Troubles always come in threes. Isn’t that what they say?
I’m writing this on April Fool’s Day and, boy, do I feel like an April Fool.
Let me explain my trio of troubles. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Shakespeare
Airy Nothing’s Timeline
I used to think that only historical novelists needed to write a timeline for a novel. Someone like me, writing contemporary fiction set pretty close to the real world, didn’t have any use for it. I read Joanna’s excellent (and detailed) account on this blog of the timeline she constructed for her Regency-set Lady in Lace. And thanked my lucky stars that this was so. (It’s a lovely book, by the way.)
Only, of course, she is not just talking about setting her characters into a sequence of historically documented events. She is talking about the timeline of the whole novel, including the stuff she’d made up. Scene by scene Joanna records what her characters do and feel as well as well as facts of place and history.
But I still thought I didn’t need that sort of hassle in a contemporary story.
And boy, was I wrong. Continue reading
The Sweet Sorrow of Endings
I have done it! I have finished my latest historical romance!
Hooray, I hear you say. At last.
About time.
It has been polished, re-polished and sent winging its merry way to The Editor, the god-like creature who will pronounce judgement upon my baby. As some old writer hack said, “parting is such sweet sorrow.”
It is an anxious time.
But while I wait, chewing my nails to the quick, I have been pondering on Life, the Universe and…
Endings
Twelfth Night
I am posting this on Twelfth Night. Well, at least, what my family have always called Twelfth Night. That’s the 6th January. It is a family birthday in our house, so it kind of sticks in the memory.
Only — maybe Twelfth Night is 5th January. The Anglican Church think that’s the right date.
SO WHEN is Twelfth Night?
What Copy Editors Do and How They Save the World
For some time now, people have been asking me to write about what copy editors do and why they’re important. This is a companion piece to last year’s little trot through the origins and history of publishers’ editing: “What Editors Do”.
Why now? I have just actually been reviewing the copy editor’s changes on the text of my new book. So the mind is focused on what I did and what it felt like.
I should point out that, like my blog on editors, this is highly personal. Though I have also drawn on conversations with copy editors and a great talk, some years ago at an RNA Chapter, by jay Dixon, a trained copy editor. Continue reading
Considering Cliché: A Writer’s Unforgivable Sin?
The very first piece of advice that I remember anyone giving me about writing was, “Avoid cliché.” I was ten. I had to look up “cliché”. So now I have a question.
A cliché is a word or phrase so worn out by overuse that it has deteriorated until it is meaningless. It may once have been striking. Today it is white noise.
The gentle reader ignores it. The ungentle critic berates the writer for laziness and lack of originality.
Dickens got away with “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done,” because he thought of it first. After that it became popular, then heard widely, then untouchable by any writer with pretensions to respectability.
Cliché, the Reader’s Friend?
Nice words: he Rats, they Badger, but does anyone Mole?
Language is a writer’s basic toolkit. Writers — novelists, playwrights, poets, lyricists, and all the rest — use words to trigger emotional responses or to paint pictures in the minds of their readers and listeners.
How can we fail to see layers of meaning in creations like these?
- the wine-dark sea (Homer, Ancient Greece)
- sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care (Shakespeare: Macbeth, 1606)
- nursing her wrath to keep it warm (Robert Burns: Tam O’Shanter, 1790)
- moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black (Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood, 1954)
English, a pickpocket stealing words?
How to Become a Wizard
Day 7 And a day of rest for the industrious Joanna . . .
An author, in Shakespeare’s words, gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. But that still leaves a pretty misty prospect. The habitation has no postcode.
Names often have more substance, admittedly. You only have to think of Sir Toby Belch or the Cheeryble Brothers to realise that. But they’re still in the middle of an open circuit. It needs something else to close it.
