ANNABEL SMITH

What do a monk, a spider monkey, a clifftop temple and a tsunami have in common? They all feature in my fourth novel, an epic adventure in which an immortal cocaine-addicted scientist, a super-intelligent monkey and a naive monk join forces to overthrow an evil priestess in a race against time against the mother of all tsunamis! 

For the month of June I have the privilege of being Emerging Writer-in-Residence at the Fellowship of Australian Writers WA and I will be working intensively on this new novel. It is a huge departure for me in terms of style and content, and is also much more plot-driven than anything I have written before. So I am on a steep learning curve and being challenged in new ways every time I sit at my desk - which is what I love about writing.

The last time I had a writing intensive I wrote 10,000 words in one week. If I could match that pace for this residency I would be close to finishing a first draft, which would be amazing. But I don’t want to be unrealistic in my expectations and put myself under too much pressure. Most weeks writing at home I average between 1000 and 200 words, so anything I can write over and above that figure will be wonderful. 

As well as working on my novel, I will be conducting mentoring sessions with early career writers, and running two workshops, one on Social Media for Writers, and a second on the art of plotting.

I have also been invited to speak at a dinner commemorating 75 years of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in WA.

I’ll update you on my progress as I go, so watch this space, and if there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about my residency, or my new novel, sing out in the questions.

Want more? Personal Novel Writing Week aka PeNoWriWe

As you may know, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, takes place in November each year. All over the world people try to write 1667 words a day, every day, with the aim of having a 50,000 word draft by the end of the month. The event, which has been running for more than a decade, now attracts more than 200,000 participants each year.

I tend to be a very slow writer – my first two novels each took around four years to write, so the idea of getting a sizeable portion of a novel down in a month was very appealing to me. I was thinking seriously about committing to NaNo in 2012 but when my novel, Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, was scheduled for release on November 1^st, I thought my energies would be better spent on promotion in that month instead. Still, the idea of NaNo haunted me.

I decided to apply the principals of NaNo to a single week. I arranged to stay with a friend who has a writer’s studio on his beautiful property in Cowaramup, in WA’s south-west. Free from the normal round of domestic duties and parenting, with a self-imposed ban on social media, I set myself the goal of writing 10,000 words in 5 days. I called it PeNoWriWe (Personal Novel Writing Week).

I wrote for the first time using Scrivener, a software program designed specifically for writers. One of its features is that it allows you to set a target for each writing session. As I came closer to my target each day, a bar in a little pop-up box in the corner of my screen went from red to amber to green.

Having a visual representation of my progress towards my target was much more motivating than simply seeing the word count go up and it kept me sitting at my desk after I normally would have given up. (I was a little disappointed that nothing happened when I hit the target – I wanted a little animated dude to come out and play a trumpet fanfare or something; maybe they can consider that for the next version).

                                         the view from my desk

I learnt some interesting things about myself during PeNoWriWe. One is that it takes me a while to get rolling. Most mornings I wrote only 500 words, whereas in the afternoons I wrote three times that much. The other thing I learnt is that when I really push myself, and, if I can eliminate all distractions, I am capable of writing 2000 words a day.  Yes! I hit my target and wrote the entire first chapter of my new novel Ciudad.

Your turn: Have you ever taken part in NaNoWriMo or something similar? Or have you ever squirreled yourself away to get a creative project off the ground? Are you motivated by little glowing bars in a pop-up window? Or does it take something more to keep your nose to the grindstone? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Want more?

Remembering How to Write or Bookish Goals for 2013

2012 was an exciting year for me in a bookish sense. I read many great books, had a novel published, and became an avid user of social media. I decided to set some bookish goals for 2013 in all of these areas:

Reading

Though I’ve been a member of Goodreads for a while, 2012 was the first year I faithfully recorded every book I read. Last year I started 65 books, of which I finished 52 (abandoning 13 due to lack of interest). This year I wanted to challenge myself to finish a few more books.

Bookish Goal #1 Read 64 books (1 each week plus one bonus book each month)

2012 is also the first year I’ve ever taken part in a reading challenge, which was the Australian Women Writers (AWW) Reading and Reviewing Challenge. This made me pay attention, for the first time, to the nationality and gender of the authors whose books I was reading. At the end of the year I made a super-nerdy spreadsheet which included, among other things, the country of origin for each book I read and the author’s gender. I discovered that 90% of my reading is fiction from the USA and that I read twice as many books by male authors as by female. Though I read a lot of great books last year I’d like to read more Australian books as well as reading more widely from the rest of the world, and I’d like to try to balance the sales in terms of gender:

Bookish Goal #2 Read 12 books by Australian women writers and share my reviews with the AWW Challenge community.

Bookish Goal #3 Read one translated book per month. In order to stay on track with this I’ve signed up for the Translation Challenge hosted by Curiosity Killed the Bookworm and I’ll be following reviews on Winston’s Dad which specialises in translated fiction.

2012 was a year of firsts for me, as it is also the first time I took part in a meme, (yes! I’m talking about Top Ten Tuesday) which I stumbled across via Hollie from Music, Books and Tea. Reading the lists each week, I kept seeing the same books appear over and over again, books which I’ve always meant to read and have for various reasons, avoided, or never made time for. Which leads me to my next goal:

Bookish Goal #4 Catch up on some neglected modern/contemporary classics, including:

·        We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver

·        Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

·        Underworld, by Don DeLillo

·        Franny & Zooey by JD Salinger

·        The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

·        Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner

·        Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolf

Writing

My second novel was published in November 2012. The first print run was of 3000, of which approximately 1500 have sold so far.

Bookish Goal #5 Sell 3000 copies of Whisky Charlie Foxtrot. Yep, I’m shooting for a reprint…halfway there. You can help me reach my goal by buying my book, requesting it at your local library and/or adding it to your to-read list on Goodreads. If you need convincing you can read this review or those on Amazon or Goodreads.

Bookish Goal #6 Publish my third novel, a speculative fiction called The Ark, with an accompanying interactive multi-media website.

Bookish Goal #7 Complete a first draft of my new novel, Ciudad. I have literally just started this novel (only 10,000 words in) and will be busy trying to get The Ark out into the world, but I hope I can still make some steady progress on this one.

Social Media

I started my blog in 2011 but I only wrote three posts in that entire year! Last year I blogged pretty regularly, but have been disappointed by the lack of response to many of my blog posts:

Bookish Goal #8 Attract more engaged readers to my blog i.e. people who leave comments. I’ve done a lot of reading around this, and followed many of the suggestions I’ve come across, but it doesn’t seem to have made much difference. I welcome more suggestions…in the comments!

Bookish Goal #9 Grow my audience. Last year I created a Facebook page and started Tweeting and I’d love to connect with more readers on those networks. If you haven’t already done so, I’d love to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter.

Bookish Goal #10 Discover and connect with more like-minded readers and bloggers. Through both Top Ten Tuesday and the AWW Challenge I discovered a whole new world of people who love books enough to spend their spare time blogging about them, and I look forward to discovering more in 2013.   

Phew! Looking back at this list, it feels a bit overwhelming. But I’m sure I’ll have some fun in the process of working towards these things.

Your turn: What bookish goals have you set for 2013? Is there a book you’ve always wanted to read? A novel you want to start writing? I’d love to hear about it.

Want more?

The First Ten Books I Plan to Read in 2013

2012: A Year in Writing

After a long fallow period following the publication of my first novel, A New Map of the Universe, 2012 has been an exciting year for me creatively, with the publication of my second novel Whisky Charlie Foxtrot. Like all writers I have also had plenty of rejections, unsuccessful applications for residencies and grants, slower progress than hoped on various projects and other frustrations and setbacks. Overall though, I feel that the achievements have far outweighed the disappointments for me this year.

Some of my highlights have been:

• Publishing my second novel Whisky Charlie Foxtrot
• Receiving an inaugural Creative Australia Fellowship from the Australia Council
• Finishing a second draft of my third novel The Ark
• Contributing the ‘Year in Australian Fiction’ Essay to Westerly Journal
• Publishing a short story in Southerly Journal
• Starting a fourth novel, titled Ciudad
• Reading 52 books (and giving up on 14)
• Keeping track of all my reading and writing reviews on Goodreads
• Writing 69 blog posts
• Starting tweeting and gaining 147 followers (best Twitter moment: receiving a reply to a Tweet I wrote to Margaret Atwood!)
• Signing up for the Australian Women Writers Reading & Reviewing Challenge
• Taking part in the Top Ten Tuesday Meme

Your turn: How has 2012 been for you creatively? Have you written an end-of-year round-up? Please feel free to link to it in the comments.

Every Tuesday The Broke and the Bookish hosts a meme inviting book bloggers to post a top ten; this week’s theme is ten books or writers we’re thankful for.

The writers on my list are those who, through both innovation and incredible talent, have stretched my ideas of what’s possible in fiction and given me both inspiration and a form of instruction by example for my own writing.

1. Ernest Hemingway

Touted as ‘the writer’s writer’, if you can get past the machismo, he’s the ultimate teacher of how to say everything by saying nothing.

2. Ann Patchett

Patchett does relationship drama like no other; when I had to kill off a beloved character in A New Map of the Universe, I looked to Bel Canto for guidance.

3. Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar is a brilliant example of the kind of taut prose many writers strive for, and Plath’s Letters Home illustrates her incredible determination and dedication to her craft - the ultimate inspiration for aspiring writers.

4. Tobias Wolff

5. Joan Didion

6. Jonathan Safran Foer

7. Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje’s swooning prose was the style I aspired to in A New Map of the Universe; every sentence of his is a poem. Utterly gorgeous.

8. Jonathan Franzen

Part-way through writing my third novel, The Ark, I totally lost my way and was creatively blocked for a few months. Then I read an interview with Franzen in The Paris Review and his insight into his own writing process helped me to understand the essential problem with my own story. I worship at his altar!

9. Margaret Atwood

For me, Atwood is the writer who showed the world that genre is not a dirty word. She can do speculative fiction and historical fiction and any darn thing she turns her hand to. All hail Atwood!

10. Felix Gilman

Gilman’s irreverant rollicking style and exuberant world-building in The Half-Made World is the touchstone for my next writing project, Ciudad, where nothing feels too crazy to be included.

What books or writers are you thankful for?

Want more?

Top Ten Books About Sibling Rivalry

Top Ten Books That Should Never Be Forgotten

Connect with me on Facebook

Lately, I’ve become interested in the concept of ‘story arcs’. An arc is essentially, the journey from the opening of a story to the resolution of a conflict, via the peak of the crisis, and in its most basic form it looks something like this:                

via Begin… Begin Again

When I wrote my first novel, A New Map of the Universe, I gave no thought to story arcs. It was not because I didn’t think they were important, but because I had no understanding of the mechanics of how to write a novel. I just sat down and wrote what came out. As a result, I wrote a book which, though praised for the beauty of its language and its emotional depth, didn’t really keep people up at night.

My second novel, Whisky Charlie Foxtrot, centres on the story of a man in a coma, which is, by definition, a state in which nothing happens… not exactly page-turner material. Intuitively I understood that the stasis of Whisky’s condition had to be punctuated by a series of dramatic episodes. Some of these came from research into secondary complications of coma (for example, a life-threatening spike in temperature) and others came from flashbacks to Whisky’s life before his accident.

Inadvertently, I had stumbled across the concept of story arcs, though I still didn’t call them this. But what I learnt from writing Whisky Charlie Foxtrot is that the larger arc of the story actually comprises several smaller arcs. The number of arcs, and the shape (i.e. steepness) of their curves relates directly to the levels of tension for the reader, and, if combined with ‘cliff-hanger’ endings, create that feeling of being literally unable to put a book down. So a book with a really thrilling story might have a story arc that looks more like this:

via Darcy Pattison

These kind of story arcs are traditionally more associated with ‘genre’ fiction i.e. murder mysteries, thrillers, etc But there is undoubtedly a new wave of ‘literary-genre’ fiction, as exemplified by books like Hugh Howey’s speculative fiction Wool, and Justin Cronin’s zombie/vampire trilogy The Passage. These books carry all the hallmarks of literary fiction – complex multi-faceted characters, settings rendered in great detail, descriptive language, engaging dialogue etc But on top of this, they have the heart-in-your-mouth thrills and spills of epic adventure stories.

My writing process for my first three novels has been what you might call ‘organic’ i.e. unplanned. But I am about to begin a new novel, tentatively titled Ciudad, and for the first time, I am going to plot it in advance, using my new understanding of story arcs. The overall story arc involves a naïve young monk, a cocaine-addicted mad scientist and a super-intelligent monkey in a race against time to save a group of mute children from being sacrificed by an evil priestess, before a tsunami strikes their city. It sounds completely crazy, right? But wait, there’s more. Some of the mini story arcs I plan to incorporate include a punch-up in a brothel, a duel and a prison break-out. Eat your heart out Dan Brown!

What are your thoughts on story arcs? Do you use them in your writing? Or notice them in your reading? What kind of incidents do you think make for excellent mini-arc episodes? Make me a list in the comments and I’ll take on the challenge of putting them in my new book. And don’t hold back!