19/5/2024 0 Comments The only way to learn how to write is to write – seven lessons I’ve learned writing six novels.Back in October 2021, I started writing. The story that had been rattling around my head for the best part of ten years, finally got written. By Christmas 2021, I’d finished my first draft and I launched myself straight into the sequel. By the end of spring, 2022, I’d written three draft novels and was deluded into thinking I could actually write. I started querying my first novel, I also paid an editor for a review of said novel. When I got my feedback, I realised it stank. I gave up querying and parked my first trilogy and cracked on with the sequel trilogy. By autumn of the same year, I’d drafted another three novels. Wow! In around twelve months, I’d committed over 600,000 words to paper. That’s a lot by anyone’s standards. I find writing first drafts easy; the stories rattle around my head and fight to come out. I’ve never had writer’s block; I’ve never struggled to come up with a plot or to work out a direction of travel for my stories. But that’s half the problem. I’m incredibly impatient. I hate indecision and I have a bias for action in everything I do. I can’t deal with uncertainty and things I can’t control. It’s the main reason I don’t run a property development company anymore. I can’t deal with the stress caused by the uncertainty of the process of selling houses I’ve renovated or built. But this characteristic often leads to poor, rushed decisions. When it comes to writing, I don’t take time to think plots and characters over for a long period of time, I quickly decide how things should go, and start scribbling. In writing, as in life, this doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes. Lesson 1. A rushed novel is (probably) a flawed novel. If you prioritise speed over perfection, you will move too quickly to spot the bits that still need work. So after I’d drafted six novels, then what? Well, I convinced myself I knew what I was doing after all that writing practice. I’d had some positive feedback from the few people who’d read my novels and a few suggestions of tweaks I could make. I decided that was enough to allow me to do my own developmental edits. Lesson 2. Your average alpha reader (an alpha reader is a first draft reader – beta readers tend to read your almost finished novel) is no substitute for a pro. Friends and family may be able to give you some basic feedback, but they won’t give your novel the critical review it needs. Friends and family had given me some nice feedback, but my professional review and my own instincts made me realise that my first three novels needed loads of work, so I decided to focus on the second three which were in a better state. These were the ones I was going to self-publish. They were set twenty years after the first trilogy and had been written to stand alone – think Star Wars episodes IV – VI. I started work on getting my second trilogy publishing ready. I shifted chapters around and re-wrote bits. I read through each of the manuscripts a few times and improved descriptions, made dialogue less clunky, made sure things flowed better and thought I’d fixed everything I needed to fix. I then employed a pro to do a line and copy edit of my novels. For those who aren’t editing experts, line editing looks at decent use of language, readability and flow, while copy editing looks primarily at technical accuracy and decent spelling and grammar. Lesson 3. A line and copy editor will not fix a flawed novel. They will only make sure your English is good, they will not point out massive plot holes or under-developed characters. After I’d done my own developmental edit based on the feedback of un-qualified alpha readers and got my novels edited by a pro, I was convinced my second trilogy was awesome. I employed a pro-cover designer too, and got some pretty covers… Lesson 4. A cover designer will only every work to your brief, don’t expect miracles. I’ll come back to the lesson above shortly. So there I was, with my newly edited novels and shiny covers. I got them whacked online at six-week intervals and rushed them out the door. It kind of sounds like I should have paid attention to lesson 1 here – DON’T RUSH! Because I rushed, I wasn’t able to have the sequel ready for pre-order on day one. I should have waited until they were all ready. Anyway… By summer 2023 I’d published all three books in my second trilogy and then tried a lot of things to sell them. I tried Amazon ads, Facebook ads, I used promo sites, I worked on my author platforms on my website, Amazon and Goodreads, I even employed a marketing agency. I sold a few hundred books; take a look at an earlier blog to see the figures. I sold the equivalent of 450 books, if you include pages read on Kindle Unlimited, but as I followed the stats over time, I noticed something – my readthrough wasn’t great. People who bought book 1, weren’t buying the sequel. On the plus side, a lot of people who bought book 2 did buy book 3, so things were looking good there, so what was the issue with book 1? I had good reviews for book 1. It was averaging 4.3 stars and I had quite a few reviews from people I’d never met independently singing my book’s praises. I was really struggling to work out what was wrong. Then a lovely chap called Peter from Snowdon Publishing Services helped me figure it out. Lesson 5. Your novel is flawed, the question is, how flawed? Even best-sellers have flaws, but little flaws can be overlooked, the best marketing in the world can’t save a heavily flawed novel. It took time for me to conclude the first novel in my second trilogy was full of issues. I’d always had doubts about the first chapter and wondered about other threads besides. Peter flagged up the issues with chapter 1, I was also beginning to doubt the rest of the manuscript too, in part because of the stats on the read-through. So I pulled my whole trilogy off the market and employed Peter’s daughter, Karen, to give my manuscript a review. Lesson 6. Be prepared to start again. One definition of insanity is to keep trying the same things and to expect different results. One of the reasons I’d started my self-publishing journey with my second trilogy, was that it would give me a chance to start again. I could re-launch with my first trilogy, and good god, I’m so very glad I have this opportunity. Karen’s review came back, I gave it a read and it was like the rose-tinted filters I’d viewed my novel with were ripped away. I could see the whole thing so much more clearly now. Every flaw she flagged made complete sense, I agreed with it all. The novel is fixable – it has a good overall concept and some good characters, there’s just bits that aren’t delivered as well as they could be. I’m going to fix that book, but not yet. Right now I’m preparing to launch the first trilogy. I’d re-written my very first novel in the summer of 2023 and tried to query it to literary agents for a time. But soon after I’d made the decision to pull my second trilogy off the market, I decided to self-publish the first trilogy, too. I’ve asked Karen to review book 1 of my very first trilogy. She’s provided some very valuable feedback and I now know what I need to do to it. I’m going to crack on shortly, just as soon as I’ve finished the re-write of my second novel. When I re-read my early work, I realise how bad my writing was back then. The amount I’ve learned from my writing journey to date is immense. Lesson 7. You will get better the more you write. You are a better writer than you were when you wrote your first, first draft. You are not as good as you will be in years to come. I’m getting my covers re-designed too. I said I’d come back to lesson 4 – well, back when I was trying to rush my novels onto the market, I employed a rather expensive American to design my covers thinking that because he was expensive, he’d work miracles. He didn’t. He produced pretty covers but they didn’t link to the story as well as they could have done. When you’re marketing, you’re paying for clicks. If people click on a pretty cover that doesn’t link to your blurb, you’re wasting money. Your covers have to be right, so you need to give a lot of thought into what graphics will sell your story and guide your designer accordingly. After I decided to pull my first trilogy off the market and had received the professional feedback from book 1 in my second trilogy (The General’s Son), I made a metal ‘to-do’ list, it looks a bit like this:
You can see that there’s a lot of work to do here, and if I pay attention to my first lesson, I realise I really shouldn’t rush things. I’m going to take my time getting my novels ready this time. I’m going to make sure they are all pretty much ready to publish before I even release the first book in the series. If I’m focussing on editing, I won’t have time to do marketing. I’m going to plan properly this time, I’m going to have a marketing strategy, I’m going to have polished novels that really are as good as I can get them before I send them out into the world. I’m going to heed my own lessons. It’s going to take time. But as I said in my last blog, few authors have success overnight. Very, very few. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I’ve started a whole new race but I’m pacing myself this time so that when I get to the end, not only will I have the energy to tell the world what I’ve achieved, I’ll finish with the strength to start another race, but next time, armed with all I’ve learned from the first race, I’ll do even better. To follow me on my journey to publishing, for free, advance copies of my novels and all the latest updates, be sure to sign up to my newsletter!
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15/4/2024 0 Comments Am I chasing a mirage?I recall plenty of cartoons from my childhood where a character is in a desert and an oasis appears on the horizon. They’re so desperate to believe it’s real that they run blindly towards the promise of palm tree shade and more water than they could drink. But the closer they get, the further away the mirage appears, until it vanishes entirely. I’ve come to feel like I’m chasing the mirage of writing success.
I admit it, I want to make money from writing. Why? Because I love making up stories, I love hearing that people have enjoyed reading what I’ve created, and who wouldn’t want to make a living from doing what they love? I’ve quizzed other writers on this topic, and it seems most do it for the love of writing itself. But for me, that’s not enough. Call it vanity if you like, but my ultimate dream is that one day, I’ll see my books on the shelves of Waterstones, people will queue up at my book signings and I’ll be invited to do interviews where I talk about my stories. Basically, I simply want to ‘make it’ as an author. In the quest to achieve success, I’ve read a lot of stuff about other authors and how long it took them to ‘make it’. Few had success overnight. Very, very few. Most plugged away at their craft for years, sometimes decades until they finally got a break. I keep telling myself that if I keep going, if I keep listening to feedback and tweaking my style, and if I keep writing more and more that eventually, I’ll write something that loads of people will love. Enough to make that story a best seller. But what if I don’t? What if all I’m doing is chasing a mirage? What if I’m destined to never find that oasis, but to simply one day, collapse dead in the desert after spending too long chasing an impossible dream at the expense of all other avenues to success? I sacrifice a lot of valuable time for writing. Time I could be using to try to build a career in something that will actually make me money, time I could be using for renovations that will increase the value of my house, time I could be spending with my kids. I sacrifice money, too. I’ve spent thousands on editors and cover designers. I keep telling myself it’s money well-spent. I’ve learned so much from the editing process and about what the right cover looks like. Is it worth it? How long can this go on? Maybe I need to re-think why I’m doing this. Is it for the money, the fame or the fortune that will (probably) never come? Or is it so that one day, I can say I left a legacy. A legacy of books. If they’re not that great, and only a handful of people ever read them, will it still be worth it? I’m not sure. But right now, I’m still chasing that mirage in the hope it might be real. I suppose one day I'll either quench my thirst, or I'll die trying - metaphorically at least. Never meet your heroes – that’s what they say, isn’t it? I’m even not entirely sure who they are so screw what they say. I don’t actually have any heroes, but if I was forced to select one, it would be Joe Abercrombie. Yuck! I’m cringing even writing that. I don’t do hero worship, I hate the idea of genuflecting to anyone remotely famous or prestigious. So why bring up this nonsense at all? Well, it’s because yesterday I met Joe Abercrombie; best selling author of The First Law trilogy. I’d like to say I met him down the pub, and we had a pint together and talked shit about writing and growing up in Lancashire, but unfortunately, that nice little fantasy didn’t quite happen. Instead, I saw him at a little conference thing called Gollanczfest – he was a speaker there then did a book sighing after. I got a book signed and I told him how The First Law influenced my own books. He scribbled something in my paperback copy of The Blade Itself and off I went. That was that. I’m not in any way disappointed in my brief encounter. I like how he came across at the event and he seemed nice enough when we briefly met. Maybe it takes at least a pint in a pub somewhere to become disillusioned by your heroes, maybe one day I’ll get the chance – but not today.
So why am I waffling about Joe? What made me want to write a blog post about yesterday’s brief encounter? Well, I suppose it’s because I want to explain why I think he’s so influential to my own work. My story begins back in October 2021. I was on holiday, I had a week by the pool and my love of reading was re-kindled. I didn’t read any of Joe’s stuff on that particular holiday, I can’t actually recall what I read, but that’s not the point. The point is that the re-emergence of my love of reading that I discovered on this holiday brought something else to the fore too, my love of making stuff up. In October 2021, I was in a job where I was bored. I worked from home and had to be at my computer all day in case anyone wanted to get in touch. But I didn’t have enough work to fill my day. While I was on holiday, I had an epiphany; I realised I could use my time stuck at a computer to write stuff. So when I came home I started writing the story that had rattled around my head for years and had survived two previous attempts to get it down on paper. By Christmas, 2021, the first draft of The Queen of Vorn was complete. So what has this got to do with Joe? Soon after I started writing, I realised I needed to read more. I searched for new stuff to try, and I came across Joe Abercrombie’s books. I wanted to find a fantasy trilogy that I thought I’d enjoy and The First Law trilogy seemed to fit the bill. I read this trilogy over the next year, at the same time I wrote my own trilogy. After I finished The Queen of Vorn, I cracked straight on with its sequels. So The First Law trilogy was with me the whole time I was writing The Homecoming Trilogy. So what? I loved Joe’s fresh take on the fantasy genre. Sure, there were lots of familiar tropes, there were familiar settings and some of the characters were even quite familiar, but most weren’t. Most had dark sides, complex sides and interesting back stories. They were multi-layered and very distinctive from each other. They all came with their own threads and intermingled with other characters in a satisfying manner as the trilogy progressed. I wanted to get this stuff in my stories. I wanted deep, dark, interesting characters… (Note: If you have read neither my stories nor The First Law trilogy, you may wish to skip to the final paragraph, as the following may go over your head) First, I want to talk about Queen Lila. She’s the antagonist in my first novel, The Queen of Vorn, book 1 in The Homecoming Trilogy. She has a long back story that featured in my first draft but got axed when I re-wrote The Queen of Vorn last summer. I aim to make that backstory into a prequel one day – but anyway… Let’s make her long story short (as we’ll be here far longer than I imagine your attention span will stretch to): Queen Lila starts off as a sweet, innocent young woman, then has a really nasty time of things and turns evil. A little like how Glokta from The First Law got tortured and became a torturer. She has some nice Glokta-style practical nastiness traits about her, but she maybe isn’t as multi layered as I’d like. Looking back, she was the first character I created in The Homecoming Trilogy and so probably wasn’t as influenced by Joe as some of my others. Let’s consider another of my characters: Mark. Mark’s one of my favourite characters. He appears in the second book in The Homecoming Trilogy. He’s not particularly dark, but I think he has quite a few nuanced characteristics. He’s had a difficult start to life, which contrasts against the cushy upbringing and less complex personality of another character, Tom, quite nicely. Thinking about it, he has a lot of parallels with Joe’s Collem West. They are both officers in the military and had unconventional starts in life and carry insecurities about that through their careers. I’m rattling the rest of my characters through my head as I write this, and on reflection, I, think my more complex characters appear in The Offspring Trilogy, this is the sequel trilogy to The Homecoming Trilogy. As the name suggests, it focusses on the offspring of the characters from the first three books. There’s Garrad – the title character in The General’s Son. He’s a bit like Joe’s Ardee West meets Jezal dan Luthar: he’s not comfortable in his skin, has a bit of a booze problem, he's great with a sword and arrogant at times. There’s Sarah, she’s a bit like a non-crippled evil version of Glokta. She’s not crippled physically, but she’s a bit screwed up mentally from childhood trauma. She’s also very practical, she's a survivor, and necessarily brutal. And there’s Mikey, he’s the title character in the third book in The Offspring Trilogy, The Prince’s Nephew. I think he’s my favourite character of any I’ve created. I can’t actually think of any direct parallels to Joe’s characters because I think he takes bits of them all. He starts a bit like Logen Ninefingers in some ways - a bit of a thinking man’s barbarian, but from a modern era, but then transforms into something a bit like Ferro, a bit tapped in the head and extremely ruthless, but finally, I think he merges into something akin to Logen meets Collem. I’d always known Joe Abercrombie’s books had influenced my own work, but until I really started to think about it, I don’t think I’d realised how much. My stories are very different, but my characters? They were the thing I liked the most from Joe’s books, so I suppose it really isn’t a surprise there’s parallels…thanks for the inspiration, Joe! |
AuthorCharlotte Goodwin is the author of the Gallantrian Legacy series. A set of six books (and counting) set in a universe where magic is real, there's just not much of it on Earth. Archives
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