Part-Time Writer E-Book

Marjorie Quarton

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 249

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Part-time Writer guides the reader through all aspects of writing – from the embryonic stages of researching and planning, to the hard slog of the writing and editing, through to the presentation of the manuscript, and finally, approaching agents and publishers. At each stage, the author explains how she did it – and how the reader can do it too. * How can I write engaging dialogue? * What can I do to make my characters 'live' on the page? * Must I always 'show and not tell'? * How can I transform a hobby into a book? * When is the right time to show my work to others? * How should I present my manuscript? * Do I need an agent? * Should I self-publish? * Where can I find the time to write a novel? In her inimitable style, Marjorie Quarton merges literary memoir, anecdotes and straight talking to provide invaluable insights into the realities of being a writer, while offering indispensable advice on the trade, making this book a must-have for any aspiring author.

Leseprobe

Part-Time Writer

Marjorie Quarton

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

PART ONE: FICTION

1. Starting

2. Preparations

3. Stories and Courses

4. Characterization

5. Birth of a Book

6. Dialogue

7. Usage and Abusage

8. Narrative and Construction

9. What Readers Want and What You Can Give Them

10. Starting to Write a Novel

11. Getting down to Business

12. Going it Alone

PART TWO: NON-FICTION

13. The Same but Different

14. Memoir and Biography

15. How-to and How-not-to

Copyright

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.

Cicero c.43BC

Foreword

I can’t claim to be writing this foreword in an impartial frame of mind. I once had the good fortune to be Marjorie Quarton’s publisher so I came to know her, and to know her is to admire and like her, so I expected in advance to admire Part-Time Writer. I am, however, speaking the plain truth when I say that now, having read it, I admire it even more. I can’t imagine a more sensible and helpful guide for the would-be writer, part-time or not.

Marjorie has turned her hand to many things, all of which she has done well. She has bought and sold horses, bred and trained sheepdogs, farmed sheep, been an antique dealer, run a charity – and in addition to all this has herself been a successful part-time writer who has helped other part-time writers towards success by running classes and by undertaking the editing of their work. It is from those last two parts of her career that she draws the wisdom and common sense that make this book so valuable.

It also reminds me of why I came to like Marjorie so much. There is no nonsense about it, and much wit and warmth, and it is also often very funny – see the section on sex and violence in chapter 9. In fact, that chapter is a good example of the book’s unusual quality as a whole. The touch is light, but what is being said is profoundly true. Although Marjorie is often downright hard-headed about the practicalities of writing, she never takes the art less than seriously: she thinks it silly to write and then fail to do the best you can to present what you have written to readers, but at the same time she never doubts that writing is worth doing well for writing’s sake. Her book will not only help people sell their work, it will also make them better writers. I think it will have a long and useful life.

Diana Athill

Introduction

I became a writer by accident. I slunk into writing by the back door. It would never have been possible for me to become a full-time author or journalist, because I am not and never was one of those who command six-figure advances and royalty cheques. Even if I were, I believe I would tire of authorship as a profession. The thought of sitting at a desk for a fixed number of hours every day fills me with a mixture of horror and boredom.

It is a fine thing to be able to describe yourself honestly as a writer, to know that you are one of a minority, in a profession generally admired and often envied. There is a thrill in seeing your name in print for the first time. (I don’t count wild promises from Reader’s Digest and the like: ‘You are a winner Mrs Quarton!!!’) I hope to show that you can achieve these things while being a part-time writer, practising an enjoyable hobby and collecting an equally enjoyable second income.

I come from a literary background and my mother urged me to ‘write a book’ when I was too young to have anything to write about. She mentioned Ernest Thomson Seton, the naturalist and writer, and his daughter, novelist Anya Seton. They were my relatives, as were Henry Seton Merriman, a fashionable author in the early 1900s, and Edith Somerville, a cousin. ‘Of course you could write a book,’ said my mother, aunts and cousins. My aunt, Evelyn Brodhurst Hill, wrote two successful books about Kenya and many articles for The Spectator in days when women who wrote political articles were scarce and treated with some suspicion. She used the painful nom de plume ‘Eve Bache’.

I wasn’t encouraged; I was alarmed. I felt I couldn’t possibly measure up to my family’s expectations. But still, I suppose a seed had been sown. I was over fifty when it finally germinated and I began, almost stealthily, to write.

I admit I was mainly motivated by money. In the 1970s, farming had improved, but drystock farming in Ireland was never a road to wealth. More importantly, two of our best sources of cash had dried up. Owing to the war in Northern Ireland, the British police forces were buying their remounts elsewhere and, even worse for us, the Swiss Cavalry had taken to motorbikes. Until then, our horse population had fluctuated between six and thirty and looking after them had been a full-time occupation on its own. We also had a kennel of working dogs and quantities of cattle and sheep. Write a book? When? How?

I had already offered an article about working dogs to Irish Farmers Journal and had in exchange been offered £25 a week for a series of six. £150 would have bought a decent bullock. I was amazed. But I knew that specialized subject well, and the average farmer did not. So the work prospered and I did another series at £40.

What else did I know about? Horse fairs. I turned to The Irish Field and had a winter column with them for eight years. Later, I wrote books about working dogs and horse fairs, made money and learned that the pitfalls that face the specialist animal writer are deep and hard to climb out of. I had, however, taken the initial plunge, was known and accepted as a writer, and could risk asserting myself.

The first part of this book concerns fiction and I was never crazy enough to imagine that I could dash off a novel and expect anyone to publish it. But I used to take the magazineWorking Sheepdog News, and send the occasional report. The editor asked readers to supply ideas for something to boost readership and wrote to me among others. The magazine was excellent of its kind, though in most families only the enthusiast was likely to read its worthy and solemn pages. I contributed a bit of nonsense called ‘Sheep at the Sheepdog Trial’, and it was so well received that I continued, encouraged by delighted phone calls and letters from people wanting ‘More about Irish sheep’.

They got it. I wrote and wrote and found my little stories turning into a little book. I’ll go back to those heady days later on. Heady, even though the magazine didn’t pay me until years later. Once I had started to write fiction, ideas crowded my mind and I went about my work in a trance. Sometimes I asked myself why I had suddenly developed an urge to write; why I had imaginary people crowding my brain, waiting to have their stories put down on paper, why their doings were suddenly of importance, so that I felt obliged to write them down. They wouldn’t leave me alone.

Many years later I gave a talk entitled, ‘Should I Write a Novel? If so, how do I start?’ Well, should you? If it clamours in your brain, demanding that you do something about it, then yes, you should.

For the past twenty-five years, I have been a part-time writer, combining it first with farming, horse dealing and dog breeding, later with a full-time PR job with a charity. I have never felt the urge to be a full-time writer, because I would feel pressure to achieve and nervousness about earning a living from it. I prefer to do what I can in my own time.

There’s nothing wrong with working full-time as journalist or author. My warning is not to give up the day job until you are sure you won’t regret it. When you have enough work on hand to give it all your time and attention and make a decent living as well, you can consider whether this is what you want or not.

When you give up work and start writing to a schedule, so many hours a day, will you still find fresh ideas? A life measured by deadlines is okay if you like your time to be ordered. If not, you might find the necessity of finishing a book, and starting another in order to keep a contract, mind-numbing. Writing should be a portable profession. Do you really want to turn your home into an office? Maybe you do, but working from home can be lonely and it’s hard to discipline yourself when those fascinating ideas have dried up. Given that you can’t just go away, shut the door and take a holiday, you might easily find that your new career was not a good idea. Not if you need to earn a living.

This book is a guide, based on courses and workshops I have held over a number of years. I know they work, because of the success rate of those that attended them. Students have been published for the first time, have continued to be successful and have won literary prizes. Latterly I have edited more than thirty books, mostly by first-timers and have had the pleasure of seeing several of them published. I think this has taught me almost as much as the writers I edit.

As a working model in the fiction section, I have chosen one of my novels, No Harp Like My Own. I use it to describe the gestation and birth of a middle-of-the road work of fiction. It has been quietly successful for more than twenty years, so I feel it is suitable, especially as it was a second novel, expected by my publishers to do as well as my first, which, eventually, it did. It’s the only one of my novels to be contemporary (well, it was in 1988) and not a researched period work.

I don’t believe in teaching something that I don’t feel capable of doing myself. That is why this book is called Part-Time Writer.

Part-Time Writer

PART ONE

Fiction

1. Starting

Are you a teenager? A busy twenty-something? A harassed housewife – or husband? A pensioner with time to spare? Perhaps you are wondering how you could fit in a serious attempt at writing. Don’t despair. There are many ways of combining a writing career with regular paid work.

I don’t mean to aim at college students in this section, because the best way of getting published for them is by way of a degree in journalism. Young people with a talent for writing fiction generally feel the need to use it. There is little similarity between a young person’s writing and that of an adult who has picked up thousands of ideas and tricks of writing along the way. The work of someone under twenty-five, however, has a freshness that doesn’t last.

There is far more support for young aspiring authors today than there was a decade back, but the chances of getting fiction published are slighter than ever. To offset this, there are opportunities for publishing online, and most of the vanity publishers have disappeared or turned respectable. They have re-emerged among the print-on-demand and subsidy houses.

It is possible to study ‘Creative Writing’ at some universities and accepted summer schools, where much depends on the tutor. Great to be tutored by the likes of David Rice, Frank McCourt or Roddy Doyle, but qualifications for teaching writing as a career are founded on academic success as much as the ability to pass it on. As in almost every branch of tuition, naturally talented teachers often inspire their students to open up and forget their inhibitions, while others, as well, or better qualified, overawe their pupils, making them self-conscious about showing their work to the great man or woman. Or they may play safe by writing exactly as instructed, nervously keeping their gifts out of sight.

All these options are aimed at full-time employment and a career in writing. I mention them so as to give a general idea of what is on offer. Now I want to consider less permanent options.

The other thing to emphasize is the fact that it’s seldom too late to start. There is so much support for young people who want to write, so little for the elderly. I was once interviewed for the post of Writer in Residence in Portlaoise. I didn’t get the job and I was told that the main reason was that I was reluctant to work with the prison inmates, suggesting instead writing sessions for retired people and those living in nursing homes.

In most retirement homes, elderly people would love to be visited by authors and perhaps take classes in short-story writing. I was born in 1930 and have edited for people of my own age group, who have been delighted with their new skill. Then there are the Active Retirement groups. For anyone retired and bored, writing could be something to try out for fun, then taken up seriously if the person developed a latent talent.

The basics

Bernard Shaw, on one of the rare occasions when he was forced to address students, asked what they thought was most essential to become a writer. A brave soul at the back suggested a pencil. Shaw’s reply is not on record. Probably it was scathing. He once stated grandly, ‘I was born a writer’.

The student had a point. A biro will do to start with, or a BlackBerry if you are so inclined. To begin, you need the simplest essentials, just enough to jot down ideas as they occur to you.

Too often, hopeful writers are over-faced by a mass of information, when what they need to know is the answer to the simplest questions. Is it in me to be a good writer? Have I got what it takes? Am I wasting my time?

The answers are as simple as the questions, but note that I said a good writer.

You need talent, imagination, an inquiring mind, above-average powers of observation, a will to succeed, and confidence.

Talent

Talent may be anything from a timid aptitude to a towering God-given gift. If you had none at all, you would be unlikely to want to study the art of writing. You might like to learn about the craft of writing, which is different, or even the trade, but without talent, you would never be any better than average.

All talents have this in common: like neglected houseplants, without nourishment, they wither and die. You have a talent for self-expression that you feel might be developed? I have news for you – the simplest way to develop talent is to use it. Use it or lose it. If you don’t use the gifts you were born with, they will atrophy and waste away. This is a particularly harmful wastage and it happens all the time.

Teaching an untalented person to write is like teaching a tone-deaf student to play the piano. It’s possible, but the resulting performance has no soul, however correct it may be. I have spent many days and weeks trying to train untalented horses to jump and untalented dogs to round up sheep. Sometimes the results were passable, but I had spent too much time and, once I stopped actively training the animals, they stopped improving and lost interest.

Before you accuse me of likening you to an untalented sheepdog, look back. You must have some aptitude or you wouldn’t be bothering to read this, so let’s assume you have it and intend to use it. If you want to train your body for athletics or muscle tone, you exercise it regularly in whatever way is appropriate. The more you carry out these exercises, the easier they become, until they are part of your life. If for any reason you stop training, your muscles will go flabby after a while. If you don’t use your talent, the neglected part of your mind will grow flabby and you won’t be able to use it to advantage. How could anybody construct a plot or create a convincing character with a flabby brain? You must practise.

Imagination

Imagination is the thing that brings your gifts to life. Like talent, you were born with it. Like talent, it can be smothered and die of neglect. Almost all children have vivid imaginations. I think this is part of our Stone-Age history. A caveman’s automatic reflexes were born of imagination. Today, if you are startled, your reflexes make you stand still, so that the sabre-toothed tiger may not notice you. The blood drains from your face, so that it can be concentrated in heart and muscles, enabling you to fight harder or run faster. Your sweating palms and soles cling to the bark, as your terror propels you up the nearest tree, with, if you are male, your genitals neatly drawn up into your body, out of reach of teeth and claws.

Children are simpler than adults. They may have real awareness of the wild animal sharpening its claws. In night-mares, they see things they have never seen when awake and, given the chance, they tell highly coloured stories. My daughter, aged about eight, was given a subject for an essay, ‘What I did in the holidays’. She thought the reality far too tame and wrote about an imaginary safari, climbing trees to escape from wild beasts. She ended up by frightening herself and I don’t think her teacher was impressed. Schoolwork is less inhibited today, but children who make up stories are still scolded for lying, which is another thing altogether.

Probably it is this early repression that makes many adults afraid to imagine. Or perhaps it’s a lack of confidence and the fear of being laughed at – I don’t know. When judging short-story competitions, I have read entries by adult beginners that didn’t ‘live on the page’, because their writers had straight-jacketed their imaginations.

Some writers are sustained by the power of their imagination. They gallop from one unlikely scene to another and their readers follow, convinced. Luckily for those writers, fantasy, science fiction and grown-up fairy tales have made a comeback. They can thank Tolkien, Pratchett and Stephen King. Consider the Booker-winning Life of Pi. I don’t know how the author got his book accepted, but I’ll bet it wasn’t on the strength of a synopsis. But, as one impossible scene follows another, the reader is caught up in the narrative. Yes, it’s crazy, but what happens next? You need to know. This is the power of the writer’s imagination carrying readers along with him.

Training your imagination is an essential part of using your talent. Observe people at work, on trains or buses, sitting on park benches. Using only what you can see and hear, build likely personalities for them and invent stories about them. There are no limits at all to what you can imagine. That big woman is a man in drag (look at her hands!). That little man scuttling by with a briefcase is an axe murderer when the moon is full. I do this in waiting rooms and airports as an antidote to boredom. I have sometimes found usable material like this – and occasionally become so absorbed in my fantasies that I’ve failed to hear my name being called.

An enquiring mind

This is a useful asset, often overlooked. If you weren’t born with one, try to acquire it. Interest in other people and a willingness to learn are vital for a journalist, but make the fiction-writer’s task much easier too. These qualities keep your mind and outlook young and your writing fresh.

You feed your inquiring mind by finding out the answers to the questions you ask yourself. If you can’t discover what you want to know, ask. Or search the Internet. I shall have more to say about the Internet later on. If you don’t use a computer, go the library, consult an encyclopaedia or specialist book on the subject. Read as widely as you can and use your critical faculties as you read. Try to keep your brain active always. I do word games and crosswords; other writers have other methods and there must be some form of brain-enhancement that you enjoy.

Powers of observation

These are essential to the journalist and writer of non-fiction, but useful for everybody. Powers of observation go hand in hand with memory, as it’s no use observing if you forget what you’ve observed. You can train your memory and you should, but it’s not a good idea to rely on it. Mine is vile and I carry a small spiral-bound notebook and use it. I say ‘spiral-bound’ because it’s good to be able to tear out pages when you no longer need them.

I refrain from jotting down ideas when in company. People look at you oddly, and deplore your manners. Fix the material in your mind with one of the mind tricks of association that most of us use, and write them down later. When I’m researching, I use a reporter’s mini-recorder. Talking to it as I google away is the quickest way to make notes. Pocket recorders are quite cheap and invaluable if your memory is bad. Tapes have almost disappeared, but I stay with my little recorder and its remaining mini-tapes, because I haven’t found anything quite as cheap and simple to use. When it finally gives out, I’ll get a grandson to explain the MP3 player to me.

The will, desire and need to succeed

Bracketed together, but all different. Desire and need are akin but dissimilar. They aren’t the same as will or ambition. You can be a good writer and have no trace of ambition in your make-up. The will to succeed is a mixture of obstinacy and perseverance. Even if you are mild, quiet and retiring by nature, you can be determined to always do your best. You mustn’t compromise. If your best isn’t good enough for a particular publisher or editor, too bad, but you must be prepared to work hard in order to find out what you can do. The results may surprise you. Nobody walks into writing. Besides the determination, you need stamina, a love of words and a love of reading. The desire and need to succeed grow from this and will carry you along nicely once past the point where you are unsure if it’s worth going on.

These are the emotions that keep you going when you are tired or disappointed. You shouldn’t aim too high to start with, or you may be permanently discouraged. Tuition helps to keep you working when you might otherwise give up. This is partly reluctance to admit to your tutor that you are beaten. A good teacher knows when to encourage and when to criticize. To those godlike creatures who write perfect prose and claim that writing cannot be taught, I say … well, I don’t say anything. Who wants enemies?

The teaching of creative writing is really a misnomer. I can’t teach anybody lacking in talent and imagination to ‘create’, only to copy and compose. I can teach people to develop the gifts they have and I can teach technique. Any tutor who claims to do more is suspect, but there are plenty who can and do teach the basics, with results to prove it.

Confidence

You don’t need huge ambition, but you do need confidence in yourself and a positive mind. If you don’t have it, try to develop it. Once you have successes, even small ones to your name, your confidence will grow naturally.

When I started writing, I was a shy person. In fact, I still am shy. Many people who think they know me will fall about laughing when they read that sentence, but it’s true. Shyness still surfaces if I find myself one of a crowd of people who know each other. I slip away and lurk near the door, wishing I were less tall. Now, public speaking no longer fills me with dread. In my early days, I turned down the chance of speaking on radio more than once. The first time I was interviewed on radio, I lay awake most of the night before, sweating with fear. Later, I turned down an appearance on the Late Late Show to my publisher’s understandable fury. I might have gone through with it, had not some liar told me that Gay Byrne didn’t like women, dogs or Protestants. When I eventually crept on stage in Kenny Live I was terrified. Only Pat’s calm acceptance of my nervousness got me through the evening. He wrote a piece in RTÉ News about it afterwards, quoting my frightened comment, ‘The dentist has a charming smile.’

If you lack confidence in the quality of your writing, I advise you not to show your work to your friends. Having it dismissed as nonsense or worse, boring, can dent your self-esteem seriously. Tell yourself that the critic may easily be wrong. Being too close to your critic is just as bad as being slated by a stranger in a book review.

Funnily enough, many people think they have a perfect right to criticize a writer’s work, dismissing it in a few cutting phrases. These self-styled critics wouldn’t dream of finding fault with your dress sense, your taste in men or women as applicable, or your baby’s looks. This is a problem with some writers’ groups, although I admit, many people swear by them. People judge one another’s work and often, the most critical are the least fit to judge.

The first-time writer is a sensitive creature as a rule, quick to imagine a slight to his or her work. You must not react. If you expect praise and get, ‘I expect I’ll read it if I get time’, it’s hard to smile as you sign the copy.

Consider the probable feelings of Edward Gibbon, when he presented the second volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to King George III, whose response was, ‘Another damned thick square book, Mr Gibbon! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr Gibbon?’

Somebody possessed of all the requirements mentioned, from talent to confidence, should be able to write for profit as well as pleasure, although I will concentrate on the pleasure aspect for the moment, because the pleasure of starting to write a novel, knowing that you may succeed, is intense.

Education

This extra heading occurred to me when being told for the hundredth time by well-informed, intelligent people, ‘Oh, I could never write; I haven’t the education.’ Lack of education comes high on the list of popular excuses for not writing. Really, it’s useful but not essential. My own education was patchy to say the least. I learned to read and write very young, did some lessons at home and didn’t go to school until I was fourteen and a half. It was the middle of the school year and I had only just reached long division in arithmetic.

I was naturally good at English and liked the sound and shapes of words, as I still do. I don’t think you need to be brilliant at English as a subject, although it helps. The feeling for language and words, which should be part of a writer’s make up, is much more important than a degree in English. Maybe you wouldn’t have got the degree without it, but not everybody has had the chance to study. The feeling for language can be cultivated, especially by reading. I have more to say about this in chapter 7.

Publishers’ editors deal with serious grammatical errors. If bad grammar was enough to condemn a book, there would be no more tough thrillers. As long as you know what is correct, you needn’t consider your grammar any more than you do when you talk. Most writers develop little ungrammatical tricks of writing. When they succeed in a big way, these are considered to be attractive hallmarks of an author’s style. They may well be worth fighting for with publishers and editors, but be careful not to endanger a contract. Raymond Chandler wrote to his publisher, ‘When I split an infinitive, Goddammit, it stays split …’

As for spelling, it isn’t a handicap unless it’s really appalling. Spellcheckers can’t help if you spell a word with two meanings. Saying ‘coarse’ for ‘course,’ or ‘paws’ for ‘pause’, bewilders any spellchecker. If you spell so badly that you don’t know the initial letter for neumonia – sorry, pneumonia – your dictionary won’t help either.

Spellcheckers are only as good as their compilers, so you can’t always trust them. One of them, baffled by ‘Jesus’ came up with ‘Jeans’ as an alternative. A Dutch lady, Bea Zwagge, wanting to sign her work, was faced with the wiggly red underline. The spellchecker then offered the alternative, ‘Beer Sewage’. ‘Quarton’ is corrected to ‘Quarto’. You can’t win.

2. Preparations

I hope you are not one of those people who can’t use a computer