Tag: editing

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The End of the Renga

Back in 2020, I was invited to take part in a collaborative project started by the poet W N Herbert, known to us all as Bill.

His idea was simple. He would create an email list containing a group of poets. Then each month, he would send out the first stanza of a new poem and incorporate suggestions from those poets for a second stanza, then a third, and so on. The complete poem would be posted publicly by the end of the month.

From the start, Bill introduced us to the renga form. We did play somewhat fast and loose with its complex rules and conventions, but we mostly stuck to the alternating stanza length: a three-line haiku followed by two lines of seven syllables each.

Here’s part of a recent renga. Depending on the contributor, some parts were written in standard English and some in Scots.

Then two days ago, he announced the project was at an end. It seems this always intended to run for four years, but in the initial excitement of being asked to contribute, I hadn’t read that part.

I haven’t always had the time and/or inspiration to contribute, but I always made a point of reading the constructed renga when it was sent out. The next stage is to think about publication; Bill has a lot of experience in this area, so it’ll probably happen.

Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing about whatever project he has planned next.

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I’ve Started So I’ll Finish

On Saturday, I made my annual visit to StAnza in St Andrews, billed as Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.

I’ve been going for around a decade, but my commitment has varied from year to year. Sometimes I’ve been to as many events as possible during a day trip, and sometimes I’ve booked accommodation so I could stay for the late-night slam.

This year, I made a conscious decision to buy just one ticket for the Breakfast Poetry show. As part of the entry fee, the audience is offered light refreshments and a coffee. In the afternoon, I planned to take the opportunity to catch up with my pal Robert who lives in St Andrews.

My advice for going to StAnza – and poetry events in general – is always to carry a notepad and pencil. I always find little nuggets of information that would otherwise be forgotten afterwards.

I’m glad I did because I was trying to compose a poem for my monthly Wyverns group using the prompt ‘Stars and planets’. I’d been turning over two ideas but they’d been coming out as short stories.

But as I listened to our guests Rachel Mann and Yomi Ṣode, it started to come together. It’s hard to quantify, but just being around other poets can help the process along. I was able to complete the piece that morning.

The following day, I typed up the piece and sent it to the group. The meeting had already taken place a week before it normally does because of a scheduling conflict, but I did received generally positive feedback by email.

I don’t yet know what my next festival will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out what’s on.

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A Time for Writing

When I started this blog over a decade ago, the first dozen entries or so were posted at seemingly arbitrary intervals. It was an experimental venture that took a few months to settle into a regular cycle, initially every Monday at 5pm.

It made sense, considering my schedule at the time. I could write the blog over the weekend and then make any tweaks during the day on Monday. These are now posted around 8pm every Tuesday, which coincides with the end of my writing group, so I can use that time to make amendments.

The purpose of this schedule is to keep me producing at least one piece of prose per week. I don’t always manage a full entry, but I always post some text, even if it’s to explain I haven’t managed to write that full entry. Additionally, my Wyverns group membership encourages me to produce at least one piece of poetry every month.

I hear about too many writers – especially beginners – who feel they aren’t real writers unless they set aside a certain length of time every day. Of those, there is a sizeable subset who feel the well-known writing routine of Steven King is the One and Only True Way.

I find this frustrating to hear. One man’s method is not everyone’s method, and it shouldn’t be treated as such.

Some authors swear by keeping a notepad and pen by the bed, or writing in the morning, whereas neither of these work for me. There are a few who consider the activity seasonal, doing the bulk of their work in the summer or winter months.

There are also environmental factors. Bizarrely, one of my favourite places to write used to be in a certain branch of McDonald’s, and I can’t explain why. Maybe I should go back there and see whether it still works.

Once you experiment with your times and figure out what schedule works for you personally, the process will probably become easier.

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Looking Out for Each Other

One of the best pieces for anyone looking to be published is to fully read the submission guidelines for any publisher you wish to contact.

It came to my attention late last week that Auroras & Blossoms is soliciting submissions with conditions that many writers and editors consider unfair and unorthodox. You can read some reactions to these guidelines online and find links to the publisher’s website.

For someone like me who has made hundreds of submissions to many publishers, I can immediately see what’s wrong. For instance, it’s highly uncommon for a publisher to withhold royalties unless the writer makes a donation. For a beginner writer who hasn’t yet developed that frame of reference, it’s easy to be caught out.

Fortunately, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is also worried about this problem. They run a blog called Writer Beware that’s geared towards any author, regardless of genre, highlighting the latest scams, impersonations and general shadiness. Unbelievably, this has been online since 1998.

Shortly before posting this entry, I discussed the blog with a pal. She not only already knew about the Writer Beware blog, but told me she’d brought Christina Kaye to their attention after a bad experience. Since the original post in November 2021, many other writers and industry professionals have added their voices, with a couple of comments even dating from last week.

While the problem of dodgy publishers isn’t new and isn’t going away any time soon, there are at least some in the industry who have your back.

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A Short Spell of Reading

I have a group of pals who hold a readathon approximately every three months, typically coinciding with the equinoxes and solstices. It used to be an intensive twelve hours but has settled down into a more relaxed two-day format.

Ahead of the most recent one on Friday and Saturday, I went to the library and found two short story collections, namely:

  • Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
  • The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan.

I started with the Kirsty Logan one. I’d enjoyed her novel The Gracekeepers, and I even met her at a launch on its release. But the esteem in which I hold the novel didn’t translate to that collection.

Back in July, I wrote an entry about short stories and how readers need to feel satisfied before the end of the narrative. I also prophetically ended the entry by saying I would park the thought for the moment with the intention of returning at some point. This is that point.

In the case of the Logan collection, I’d like to turn to a different metaphor. Each story is a jigsaw puzzle rather than a picture. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and a few of the stories worked. However, it’s necessary to make sure all the pieces are there so the reader can mentally assemble them and this didn’t work in a lot of cases. A story about a coin-operated boy simply baffled me towards the end.

I’m only part-way through the other collection, but all the pieces are present, so I’m enjoying the stories much more.

Taking the time to read has also encouraged me to continue with other projects. For instance, I submitted a 50-word-story to a competition run by the Scottish Book Trust. I’ve then continued some overdue work on my stage monologue. Who knows what else I’ll manage to tackle when I next dislike a book?

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Backing Dvorak

If you look at the keyboard settings in your operating system, you’ll often spot several different layouts that the computer can understand. For instance: a French keyboard has its letters in a slightly different order, while a Russian one uses a completely different alphabet. Among them, you might see one marked ‘Dvorak’.

Despite its Czech name, the layout was invented by an American educational psychologist for use in typewriters. It’s well-known that the QWERTY design was introduced to slow down typists and avoid jamming the mechanisms, but by the 1930s, machines had improved to the point where fast typing wasn’t a problem. That’s where August Dvorak came in.

About a year or two after I began writing fiction, I began to develop Repetitive Strain Injury in my fingers, so I wanted to explore other options such as writing by hand, voice dictation, and a different keyboard.

With the vowels and most common consonants on the middle row, and the least often used on the bottom row, your fingers don’t need to travel so much. This is also the principle on which Scrabble letters are scored, but that’s a topic for a different time.

Dvorak does have downfalls. When I started using the system, I needed labels on the keys as reminders, graduating to a custom-built external keyboard, before I was able to rely on muscle memory. I also can’t change the keyboard on my workplace computer so I need to switch mentally between that and QWERTY.

Additionally, I mentioned how the layout was designed by an American, so a few of the keys don’t operate as expected, especially the pound sterling symbol.

To circumvent this, I use a program called AutoHotkey. On start-up, it loads a script that maps keypresses to other keys or to a subroutine. So if I press Ctrl+3, Windows can display the missing ‘£’ symbol rather than the ‘#’ produced by Shift+3. I have a few similar shortcuts for these special cases, although I still rely heavily on memory.

On balance, using the Dvorak keyboard has been a help more than a hindrance, and I’ll probably be using it well into the future.

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Deliberately Not Reaching the Target

The end of November signals the end of National Novel Writing Month, which is a global challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. Regular readers will know I’ve run the Dundee & Angus region for the last eight years.

Although it’s a tough challenge, the only real competition is against yourself. It’s run largely on an honour system, where participants self-report their word counts, and there’s no sanction for not reaching the target. As such, we always remind members that there’s no shame in not hitting 50,000 words.

When I took over the group, I quickly realised that organising and encouraging group members is sometimes incompatible with achieving my own goals. I have previously managed to reach 50,000 words while running the group, but the quality of my leadership suffered.

So for the last few years, I’ve made more of an effort to focus on the running of the group. This is in the full knowledge that a decent word count is unlikely to be possible. At the time of writing, I’ve recorded just 1,178 words.

However, there has been a noticeable improvement in the running of the region. This has been particularly true in the pre-pandemic period as my co-leader and I have gradually developed and trialled different ways of working.

The way I see it, if the members are able to focus on their projects and don’t notice how we run the group, then we’re doing a good job.

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Some Direction

At an event yesternight, I had a conversation with a local author. While we’re not terribly well acquainted, we do follow each other online.

I mentioned I’d written a monologue as part of a Masters degree some years ago. Back in August, you might remember I saw the play Almost Adult at the Edinburgh Fringe, which prompted me to start redrafting it. The conversation did start me thinking about where I might go from here.

For instance, because the play is written from the point of view of a woman looking back around 15 years to her student days, we would need an actress of the right age. She also suggested reaching out to ‘an up-and-coming’ female director who could ensure some of the details were spot-on.

We also discussed the issue of copycat works. I wrote my monologue before Phoebe Waller-Bridge scored a massive hit with Fleabag, but there are some similarities. While it might be seen as derivative, success with one type of story often encourages publishers to snap up other works in the same genre.

In any case, it’s all academic for the moment, as I’m still not finished my latest redraft.

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Until the Last Moment

I’m a member of a monthly poetry circle called the Wyverns. We each typically write a piece ahead of the next meeting to be read aloud and discussed. There is always a broad prompt to assist with choosing a subject.

In most cases, I submit my work relatively quickly, but I’d let it go in October because I thought the focus of the November meeting was entirely given over to discussing an upcoming pamphlet project. Around 48 hours before the meeting, it transpired that I’d misunderstood what was said. We were discussing the project, but there would also be time for poetry.

It was time to knuckle down. The prompt was ‘Being Human’, which coincided with the theme of the aforementioned pamphlet and is also why I misunderstood the brief. By coincidence, I’ve been learning a lot recently about the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, so I wasn’t short of material.

Much of the online communication in the group is done using an email discussion list, so I posted my ten-line verse there as soon as I was satisfied with the wording. I also printed off several paper copies for those who might not have checked their emails.

As a result, I was able to gather feedback on it, which was more favourable than some pieces where I’d spent days thinking about the wording. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there.

If you’re local to Dundee, incidentally, you can come and hear poems from the pamphlet being performed tomorrow at the Global Room in the University of Dundee.

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Writing Just Enough

As writers, I think we’ve all had the experience of starting a poem or a story with a great idea, but it fails because there simply isn’t enough material to sustain a complete story.

I remember one instance when I was invited to write a poem inspired by a botanic garden. I was particularly taken by a species of tree where the seed is sealed with a natural glue that can only be opened when it melts with heat. As such, in a natural environment, it requires a forest fire to reproduce. Despite writing many lines to this effect, I found only the first two and last two were strong candidates, so the end piece was much shorter than expected, but much punchier as well.

I’ve also experienced the opposite effect at least once. I set out to write a little joke for my online pals about how YouTube videos used to be sent out to customers by post. The fictional history of the company became so detailed that I eventually turned it into a 2,000-word short story.

The same unpredictability also happens in non-fiction. The Wikipedia page for Kirkton, Dundee is relatively short because it’s mainly a residential area, albeit with four schools and excellent transport links. On the other hand, the riot that erupted there at Hallowe’en in 2022 is given a separate page that’s around twice as long as the main article, simply because there is so much to be written about the incident.

Having written this blog for a decade now, I can generally predict how long my entries will be. Something else will occasionally occur to me while writing that extends their length. Every so often, I’ll run out of steam, leaving me with a draft entry that goes nowhere.

As these drafts are beginning to build up again, I’m going to see whether I can revisit them and add enough to create a fully-fledged topic.