Tag: prose

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Discussion Questions About Discussion Questions

On Sunday evening, I reached the end of the Richard Osman novel The Man Who Died Twice. I always like to read over the acknowledgements, and then I turned the page to find a section titled ‘Discussion Questions for Readers’.

Most of the questions give away plot points, so I won’t repeat those here, but there are a few only tangentially related to the story, such as ‘Have you ever been lonely in a new town?’ and ‘What is an acceptable name for a pet, and what is unacceptable?’

I’d never before seen this feature in a novel, so I asked around to see whether others had. While some pals were – like me – surprised to see this outside of an educational setting, others reported discussion questions appearing in other books, such as:

  • A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, both by Taylor Jenkins Reid

These titles were all published in or after 2012, and I’d be interested to find out whether any older novels also have this feature.

One respondent reported debating with herself whether such questions encourage critical thinking or are merely there to spoon-feed reading groups. I’ve considered this question myself, but I have no conclusions so far.

It’s not clear whether the discussion section was the initiative of the author or the publisher, but I expect you’d want to test the waters first. My edition boasts ‘The multi-million-copy bestseller’ on the cover, so I expect Penguin Random House knew by this point that its readers would want to discuss the title.

Although I really enjoyed The Man Who Died Twice, perhaps I haven’t seen a discussion section before because I simply don’t normally lean towards crime fiction, cosy or otherwise. However, I will keep an eye out for this in the future.

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Sky Writing and Railway Reading

Yesterweek, I talked about going to Dublin for a few days and what I would bring to read and write on the three-day trip.

The flight there takes about an hour and five minutes from Edinburgh. I used the journey there to write six postcards, which I would then post on arrival, and tackled some other writing on my return. As predicted in that last entry, the cashier was indeed rather bemused as she handed over my stamps.

On the second day, my pal and I took a train to Belfast and back, taking around two hours each way, I split my time between writing in my notebook and reading my magazine.

It was helpful to have this time, but it would be more helpful if I were able to recreate this experience at home without the expense of travel. I’ve heard the suggestion of listening to ambient train noises as I write, but I also rationally know I can step outside my door at any time; not something you can do on a mainline railway.

If you’ve any suggestions on that front, I’m all ears.

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Sky Writing

If you’ve flown with Ryanair before, you’ll know the company doesn’t have a generous baggage allowance. So when I head off to Dublin for a few days tomorrow, I’ve had to be selective about what I bring for reading and writing for the journey.

I’m definitely bringing my laptop, which will sit alongside my plastic A4 document holder. This comfortably holds my A5 paper diary and a commercial-sized paperback. My current read is The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, and it’s the first time in a long time I’ve wanted to read a whole series.

However, I’m going to visit a pal from university on her birthday weekend. We typically swap cards by post, so I’m taking the opportunity to hand it over in person and I’m including a book, which will take up the other half of that document holder. As such, I’ve decided to take my copy of Writing Magazine to read instead, as it’ll slot nicely into the holder.

This gives me just enough room left to slip in some postcards. I know these went out of fashion with the advent of the text message and they’ll likely arrive home long after I do, but I specifically wanted to send some. I’ve already stuck on the address labels, so it’s just a matter of writing the messages and taking them to a post office, no doubt to the bemusement of the cashier.

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Nice NaNo-ing You

Long-time readers of this blog will know I’ve been involved with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) since 2010. This is a not-for-profit initiative that encourages members to draft a 50,000-word novel every November.

In 2015, I began to organise our local Dundee & Angus region. A local leader is known as a Municipal Liasion (ML). Each ML needs to sign an agreement every year promising to enforce the code of conduct, hold regular meetings, and so forth. In fact, we already go over and above the agreement by holding meetings every week, not just during November.

I always like having a second ML in charge to help me make difficult decisions. This turns out to have been a prudent move.

Late last year, a member of NaNoWriMo staff in California stood down after making a racist comment about a colleague. Separately, the organisation was slow to remove a forum moderator who was sending inappropriate material to minors.

As a reaction to this, a new Interim Executive Director was appointed without warning, who then released a draft ML agreement with several adverse clauses. These included requiring us to verify our identity with a US company that doesn’t comply with GDPR and preventing us from speaking to MLs in other regions. There has also been a general air of disrespect in replies from this Director, which I haven’t experienced in a decade and a half of involvement.

There are a lot of aspects to this story, but that’s a summary of the main points.

As the situation with NaNoWriMo worsened, the other ML and I started serious discussions about withdrawing our affiliation and becoming an independent group. Our format had slowly evolved over the years, adapting to what members wanted, and we felt we could retain this aspect without external oversight.

Around this time last week, we sent a long bulletin announcing our independence and offered the opportunity for members to ask questions.

The news seemed to go down well. By this time, the MLs from most of the other regions in Scotland had also decided to step down. If anything, the decimation of NaNoWriMo has brought us closer together.

The next discussions in our local area will be about what to do with this newfound freedom. We’ve already amended our terminology to distinguish ourselves from our former identity, registered a URL for future use and discussed holding a summer writing event instead of a November one.

Whatever happens, we remain convinced that withdrawing our NaNoWriMo affiliation is the right action to take and we look forward to the year ahead.

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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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Looking at Loqueesha

There are plenty of films released each year that are given a lukewarm to negative reception. However, to make it onto the Wikipedia page titled List of films considered the worst, it has to be particularly bad.

At the time of writing, there are some predictable gems on there, like The Room (2003) and Cats (2019), along with forgotten and obscure features like Reefer Madness (1936) and Glitter (2001).

But one in particular caught my attention: Loqueesha, released about six months before Cats. It’s a vanity project directed, produced and co-written by its star Jeremy Saville.

The plot centres around a white barman who sends an audio recording to audition for an advice show on local radio. When his first attempt is rejected, he sends a second one pretending to be a black woman. After landing the job and fronting a successful show, he needs to maintain the illusion.

There are many reasons why it has a score of 1.6 out of 10 on IMDB and an astonishing 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. For a start, there aren’t enough plot points even to stretch to feature-length picture, and let’s skim over the borderline racism.

If there is one salvageable aspect of this film, it’s the dialogue. In the 98-minute running time, I don’t recall hearing much that I would describe as cliché. Yet it does need a lot of tightening to account for the lack of sub-plots. It could probably be shortened to a half or a third of its current running time, and be turned into a TV or radio drama.

There’s also a lesson here about lessening your control of a project. The staging or filming of a script is typically a collaborative process, with different people taking well-defined roles. The writing credits are shared, but perhaps doing the same for the other roles would have improved this film from bad to mediocre.

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No Fun ‘Til February

I really like January. It carries none of the bustle and hassle of December, but instead has a fresh feeling, as though the cellophane has just been removed from the new year.

There is a trade-off here, though. The relative stillness of the month means that nothing particularly literary is happening right now. We need to wait until March for both the St Andrews poetry festival – or StAnza – and the Scottish Poetry Slam Championship in Glasgow. Many other literary fairs and gatherings don’t happen until summer. Even the Scottish Book Trust has given participants until the end of this month to enter their December 50-word story competition.

Outside of the literary scene, I would normally take part in Fun a Day Dundee. This is aimed at artists rather than writers, but it’s to help them through the slump of January. I usually find a way to incorporate text. However, that event isn’t running in its usual form this year, although hopes are high for 2025.

The best I can do at the moment is to complete the books I borrowed for the readathon a couple of weeks ago and return them to the library.

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Using the Shavian Alphabet for Scots

Over the last week, an alternative rendering of English has come to my attention: the Shavian alphabet.

The name is derived from the last name of George Bernard Shaw, who disliked silent letters and non-phonetic spellings, and argued that the existing alphabet is insufficient to represent its sounds. However, he had little to do with its creation as it was developed more than a decade after he died in 1950.

Much more detail is available on a dedicated website run by one of its proponents. In simple terms, its main purpose is to eliminate ambiguous spellings by creating just one symbol for each possible sound actually used in English. For example, the current alphabet reserves just five letters for vowels as written, whereas there are around 20 vowel sounds. The letters of Shavian are more akin to Arabic than Latin.

This blog has taken longer to research than I initially imagined it would. However, no source seems to have addressed what I think is an obvious gap. The variant of English spoken in Scotland shares a similar problem with standard English in that the letters don’t necessarily match the sounds, with the extra issue that more words have more than one spelling, depending on how the speaker pronounces it.

On top of that is an additional guttural sound, represented by ch in words such as loch or Auchterhouse. This is not unique to Scotland, also appearing in languages such as Spanish and German.

In my view, adding a representation for that sound would go some way towards making it suitable for Scots speakers. The International Phonetic Alphabet devotes the letter x to it, which is not already used in Shavian, but also can’t be drawn with one stroke like the rest of its characters.

As it stands, it’s unlikely we’ll see any widespread use of the Shavian alphabet in our lifetimes. But who knows what practical applications might be found for it in the future?

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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.