What’s The Buzz?

Posted on January 31, 2011 by waxings

In the spirit of providing an encouraging and useful site for writers, Waxings is branching out into literary journalism.

We do not pretend to have the resources to be a comprehensive news service, but Waxings will make the occasional foray into writers festivals, author interviews and any other areas we deem interesting to those with a fondness for words.

Waxings’ focus will be on the needs and interests of our subscribers so our articles will not reflect standard news style. We’re just friends passing on useful tidbits about writing as we come across them.

Our first such undertaking will be coverage of the Perth Writers Festival (see below). If you are attending a writers festival in your part of the world and are willing to send us a few words about what’s happening, or if you come across any useful advice or intelligence in any forum, please contact us at waxings.blog@gmail.com , we’d love to hear from you.

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Perth’s Festival of Words

The 2011 Perth Writers Festival program was officially launched this week and it looks awesome.

The festival will run from March 4 to 7. Offerings include face time with international drawcards such as Annie Proulx (The Shipping News), Armistead Maupin  (Tales of the City), Anjali Joseph (Saraswati Park), Raimond Gaita (Romulus, My Father and Gaza), Man Asian Literary Prize winner Miguel Syjuco (Illustrado) , Man Booker nominees Damon Galgut (In a Strange Room) and Andrew O’Hagan (Our Fathers, Personality)Joanne Harris (chocolat), British poet and novelist Simon Armitage (Kid, Book of Matches, The Dead Sea Poems) and Jeff Lindsay (Dexter).

The importance of words to democracy will be examined in sessions with Chinese author Yan Lianke, British writer and film-maker Tariq Ali (Clash of Fundamentalisms, Bush in Babylon, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Duel), former Supreme Court judge Ken Crispin, political writer John Keane, journalist and author Antony Loewenstein, and Raimond Gaita.

And the Australian ‘voice’ and landscape features in sessions with poet Les Murray, Margo Lanagan, Anthony Eaton, Will Elliott, Kim Scott, Ron Elliott, Roger McDonald, Victoria Laurie and Ian Lowe.  

The workshop series offers something for every writer – or everything for one, intellectually greedy, writer (ahem).  Session topics include: ‘show not tell’, building fantasy worlds, working through writing obstacles, screenwriting, crime writing, ‘getting out of your own way’, writing for children, memoir writing, Jane Austen’s techniques, creating villains, writing your own life story and researching in the State Library. 

For those interested in getting published, Melanie Ostell from UWA Publishing will provide marketplace insights, submission tips and individualised feedback on manuscripts. A separate day-long seminar tackles ‘The A-Z of Getting Published’, with input from Random House Publisher Meredith Curnow, Text publishing senior editor Mandy Brett, UWA Publishing director Terri-ann White and agent Lyn Tranter.

There’s a Family Day, a Feast of Words and much more. Waxings will try to bring you as much news and writing advice as we can from the festival. We can’t wait!

*Congratulations to Jacqueline Wright, winner of the 2010 T.A.G. Hungerford Award for her manuscript, The Telling. The award was announced at the PWF launch and followed by an evocative reading from The Telling which revealed clear, powerful writing and a voice that is authentic to Australia’s north-west. Jacqueline receives a $12,000 cash prize from writingWA and New Edition bookshop and her manuscript will be published by Fremantle Press.

 

 

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More for ‘Isabella’ Fans

Posted on January 21, 2011 by waxings

In response to popular demand, the prolific Mark Cunningham has graciously provided Waxings with Part Four of his gripping vampire series, Isabella.

If you haven’t yet sampled Isabella’s Intro  or Parts Two and Three, I recommend you cast your eyes in their direction. In Part Four, find out what Cardinal Donal learns when he arrives in the United States…then join me in harassing the author for more, more, more! 

Another excellent recent posting is the first chapter of Jessica McHugh’s novel, Rabbits in the Garden, which has just been accepted for publication. Congratulations Jessica!

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Sometimes Two Heads Are Better

Posted on January 16, 2011 by waxings

Writing with someone else always struck me as an odd thing to do. Like sharing a boiled sweet – not quite as delicious once someone else has had a suck.

Turns out I was wrong. Again.

Right now I am collaborating with another writer on a story that started out as a fun little exercise and has since turned into a full-blown project. We’ve been writing for months, tens of thousands of words. Creating characters and plot-lines and letting each other play with them like so many dolls on a toy-room floor.

I thought I might be possessive of the characters I created, resent someone else putting words in their mouths and directing their actions, shaping their destinies. But, as William Faulkner said of his own characters, ‘once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does’.

My characters frequently take off on their own frolics with scarcely a thought for my rough-hewn expectations, leaving me shaking my head at the choices they make. So why not let someone else share chronicling duties?

This joint exercise has been a revelation. My characters have taken to my writing partner with disturbing alacrity, revealing startling eloquence, depth and daring in his presence. His characters in turn have drawn me into their souls, both disturbing and delighting me with their language and antics.

We haven’t shared our thoughts on plot development and have only recently touched on character beyond what emerges from our alternating instalments. Yet each thread sits comfortably with the next and our characters mingle freely and with purpose.

Most surprising for me is that we have settled into a clear joint ‘voice’ – surprising because of the sharp contrast between our writing styles as individuals. Perhaps it’s due to my writing partner’s experience with collaboration and his skill with varied ‘voices’. Or maybe we’ve lucked into a genre and characters that draw from our sliver of stylistic commonality. Whatever it is, I’m astounded and delighted with what we’ve conjured and I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

What’s your experience of collaborative writing?

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First Winner, 500-Word Challenge

Posted on January 12, 2011 by waxings

Congratulations to Robin Rhyner – the first winner of the Waxings 500-word challenge with the superbly written and heart-wrenching ‘Not Christmas Lights’.

Robin, a copy of The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia and RS Gwynn, will soon be winging its way towards you.

Respectful tips of the hat to each of the other entrants for submitting such varied and evocative works. You have set the bar high for this competition and I’m looking forward to reading more of your contributions. This is going to be good!

Warmest thanks to our first guest judge, Irene Wringe, who is a features editor of 20 years’ experience, has studied English literature and is a member of the Society of Editors. Irene was given only the titles and text of each entry, without author names, and agreed not to read the posted versions so was not aware of ‘likes’ or comments. See below for her thoughts on this round.

A reminder that the next challenge is now open. Write up to 500 words around the theme ‘night‘ and send them to waxings.blog@gmail.com by midnight, 4 February, 2011, Australian Western Standard Time (GMT+8).

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Judge’s comments:

In a collection of short pieces, reflecting different genres, that show admirable creativity, imagination, verve and skill, choosing a winner was not a simple process. It has been both enjoyable and very difficult. How to compare thoughtful reflection to an uplifting poem or vivid characters in a short story?

After much thought (and mild frustration at not being able to name multiple winners) Not Christmas Lights gets my vote.

This small fiction conjures its scene vividly, the language and style – short, bleak evocations of reality interspersed with longer, detailed sentences of hope and warmth. It shows confidence in its expression and skill in its pacing, and is well put together.

It uses the short form to effectively portray an image of dysfunctional family life with skill and in a manner that made me care about every character on the page. This is no mean feat in less than 500 words. None is wasted, from the first paragraph, which plunges the reader straight into the children’s world, to the heart-tugging end.

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Dare to Write Once

Posted on January 11, 2011 by waxings

To edit or not to edit. Or maybe to edit a little bit. These are the questions.

My great weakness as a writer – well, one of them – is that I can not abide the slings and arrows of outrageous typos. But, too often, in taking arms against them, I get carried away, start re-writing and destroy the original spark, the flow of the words.

It’s too easy to fiddle and tweak endlessly. Never quite finishing that piece because there are always last minute ‘improvements’ to be made. You can fool yourself that this extended editing is a reflection of high standards, of perfectionism. But we all know it’s another manifestation of writerly procrastination, another way to delay that gut-wrenching moment when you finally present your work to the world. To be read. To be judged.

I do this all the time. Then I read over the edited work and often find that I don’t like it as much as I did the original. It might read more easily but the construction might be a little too perfect. Like an artificially youthful face after cosmetic surgery, there’s nothing technically wrong with it, but the absence of character lines, the bumps and creases of a life lived well, can be bland, uninteresting and unnatural.

Like most ingrained habits, my tendency to over-edit has been difficult to stop. But I have been inspired by Dean Wesley Smith’s motto: ‘Dare to be bad.’ His approach: write your first draft hard and fast then fix it, if you must, the next time around. But try not to. He resists the ‘fix’ phase and posts out first drafts to publishers, making changes only when they are requested  by editors. He says ‘dare to be bad’ not only made him more productive, it ‘got me a career’.

So that’s going to be one of my few resolutions for the new year, I’m going to ‘dare to be bad’. And I dare you to too.

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Tip-Toeing Through Technology

Posted on January 8, 2011 by waxings

A good friend of mine can write in bed with a pencil and a notebook, channelling humour and originality via the old-school scratching of lead on paper. 

Another has written extraordinary prose on the tiny keyboard of a Blackberry, in the back of a taxi and standing on a train, while travelling overseas.

I can’t begin to describe how much I admire them both, not just for the grace and lyrical beauty of what they produce, but for their ability to write in circumstances and with tools that, to me, are deal-breakers.

I am a creative victim of the need for speed. 

As a young journalist I was required to write shorthand at 120 words a minute. I was capable of reasonable bursts up to 200 words a minute. My deadline-driven typing speed was not far behind. I became used to writing almost as fast as I could think, the words sometimes tapping themselves out on the screen before I was fully aware of them. 

This was all well and good for the job but there have been some drawbacks to these handy skills. For one thing, my handwriting, once neat and well formed, has evolved into a scrawling mess as my hand and arm muscles, conditioned to writing in symbols and at speed, struggle with the careful formation of elegant letters. 

What is worse is that my mind, used to slowing only slightly to accommodate shorthand or typing, now refuses to even attempt a new thought until the last one has been captured. 

This means no creative writing in pencil – one can not be lyrical in shorthand – nor on keyboards so tiny that one is restricted to operating them with just one or two fingers, or even, the mind boggles, a single thumb. 

Such crude instruments are fine for notes or short communications such as text messages. But, for creative purposes, I must have a full-sized keyboard capable of translating my high-speed pounding. Yes, pounding. I learned to type on an actual typewriter and my first years of journalism were spent bashing out stories on clunky computer keyboards that required a certain amount of force to ensure the letters selected were registered.

Thus handicapped by my reliance on specific and rapidly dating technology, I was a bit anxious about attempting to write on my new iPad recently.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it, longed for it and was beside myself with excitement to unwrap it Christmas morning. But my desire was to do with mobility and easy access to documents, emails, books and the Internet away from home. 

While being able to write on the iPad would be an incredible bonus, I thought the lack of a real, keyboard with poundable keys might be an insurmountable obstacle. Imagine my joy to discover that the pop up keyboard on this little machine is big and responsive enough for me to reach creative speed! 

Suddenly I’m free to write while waiting in the car for the school bell to ring or at a coffee shop when my little boy decides to fall asleep at a shopping centre. I can write during the tea breaks of long meetings or in those empty minutes waiting for meetings to start. So much wasted time can now be harnessed for my creative indulgence.

I know the world has much bigger and more important problems than my eccentric writing requirements. But this small development has opened up my writing world, so I thought I would share it with fellow writers.

You might shake your head and think I’m a little weird. Or you might have some writing quirks of your own and recognise a kindred spirit. 

There are so many hurdles to leap in order to reach our writing goals, it’s worth celebrating the ones we manage to clear.

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Let’s Party Like It’s 2011

Posted on January 7, 2011 by waxings

You know the feeling. The cheery invitations sent. The giddy anticipation. Then, a moment of uncertainty: “What if nobody comes?”

If you’re a bit on the dramatic side – I’m assuming, not being prone to such indulgence myself – a cold weight might form in your stomach. Your cheeks might grow pale with fearful nausea or perhaps blush pink with the anticipated embarrassment of sitting alone at a generously laid table or standing in an echoing hall. You might wish you had never thought of throwing the stupid party in the first place.

Well, I wasn’t that bad, but I will admit to a few nerves after announcing the first Waxings 500-word challenge. What if no-one played? Or only two or three of my most supportive writing friends entered, the rest of the world making a collective decision to ignore such impudence?

Now that the 4 January deadline has passed, I can report – with no small relief – that, not only did we receive a respectable number of entries for the first round competition, but entries of gratifying quality, diversity and power.

So thank you, thank you, thank you to those Waxers who took part in the ‘holiday’ round and those who have indicated they will play in future rounds. You have shown that there is interest in this type of competition and that it was worth setting up. You have also saved me from the anguish of ‘Bobby Brady’-style embarrassment and refusal of any future party-hosting duties – which would have been difficult to explain to my children.

Our guest judge is now hard at work reading the superb entries and a winner will be announced shortly. In the meantime, please take the time to read the ‘holiday’ entries for yourself and tell us what you think.

The theme of the next challenge is ‘night‘ – a word ripe with possibility. Write up to 500 words around this theme and send your entry to waxings.blog@gmail.com by midnight, 4 February 2011 Australian Western Standard Time (GMT+8). The winner will receive a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and E.B. White.

I’m looking forward to seeing you at this party – bring a friend or two!

 

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All I Want for Christmas…

Posted on December 19, 2010 by waxings

Attention loved ones: what I really want for Christmas, or any other gift-giving occasion, is – a book voucher (assuming the Greek writing holiday is off the table).

Some people turn up their noses at vouchers, thinking they reflect a lack of thought or originality. To me, a book voucher as a gift shows that someone really knows me.

Not only do I get a book that I would like, or better yet, love to read, I also get the pleasure of browsing through a bookstore, one of my favourite pastimes, and I get to buy whatever takes my fancy, absolutely guilt-free. (Unless my kids are along, in which case, I will suffer from selfish mum-guilt if I don’t buy them something to read as well – the downside of sharing a love of books with one’s progeny.) The gift-giver also experiences the satisfaction of knowing they have selected the perfect gift with minimal effort. Even wrapping is a breeze. It’s a win-win.

I do like receiving books as gifts. However, there are only a handful of people in my life who understand what I like to read. I’m an indiscriminate reader so I’ll usually read whatever someone gives me. But if you want me to really enjoy it, give me a voucher.

Which brings me to the topic of this blog: book recommendations. (Neat segue huh? No dear, the bit about the book vouchers wasn’t merely a device. It’s true. Go with the voucher. Or the Greek holiday.)

I’ve always been interested in the books other people recommend. Not just for the books themselves, but also for what the recommendation says about that person and what they think about me. With close friends, it’s pretty straight forward. You know what they like and they know what you like. With lesser known acquaintances, the book conversation is a revealing journey into an aspect of that person you might not encounter otherwise.

The forbidding matron who confesses over dessert that she’s quite the fan of Barbara Cartland. The gardener who quotes Melville.  Your teenage daughter’s boyfriend who will only read Manga. This kind of information adds texture to the superficialities, provides valuable insight into their personalities and, let’s be honest, helps us to judge them as potential friends and, gulp, in-laws.

Even non-persons can be judged by their book recommendations. Take the Perth Writers Festival. The festival won’t be on until March but its clever marketing people have drawn together a ‘suggested reading’ list, from the works of its guest authors, for us to ponder in the meantime. Not only that, they’ve created sub-lists for reading groups, children, holiday reads, non-fiction and more.

And you know what? They are substantial and varied lists of worthy recommendations – even with the strict limitation of drawing only from festival authors. This reflects the strength of a line-up that includes international guests, Annie Proulx, Joanne Harris, Andrew O’Hagan, Damon Galgut, Lev Grossman, Yan Lianke, Armistead Maupin, Tariq Ali, as well as a host of acclaimed Australian authors which I’ll revisit in more detail in another post.

If you’re looking for something to read over the holiday period or want to draw some literary inspiration from a great author, you could do worse than check out these recommendations.

In fact, if you really don’t want to give me a voucher, any one of these books will do.

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Introducing the 500-word Challenge

Posted on December 4, 2010 by waxings

Daunted by the prospect of writing something substantial?  Is your current writing project stalled for lack of inspiration?  Maybe you’re just looking for some light diversion?

Well, here’s the answer to any and all of the above – the Waxings 500-word challenge.

Each month, a new theme will be posted for the challenge. All you have to do is write up to 500 words around the theme. Any written format – prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction – is acceptable.

Judging will be purely subjective, the winning entry will be the one we like best, and the judge/s decision will be final. As mentioned on the challenge page, the judge/s may or may not be influenced by popular opinion so feel free to send your friends to Waxings to ‘like’ your entry and wax lyrical about its transcendent brilliance.

The prize each month will be an interesting book of Waxings’ selection. This month’s literary lure is The Art of the Short Story by Dana Gioia and RS Gwynn.

Hopefully this challenge will be fun, draw more participants into the Waxings community, and help to un-block some of those creative pipes (cough, splutter).

A reminder: the whole purpose of Waxings is to support each other as writers by providing encouragement and constructive feedback as well as a place to publish new work, so please take the time to read each month’s entries and tell us what you think in the comment boxes provided.

The inaugural challenge closes at midnight, 4 January 2011, Australian Western Standard Time (GMT +8). Starting putting those words together!

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How to Score 100 Books

Posted on November 21, 2010 by waxings

Each morning, after the multi-stage marathon that is feeding my children breakfast, I grab my first, and most desperately needed,  cup of tea and stumble, bleary-eyed, to the computer to check what the rest of the world is up to. Usually, not a lot. It’s too early for some and too late for others. 

One recent morning, I woke to an interesting question: “Have you read more than 6 of these books?”. 

What followed was a list of 100 works, apparently compiled by the BBC, the suggestion being that the average person would not have read more than six of them. (Don’t ask me what evidence this bold assertion is based upon. Sounds to me like a fourth pint declaration. But let’s go with it..)

The instructions were to go through the list, bold the books you’ve read, italicise the ones you’ve partly read and mark with an asterisk the ones you own. Then count how many you’ve read, post the marked up list on facebook and invite your book-nerd friends to do the same.

Pointless? Hell yes. But, as far as Facebook memes go, interesting and, for me, irresistible. You get to measure your reading achievements against a random list compiled by anonymous strangers according to ill-defined guidelines and, from that, work out if you’re up to scratch in the committed reader stakes. And you get to nose into your friends’ reading lists.

Of course I did it.

For the record, I scored 53, not counting the Bible and “The collected works of Shakespeare”, which I have counted as incomplete because I can’t be absolutely sure I’ve read the lot. Not too shabby – until you find out the scores of nearly everyone else I know!

But here’s the thing. It’s an odd list. I mean, Jane Austen gets four separate listings and Shakespeare only “the collected works”. Where’s the logic in that?

And the omissions, well, I won’t go into which books I thought should have made it onto the list lest you realise what an unsophisticated, tasteless clod I really am. (Oh, you knew already? Shhh..)

Here’s the list. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think. If nothing else, it might prod you into reading some excellent books that you might not have remembered or looked for otherwise.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Goldman

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbon

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

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