Tools for Writing

Many people, when they talk about wanting to learn creative writing, basically want the magic pill.  They don't believe it when you say that there is no such thing. They will think you are trying to keep it for yourself. If there was e a magic pill for writing, some of us will get quite seriously rich.

Roy Peter Clark's blog, PoynterOnline, offers toolbox, maybe the next best thing to a magic pill, with plenty of discussions on  provides tools for your writing reporting, writing & editing. He also has a book, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Not quite 5 easy solutions to writing but 50. In case, you hate reading, there are podcasts too.

Fifty Writing Tools is divided into four part: Nuts and Bolts, Special Effects, Blueprints and Useful Habits. The first advice is: Begin sentences with subjects and verbs -- Make meaning early, then let weaker elements branch to the right. Interestingly, isn't that what we were taught in primary school, but soon forgot in our 'hurry' to become clever?

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." George Orwell -- 1984. What an incredible opening sentence! With no phoenixes or dragons, no dark and stormy nights, it was straight to the point, shocking to the core, yet simple. But contrary to the advice above, he did not simply let the weaker elements drift to the right. He positioned his sledgehammer there. (Of course, no one knows how many times he rewrote that. Our own Salleh ben Joned, laboured for three months over just one word! But that is another story.)

Many of these would be classified under commonsense, but one would equally disagree with others. Here are ten -- naturally, many of there rules are to be broken, but not for beginners (but if you think you are a genius without ever having written a book, then good luck to you):

. Activate you verbs -- Strong verbs create action, save words, and reveal the players.
. Be passive-aggressive -- Use passive verbs to showcase the "victim" of action.
. Order words for emphasis -- Place strong words at the beginning and at the end, and so on.
. Set the pace with sentence length -- Vary sentences to influence the reader's speed.
. Tune your voice -- Read drafts aloud.
. Learn the difference between reports and stories -- Use one to render information, the other to render experience.
. Use dialogue as a form of action -- Dialogue advances narrative; quotes delay it.
. Write from different cinematic angles -- Turn your notebook into a "camera."
. Prefer archetypes to stereotypes -- Use subtle symbols, not crashing cymbals.
. Recruit your own support group -- Create a corps of helpers for feedback.

Unfortunately, I feel he has left out the most important advice of all: Read, read, read and read some more. (Or does that come under the writing workbench rule?).

Poynter

What it feels like to be a boy

Alison Flood writes in The Guardian of how the judges for the Carnegie medal, Britain's oldest children's book award, have drawn up a shortlist consitingo of entirely 'boysy' stories. She says: "Magic and monsters are conspicuous by their absence this year from the shortlist for Britain's oldest children's book prize, the Carnegie medal, which is dominated by titles featuring ordinary children dealing with the pitfalls and adventures of everyday life." (The Carnegie is in its 72nd year and is seen as the most 'the kids' Booker.)

Getting boys to read for pleasure has, of course, been the subject of much literary angst. Girls have always appeared to gravitate more naturally than boys towards books or anything literary. I am currently one of the judges for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Young Malaysians for 2009. I was sent the final shortlist of twenty essays/short stories to grade, out of which, interestingly, 16 were by girls. But as a bookseller I, notice that I have as many customers who are women as men, although their buying habits are different.

Keith Gray, one of the authors on the list says: "People have said it's quite boysy -- I say hurrah for that. There seem to be quite a lot of books out there for girls, about what it feels like to be a girl in modern times, whether it's Jacqueline Wilson or pinker, fluffier books. Whereas a lot of books aimed at boys are about being a spy, fighting monsters, being a vampire. It's great to have some which are about what it feels like to just be a boy ... So many books for boys are about being X Box-style heroes -- it's so nice to have more down to earth heroes."

But is the problem all about books not appealing to boys? I know why I started reading -- the pictures. Then when I was in primary school, I had the most wonderful history teacher a boy could have. Mr Selvaratnam was his name, and the twelve-inch ruler was his game. And with his ruler he could transform from a sword-wielding pirate to a Portuguese commandant with a blunderbuss or a Japanese soldier with a bayonet. He would prance about in front of the class swishing and shooting and stabbing with his ruler, setting free our imagination. So I was more than a bit surprise when, during my Form 4 years, some of my classmates decided to 'drop' History and Literature. How could anyone not like history and literature, I thought?

Going back to the Carnagie, Gray describes himself as a reluctant reader as a child. He says the first book he was persuaded to pick up was the Carnegie-winning The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall. "I can remember seeing the Carnegie medal stamped on the front cover. Just having my name on the shortlist is great," he says. "The Machine Gunners got me reading, and that's what got me writing, so you could say the Carnegie turned me into a reader and a writer."

My son grew up in the eighties, amply distracted by the television and video games. (Internet was not available then). Interestingly, what started him reading were the movies. I remember queuing for the tickets for Jurassic Park because he was into the dinosaur phase too at the time. I had never read Michael Crichton before, but I decided to get a copy of the book just for the heck of it. He saw it lying around the house and asked if he could read it. He never looked back after that. So boys do read for different reasons, but I suspect having books around the house does not hurt.

One frequently asked question we get at Silverfish Books is from parents who want to know how they can get their children, especially boys, to read? We generally manage to huff and puff round that question. But what we really really want to say is: "So what books do you read?"

Turning boys into bookworms

A story in The Independent by Warwick Mansell, Power of words: How a children's writer is turning boys into bookworms, tells how writer GP Taylor is making pupils read by telling them stories, with some remarkable results.

Which comes as a bit of surprise. It should be expected, one would have thought. Common sense. But when bureaucratic educationists get into the act, I should think they'd be able to committee anything to death, including common sense. I started reading because it was fun, because I could go places I never could in real life. My memory of childhood is all about story-telling by my parents, my uncles, aunts and older cousins.

Graham Taylor is an ex-vicar, ex-policeman, and exorcist turned multi-million selling author of fantasy novels who has visited more than 150 primary schools this year to tell children stories, for which he does not charge. His object is to get students, especially boys, reading for pleasure.

The British Government's national literacy strategy has been accused of focusing on teaching reading mainly through extracts of books, and drilling pupils to pass tests. " ... the literacy strategy, introduced in 1998, which emphasized the teaching of reading and writing as the acquisition of discrete skills -- such as word decoding, analysing sentence structure, spelling and grammar -- without actually getting pupils wanting to read in the first place."

Professor Teresa Cremin, president of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, says: "Children were shown a text and asked to find the adverbial clause, or asked what complex sentences they could find in a paragraph. This approach can get a bit farcical."

You bet. Who cares what part of speech a word is, or how a sentence is structured. What's important are the stories they tell and the joy a child gets when he reads them. Reading is entertainment, but if there is one thing the school system does well it to take all the joy out of it, and make it  a chore.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, says: "There was an overemphasis on skills and an underemphasis on the reason why you would read. Reading for pleasure suffered."

Professor Cremin agrees: "The pressure to achieve the level fours and level fives in tests is so great that teachers have felt that there is not the time to engage in reading for pleasure".

Which is kind of funny because children who read for pleasure will surely do better in tests, as results show at St Peter's Church of England primary school in Ashton-under-Lyne, outside Manchester. Last year 83 per cent of pupils gained their expected level, well ahead of the school's 43 per cent target.

The Independent

A new publishing model?

Shelf-Awareness.com touts it as a publishing model for the 21st Century. "The [publishing] industry seems to want a return on investment, quickly and guaranteed," Stephen Roxburgh says. "The difficulty is that the people at the end of that chain, paradoxically enough, are artists and authors who need time to develop a project."
 
Roxburgh is the pioneer of namelos (nameless), a "consortium of independent publishing professionals." Kara LaReau has launched Bluebird Works, which offers creative services that include editing and manuscript evaluation. Both companies strive to help creators of children's books develop projects at their own pace and until they're ready to be submitted to an agent or editor. Agents or editors (instead of authors) may hire these companies for their projects.

So what's new about this publishing mode? This used to be the traditional role of publishing houses before big business took over. Silverfish books has been doing this for over two years now. The Silverfish New Writing series was going nowhere. It was started as a platform for discovering new Malaysian writing talent, but after seven years and no sign of any sustained talent emerging (except for Mathew Thomas) we decided to stop.

We have argued before that in Malaysia we cannot expect authors to come out with their own manuscripts without some assistance -- both editorial and creative -- particularly considering that English is often the second or third language. So we started the Silverfish Writing Programme. The focus is on story telling, and writing what publishers look for. We have currently published four writers and working with one more. It is a slow process and the current crop still have some way to go, but four writers in two years is still way better than one in seven. We continue to dream of a time in the future (not so far away we hope) when a couple of dozen Malaysian writers start producing good quality books on a regular basis, creating a supply and a demand, and perhaps even attracting a glance from publishers overseas. (We have been approached for local manuscripts by more than one international literary agent.)

We hosted a literary event last week with readings from Dua Lauk and Perempuan Simpanan. About 50 people turned up for the reading despite the rain. They appeared a little intimidated in the beginning (our reputation has probably travelled far), but they soon settled down. They were well organised, they had an enthusiastic leader who preferred to remain in the background, they were all very supportive of one another, and there was not one pretentious arty-farty literatti 'air head' in sight. Of course, they still have a long way to go, literary wise. But, I do wish them well and I sincerely hope they succeed for we do need a strong Malay literary scene. Syabas to this wonderful group. And, thank you Irman for introducing them to us and bringing them to Silverfish Books. They are welcome anytime at all. Drinks and bites on us. (A slide show has been posted for those who could not make it.)

The Shelf-Awareness article continues, saying: 'Their companies' model shifts the financial responsibility to the authors up front rather than the traditional model under which, after paying an advance, the publisher works with them to develop the project. "That will happen with increasingly fewer people," said Roxburgh. "The industry's capacity to serve and cultivate and develop the talent is much diminished in the face of the contraction and consolidation it confronts now. The model [namelos is] proposing is to acknowledge the hard truth, but I think it also happens to reflect the evolution of the industry."'
 
In the case of Silverfish Books, we currently do not charge authors anything to work with them, although many are willing to pay. (But, we do have a nominal charge for the Silverfish Writing Programme.) All we ask is they be willing to work hard. We look at their sample work, talk to them and then decide if there is a book.

Karen LaReau, hopes to have two books out in 2011. (It is a slow process.) She is not sure where the industry is going, but she says: "People are always going to want good stories ... all I can do, is to continue to provide that."

Shelf-Awareness