Category Archives: writing

Interview with Helen Smith, author of Alison Wonderland + Review

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 Alison WonderlandI was sent a copy of Alison Wonderland, by Helen Smith to read. I’m uncertain how to categorize this novel. Surreal or ‘weird’ fiction is probably the closest to accurate. To start us off, here is the description:

After her husband leaves her for another woman, twentysomething Londoner Alison Temple impulsively applies for a job at the very P.I. firm she hired to trap her philandering ex. She hopes it will be the change of scene she so desperately needs to move on with her shattered life. At the all-female Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation, she spends her days tracking lost objects and her nights shadowing unfaithful husbands. But no matter what the case, none of her clients can compare to the fascinating characters in her personal life. There’s her boss, the estimable and tidy Mrs. Fitzgerald; Taron, Alison’s eccentric best friend, who claims her mother is a witch; Jeff, her love-struck, poetry-writing neighbour; and—last but not least—her psychic postman. Her relationships with them all become entangled when she joins Taron for a road trip to the seaside and stumbles into a misadventure of epic proportions! Clever, quirky, and infused with just a hint of magic, this humorous literary novel introduces a memorable heroine struggling with the everyday complexities of modern life.
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Sadie’s Top 10 Tips For Mechanical Edits

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I’ve spent my day editing. This is a painful and time-consuming necessity for any piece of work a writer wishes to present to the literary public. I mean it. It’s necessary. Anytime I see a bio or book description in which the author claims to have written the book in a month and spent another month editing before publication, I cringe. There is almost no chance I will read that book.

I fully believe that there are people out there who can write a book in a month. Look at NANO. I do not believe that there are many people who can adequately proofread and edit 200+ pages in a month. It should take that long to find the typos alone, and it pretty much rules out the use of a professional editor (which I recommend for a book destined for publication). Since it is such a difficult thing to do I thought I might share a few of the tips that I use. I don’t mean grammar tips, like avoid the dreaded passive voice or exile unnecessary adjectives to the foul recesses of the metaphoric rubbish heap, though those are obviously important. I mean the nuts and bolts of how to find those pesky errors lurking in every lengthy work.

Of course what works best for me is going to be different from what works best for you or anyone else. This is just my list in no particular order. I’d love to hear your tips too.

1. Give it time. Don’t expect to finish your first draft and then execute a quick fix before sending it off to print. Reading and rereading and then reading again takes time.

2. Step away. This too takes time, sometimes a lot of it. Put your novel in a drawer. Walk away from it for at least a few days, so that you can look at it with relatively fresh eyes. One of the hardest things to do is keep your brain from reading what it thinks it wrote as opposed to what is actually on the screen.

3. Use someone else’s eyes. Beta readers are your best friends. It doesn’t matter if it’s a colleague with a grease marker or a professional; let someone else read it for you. Trust me, they will find the repeat words you keep looking over. It will save you a lot of time in the long run.

4. Print it. I know it feels horribly wasteful to print 200 pages. I personally print two pages to a page and double side it so that I don’t feel like an environmental criminal. But taking the work from the screen to paper forces you to look at it in a different format, enabling you to see different errors. Use coloured pens to circle mistakes, scratch notes, and draw arrows. By the end of this stage my manuscripts often looks more like abstract art than anything else.

5. Use the spelling and grammar check on your computer, but don’t depend on it. A lot of homophones and homonyms will slip right past it. Try cutting and pasting your work into more than one grammar checker. I often write in LaTex, but will paste it into Word temporarily. The two systems find different mistakes. Don’t ask me why, but they do.

6. Learn your own common mistakes. I know from experience that I frequently start sentences with ‘but.’ This is a no-no. It is simply poor writing. So I will give a piece of work at least one read in which all I look for is this one mistake. Find your personal habits and correct for them.

7. Learn your body’s optimal process. I, for example, am creative in the mornings and detail oriented in the evenings. So I dedicate mornings to new writing and the evenings to editing.

8. Remember your purpose. The point is to fix errors not add content. If you come up with some fabulous new arc to follow, make a note to address it later. Stay on task.

9. Start at the end and read backwards. My high school English teacher told us this. It really works. It forces your mind to address the word before it instead of the word it expects to be there. Some people also suggest actually turning the paper upside-down. But I have never tried this.

10. Let the computer read it to you. My husband first suggested this to me, and it is ingenious. You can often hear mistakes you keep reading over. On my computer I just have to convert it to a PDF, open it in Preview, go to Edit and then Speech. voilà

So there you have it, my top ten tips for manual edits. I do every one of them more than once for every manuscript. It is a really slow process, but it is worth it in the end. So what do you do?

How do you write?

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Earlier today I was on Goodreads.com (wasting precious time that I should have spent on research) and someone posted this link. It is a collage of 12 bedrooms belonging to famous writers. Most of them are painfully lavish, reminding me how little I have actually earned with my own writing. This one apparently belonged to Victor Hugo (one of my favourites, but really, red?).

Some were surprisingly simple. Can you imagine William Faulkner sleeping here (below)? Stark hardly begins to describe it. There isn’t even a lampshade on that bare bulb.

What was notable about this variety of literary, decorative and slumbering styles was that almost all of them included a writing desk. This sparked a comical exchange in which we all discussed our bedrooms/writing spaces. I won’t rehash the conversation for you, but I do recommend checking the website out.

The conversation did cause me to pause and look around however. It made me laugh. How do you work? Are you the type that keeps things neat and tidy, with everything within ordered reach, or are you the type that has to let the paperwork flow in a natural manner in order to let your creativity free? I never gave me style much thought…until now.

Both my husband and I are in the last few months of masters degrees. He is down to less than a month and I am down to just under 4. Lately, we spend most of our time together  sitting silently at our desks hacking anxiously away at the keyboards. He produces amazingly complex graphics demonstrating the flux and stain of engineering principles I can’t begin to understand, and I string word after word after word together in what I hope is a sonorous manner. Our projects couldn’t be farther apart, and neither could our methods.

This is my desk:

It is small and cluttered. I surround myself with notes and reminders. They are stuck to the wall, my binders, the back of the computer, everywhere. It is like a den. I am physically immersed in  the information I am trying to assimilate. If ever I stop and clear my desk it is a sign of EXTREME stress, and should be taken as a very bad sign, possible even a sign to run for your life.

This, however, is my husband’s desk:

It’s a bit bigger, but I’m not bitter or anything. What I wish to point out is how neat and tidy it is. I couldn’t work in that space. Nothing would speak to me. No note would remind me where to reference de Vreese’s reconsideration of the Spiral of Cynicism or when my quants project is due or on what page Fukuyama discusses Zaibatsu. That desk gives me no information.

He, however, occasionally looks over at me in my mountain of material with a look of cold derision. I know what he’s thinking. He wonders how I can find anything or concentrate with so much distraction around me. He wonders why I have to scribble so many notes. He wants to tell me to clean it, but knows better.

We each have a method. It works for us in ways it probably wouldn’t work for anyone else. It is ours and ours alone, and I became aware of it today. It made me laugh through my stress. It enabled me to make one more cup of tea and get back to work. Today I appreciate our differences for what they are, amazing and necessary.