get almost as much fun out of watching them as I do from the show. They’re such different personalities.

Baby Duck: He’s not as interested in the show as the girls, but won’t miss a chance to stay up. Comments on odd things. Tonight, for example, an ad came on for the Good Guys (a local electrical appliance retailer). The ad is a deliberately corny song-and-dance extravaganza to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations.

“They’re not really good guys, are they, Mum?” says Baby Duck.

“Why not?”

“That man was throwing a TV. That’s naughty. And they climbed up on top of that bench. They shouldn’t do that, should they?”

Drama Duck: Keeps up a running commentary throughout the show. “Don’t chase me, don’t kill me,” as antelope flees lion “ouch, that’s my stomach, ooh, get off, bad lion, don’t bite me, oh that hurts” etc. One of her nicknames is “Little Miss Talk Underwater”.

Demon Duck: This one has a wicked sense of humour. After the umpteenth time of me shushing Drama Duck, she says matter-of-factly, “shall I get the stickytape, Mum?”

Driving me crazy

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School’s gone back so Baby Duck has me to himself again. He’s enjoying the chance to get a word in without the girls interrupting him. He particularly likes to chat when we’re in the car — no TV to watch, I suppose – so every car trip becomes an exhausting ordeal-by-question. I tell you, the Spanish Inquisition would be proud.

Generally I’m very patient but when the 200th question in a 5 km trip is something like “do dinosaurs fight better than robots?” I’ve been known to get a little tetchy. There’s no point saying “I don’t know” (believe me, I’ve tried) because it only leads to insane five-year-old speculation being interspersed with the shot-gun spray of questions. Resorting to logic and pointing out that dinosaurs and robots never co-existed only elicits the dreaded “but why?”

Then there’s the times he decides to play guessing games:

“Look, Mummy, I made a shadow with my hands.”

“I can’t look, darling, I have to watch where I’m going.”

“Guess what it is,” he says, undeterred by this minor technical hitch. “It’s something that lives in the sea.”

Well, that narrows it down since he only knows about three things that live in the sea. “Octopus” seems the most likely thing to be formed by little hands, so I try that but I’m wrong.

“No, it’s something that lives very deep down,” he says, so I try whale. No. Shark? No. By now I’m out of options so I give up.

“It’s a five-legged octopus,” he says. Should have seen that one coming.

He obviously feels sorry for his mentally deficient mother because for the next one he tells me he will give me a clue.

“It’s something from Ice Age 2 and it lives in the sea and it’s not the two monsters.”

I get that one right since there’s only one other thing in the movie that fits that description.

“Good, Mum,” he says approvingly, then throws another hard one at me.

“This one is a plant that lives in the sea.”

“Seaweed?” I try, fairly confident this time. I mean, how many plants are there that live in the sea? But I’m wrong again.

“I’ll give you a clue,” he says. “It’s got a mouth.”

Okay, maybe he thinks sea anemones are plants. He’s only little after all. So I try that.

“No, it’s got teeth. And it eats sharks.”

What?! “I don’t know any plants that live in the sea and eat sharks,” I say. “You’ll have to tell me.”

Clearly he doesn’t know any either, and there is a short silence in the back seat while he tries to come up with something. At last, triumphant, he announces:

“It’s a shark-eating plant!”

“Once upon a time …”

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I’ve just finished the first draft of my novel and am feeling very pleased with myself. There are several reasons for this, other than the obvious one that I won the race with Drama Duck after all (take that, nine-year-old!).

One is having proved that I can actually finish a whole novel. I am a notorious starter but a very bad finisher, in all aspects of life. Even my children are aware of this and roll their eyes whenever I start a new quilt, suggesting that I should instead finish one of the gazillions of UFOs (UnFinished Objects) in the quilting cupboard.

A less obvious reason is that now I can finally allow myself to start revising that sucker. The only way I could finish was to start at the beginning, not do any editing and just keep writing till I got to the end. In the past I’ve always been lured down the editing cul de sac, never to return to the story highway.

Pleased as I am with the result, one consequence of this new way of working was that every time I called up my file I had to stare at the first page of the novel. At first this was a bright shiny experience. Look at that beautiful beginning! See how cleverly it hooks the interest! But after a while the effects of first love wore off and I began to notice (gasp!) that there were flaws in the previously beloved opening. That first sentence that I’d thought was so cute was in fact in a different point of view to the rest of the scene. And then came the dreadful day when I realised that a lot of what came after it was, well, a bit boring. Back story. Told instead of shown. How could I ever have thought this crap was any good? The romance was over! But I wasn’t allowed to fix it till the first draft was finished – that was the deal.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings. What makes a good one? “Once upon a time” works pretty well for fairy tale writers, but the rest of us have to make more of an effort. There’s lots of good advice out there: start with a hook, jump straight into the action, pose a question that the reader wants answered (Tabitha Olson has a good post about this). Simon Haynes has been pondering beginnings recently too, wondering whether to stick with the slow-burning fuse start his books usually have or jump straight into the bomb blast.

Beginnings that I love include this one from Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie:

“Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.”

This tells you so much without being an infodump. It gives you a lot of facts about the story plus a feel for the personality and background of the main character, all in such an amusing way that you can’t help wanting to read more. Why is Sophie in Temptation, a place she clearly doesn’t want to be? What other disasters are in store?

One that made me laugh out loud was Montana Sky by Nora Roberts:

“Being dead didn’t make Jack Mercy less of a son of a bitch. One week of dead didn’t offset sixty-eight years of living mean.”

What a great opener! The voice is so down-to-earth, so full of personality, I couldn’t wait to read more. So why are all these people at his funeral if he was such a bastard? You have to keep reading to find out. And that’s why it works. No bombs, just a dead guy in a box, but I’m hooked.

So now I have to find my story’s equivalent to dead guy in a box. Doesn’t have to be funny, though funny is good; just memorable. Gotta give those readers a reason to keep turning the pages. Assuming that there ever are any readers, of course. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

Would you like cliches with that?

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I was reading the monthly newsletter from my favourite bookshop, Infinitas, today. It lists all the new books out and reproduces the blurb for each to whet your book-buying appetite.

When you read a whole lot of blurbs in one sitting like that it’s like getting a big shiny needle to vaccinate you against the dreaded cliche disease. After a while you just don’t notice them any more. Everything is “epic”, all the evil villains are “hell-bent on destroying everything that [insert name of protagonist] holds dear”, etc, etc. It all starts to sound the same after a while.

So there I was, scrolling half brain-dead through a tide of “mismatched bands of saviours” and heroes who had to save the world “but could he save himself?” when one sentence leapt out at me.

“Hidden hands pluck the strings of tyranny like a fell chorus.”

I boggled at that one for a moment while I tried to picture hands, hidden or otherwise, singing like a chorus. Where are their mouths? Exactly how many hands are we talking here? More than a pair, clearly. Where does one find all these disembodied singing hands? And they can pluck too, not just sing. Such multi-talented little hands.

I stopped skimming then and went back to look at the rest of this blurb more carefully. There were “dire portents” plaguing people’s nights and assassins skulking. “The hunters have become the hunted.” (But what are they hunting? Talent scouting for performing hands perhaps?) Then there were strangers arriving, bards singing “their tragic tales” and “somewhere in the distance … the baying of hounds”.

But wait, there’s more! “All is palpably not well.” No – really? What gave it away?

By this time I was feeling very sorry for the author. I know nothing about him, but I’m assuming he can write better than this. Most likely the marketing department came up with this deathless prose, and now the poor guy has to cringe every time he sees his own book. Apparently there are also “ancient crimes … clamouring for revenge”. I think I’d be clamouring for revenge myself if I were him, for crimes against the book-buying public.

The blurb concludes with the assurance that “this is epic fantasy at its most imaginative”. Quite possibly. Pity you can’t tell that from reading the blurb. Though that bit about the hands takes a special kind of imagination, I guess.

It makes me wonder about blurbs, though. Yes, they often draw on archetypes or tropes as a way of packing a lot of information into a short hook. But how much is too much? How many cliches can you pile on before it becomes unintentional parody? If I read that on the back of a book I was browsing, it would be back on the shelf as fast as my non-singing little hand could manage. Hardly the desired effect. Am I expecting too much?