Guest Blogger Rebecca Colby: Ten Commandments of a Serious Writer

Rebecca Colby's photo, writing with a baby on her lap, is one of my favourite images from the 10th birthday video of SCBWI. She is one of the 'almost-there's' of SCBWI's unpublished fraternity, one of those unpublished writers who make winning prizes a past-time, while waiting for the undeserved rejection slips to change their tune. At SCBWI's recent whizz-bang 10th birthday conference, Rebecca, as expected, casually won the competition to write up her top ten tips for creative people. Visit Rebecca's website here.
Here is her hilarious entry!

1. Thou shalt not stalk editors and agents on-line, or send them boxes of chocolates with your manuscript. They far prefer bottles of wine and being cornered in lifts.

2. Thou shalt not place false images of photographs or other likenesses of oneself on websites and jacket flaps that are more than five years old because—believe it or not--these are no longer likenesses!

3. Thou shalt not steal napkins from coffee shops. If you need something to write on, scribble tattoos on your skin instead. You’re more apt to be sent to prison for indecent exposure than stealing a serviette, and what better way to find time and space to write. (It certainly didn’t do Jeffrey Archer any harm.)

4. Thou shalt not fill slushpiles with anything you’ve written that your mother, granny, auntie, best friend’s cousin, etc. declare they love, because the chances are that any editor you send it to WON’T! Get a second opinion.

If you share your book with the dog and he doesn’t try to eat it, then it might not be rubbish after all. In which case, send it to a consultancy agency first--after remortgaging the house to pay for it. It will be worth it! They will cover your manuscript in red ink to ensure you get your money’s worth.

Alternatively, you could just sell the house and self-publish. Your name on a title deed will never match the thrill of your name on the cover of a book. Even if you only sell four copies. Bought by your mother, granny, auntie and best friend’s cousin.

5. Thou shalt not curse (or cry) when Julia Eccleshare does not wax lyrical about your book. It doesn’t matter. It’s only one opinion. Never mind that she is one of the most respected children’s book reviewers in the country. With a degree in English literature from Cambridge. Who has spent her entire working life critiquing children’s books. It doesn’t matter. Much.

6. Thou shalt not lie and tell your partner you’ve been writing all day, when in fact, you’ve been catching up with your friends on Facebook, surfing the Internet and playing Bejeweled. (Technically speaking, however, tweeting and texting counts as writing.)

7. Thou shalt not take another writer's name in vain, even after she (or he) has written your book—that same book with the similar premise, plot, character, etc. that you’ve spent the last five years pouring your heart and soul into—and published it before you. (But you may consider suing her if you believe she’s been spying on you in your locked garden shed 200 miles away from where she lives, or you think she’s been telepathically reading your mind. Especially if she’s sold the movie rights to the book.)

8. Thou shalt not succumb to middle grade spread. BIC means placing ‘Butt In Chair,’ not dunking ‘Biscuits In Coffee.’ No one wants to spend their first advance on elasticated waistband trousers. (And don’t let your books grow saggy, flabby middles either.)

9. Thou shalt not kill time. You can train yourself to write anywhere, at any time, with any number of children bouncing on your knee, off the walls, or sneaking off to stick their hand in the toilet in the name of discovery (or is that just my kid?!)

They’re your inspiration, not a distraction. Don’t waste time cleaning (your children will have far better immune systems if you don’t—especially if they get a kick out of sticking their hands in the toilet), or cooking (these same kids will have dropped plenty of leftovers on the carpet to eat) or Googling your name (lest you discover a transvestite librarian in Wisconsin uses your name for his female persona—no joke!). The ironing will keep. You won’t. Don’t wait until you are lined with more wrinkles than your clothes to make time for your writing.

10. Thou shalt not loot the family’s holiday budget for writing conferences. Unless you take the family with you. And the conference is in Italy.

SCBWI British Isles is Ten!

This is actually a momentous occasion, folks: the very first post by my new blogging partner Teri Terry! That's her pictured right. Now that my fortunes have changed, I've started a new blog (please follow me, so I don't look so unloved). The blog is targeted at readers. Notes from the Slushpile has always been focused on writers and so shall it remain. I think in this new age where there are so many voices on the internet, it would be a waste to give up this blog which has run for six years, with a peak audience of 2,500 readers a day. The audience has drooped as my blogging dwindled because of writing commitments - but have no fear, we have a plan. To start with I have recruited Teri Terry to blog with me ... but eventually I hope to turn Notes from the Slushpile into an online magazine, open to contributions and wisdom from all you other travellers out there who have experience of the slushpile. Onward and upward! Candy Gourlay

I am fired up, raring to go, and excited about writing, and it isn’t just because Candy has let me loose on her blog! I just spent the weekend at the 10^th anniversary celebration and mass book launch that was the SCBWI British Isles Onwards and Upwards conference.

It was brilliant time catching up with friends old and new, and I even learned a few things along the way. Some are not what you’d expect, at all….

TERI'S TOP TEN TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

1. A two hour journey on motorways on a rainy Friday afternoon takes over four hours.

2. Do not – under any circumstances – take the wrong path. In a graveyard. Alone. In the dark, in the rain, when you are late and don’t have time to retrace your steps. This is a very, very bad idea.

It is also good not to read anything written by Nick Cross before this walk...

3. Watch out for the Undead (see no. 2), and strange eyes that follow you late at night, from under the stairs.

OK, I feel your skepticism. Believe me: this looked much scarier

in the dark at 2 a.m. after walking through a graveyard

4. There are four P’s, and they are important to story: Plot, Pace, Place, and People. Marcus Sedgewick says so, and as well as inspiring and clever, he is rather divine. This was universally agreed in the back row at his keynote.

The Divine Mr M

5. The guys wear the best shoes.

6. An editorial director at a major publisher – no names dropped, here – can be rather lovely, and encouraging, and positively wonderful. In fact, a few ideas were born, and the whole process is looking more of a hill than a mountain.

Rebecca Hill for Usborne, Kayt Bochenski for Harper Collins, Tom Truong for Stripes, Sarah Lilly for Orchard, Brenda Gardner for Picadilly, and Bella Pearson for David Fickling Books

7. Purple is The Colour of 2010.

Julienne Durber & Philippa Francis:

on trend in the colour purple

8. It is ok to be an Internet Slut, Fetishist, or Experimentalist. It is also ok to update your Facebook status while attending a talk on Social Networking. In fact, it is practically required.

Keren David can't control herself (neither can I)

9. There is a bell in case of emergencies. I’m not sure what happens if you ring it, but it is good to know it is there.

It was outside my door at my B&B : it was SO hard not to ring it!

10. Helium filled balloons may be pretty, but they don’t make good travelling companions in the back of a car.

They just refused to duck down! Imagine!

Of course, there were also the Expected.

The conference was run like a well organized machine by dedicated SCBWI volunteers; the speakers were inspiring; everyone was there ready to work and play hard. The editor and industry panels told all their secrets. My talented and understanding critique group got on just fine without me as I dealt with motorways, and the Undead.

So hard at work! Lucy van Smit, Kathryn Evans, Mariam Vossough, Linda Lawlor and friends

Party time! John Shelley, Candy Gourlay & Benjamin Scott

Special thanks to Bex Hill, Benjamin Scott and all the other lovely SCBWI volunteers involved in making the conference such a success; to Paula Harrison for getting me there and back, with only a few wrong turns, red light and balloon-related incidents; and to Candy Gourlay for putting together such an amazing video of Scooby-ites working hard at their craft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0WEnLYSrd0). I don’t think anyone could watch it without feeling proud to be a part of SCBWI, and a little choked up.

Our amazing conference chair, Bex Hill, and party guru, Benjamin Scott

Now for the big question: how are we ever going to top this next year?

Slowmo Wrimo? Just keep going

Well it's the second week of Nanowrimo. How's it going?

Are you feeling like this:

Or like this:


(With thanks to Meg Rosoff for this brilliant animation.)

Nicola Morgan had some fine advice for Wrimo people; though there were some driven to grumpiness by theWrimo hysteria that seemed to overwhelm the web in the run-up to November.

Me, I think it's a good idea - IF it's the kick in the backside that you need. It's almost the end of the second week now. Tina Matanguihan of the Refine Me blog invited me to write a pep talk for Filipino Wrimos. I was very happy to oblige.

I did a talk for the second week - the week when Wrimos usually hit The Wall.

Thinking about what advice to give, all I could think was that whatever happens the end result of this exercise should be USEFUL. That the quantity of words should be in a shape that can be remodelled into the quality that was eschewed by this project in the name of getting the book down.

So here's my pep talk, for what it's worth. And thank you, Tina for making me stop and think about it. Nick Cross, look away now:

Greetings Wrimo Writers!

It’s Week Two, how are you coping? Are you still gliding swiftly on beautiful turns of phrase, skilfully churning out the chapters, on target to hit the half-way mark by the end of the week – which, by the way (she adds helpfully), is 25,000 words?

Or have the words gone gluey in your brain, those perfectly formed sentences dangling just beyond your reach as you sit frozen over a screen, taunted by that stupid screensaver of holiday snaps from happier days, never to return?

Before I turned to fiction, I worked for  a news features agency in London. Every day I dropped the baby off at the child minder at 8.30am, got to the office by 9am, left work at 5pm sharp to collect the baby, having written two 600 word articles. EVERYDAY. I did phone interviews before 12pm, had a quick sandwich and was writing by 1pm.

This was when I discovered the truth about Writer’s Block:

There is no such thing.

There is no such thing as losing your ability to write. There is no such thing as losing your talent. But there is such a thing as having nothing to write about.

What most writers declare to be Writer’s Block is nothing more than a lack of ideas.

A lack of ideas is nothing more than a lack of information.

And why would there be a lack of information? Because there is work to be done.

On that agency job, all the times that I couldn’t get words out it was because I didn’t have enough info to make my story. So I picked up the phone and asked some more questions. I picked up the newspaper to do some more research. And inevitably, the story would take shape. At 5pm I could press the send button on that telex machine (yes, those were the days) and go home to give my baby some dinner.

If NaNoWriMo were about quality and not quantity, I would be prescribing all sorts of inspirational activities – read a poem, watch a good movie, gaze out a window. But this is about churning out a novel, folks, not crafting: CHURNING. To get those words out, you can’t stop moving.

Here are a some tips to help you get over that first Wall, however fat and solid and tall it may be.

• Make sure you’ve got something to write. Words don’t just come when summoned. They need a story with living breathing characters, problems, settings and plot to hang on. If you seem to have hit a brick wall – can it be that you need to do some work on your story?

• Stay in your seat, keep those fingers on the keyboard. Do you need a rest? DON’T. That’s right. Don’t take a break. Don’t get yourself another coffee. Don’t check your email. Write the next sentence, however hard that is. And when you’ve finished writing it, write another one. And another. No novel was ever written without keeping one’s buttocks on the seat.

Just keep swimming!

• Break it down. Wrimo writers should write with their eye on the prize: 50,000 words. WRONG. 50,000 words divided by 30 days in November is about 1,700 words a day. Plan a day here and there where your target is 2,000. Plan a day here and there where your target is 500. Smaller targets are achievable, making days with bigger targets less threatening.

• Sketching. When the pretty words aren’t coming, try sketching. Use phrases, no details, no dialogue unless it comes to you easily. Use big brush srokes. See your scenes in their bare bones. It is so much easier to write pretty words when you have a structure to hang them on.

• Turn reported description into active scenes. You’re doing okay, getting the story out, but your word count is dismal. How can you boost word count without resorting to useless padding? Here’s what you do: read through and find a “reported” scene. A reported scene is something like “Carlos despises Maria”. In Show and Tell, it’s the Tell. It’s not on the stage. Put it on the stage. Turn that into a scene. How Carlos asks Maria on a date but forgets to turn up. And when Maria rings him, he makes her feel small and stupid, as if she deserved to be left in the lurch. Literally, turn it into a Show – not only is it better writing, it will fatten up your word count!

• Use back story to build even more scenes. Exposition is the bane of novel writers, right? Those long explanatory paragraphs that get in the way of the action – so boring but so necessary. Necessary, sure but you can avoid the boring part by sneakily slipping it somewhere else in the text – maybe not even in the same chapter. This is called a Set up, a fine way to build word count!

Check your chapters for long bits of exposition. Cut them out! Now find a sneaky place in an earlier chapter where you can plant a scene that serves that purpose. A scene – meaning a mini-event (see the previous point about turning description into scenes). Now when you get to the part of the story where the back story used to be the reader already knows about it. Your story skips apace, and so does your word count.

So there you are. The wall is scaled. The two weeks are almost done. Two more weeks to go.

Keep those fingers flying, and keep your bottom on that seat. After all is said and done, just getting on with it is what you have to do. And then believe you me, 50,000 words are coming soon to a manuscript near you.

Congratulations.