Colin Harvey – author

SF writer and journalist Gareth L Powell made this timely comment:  Just as you climb a mountain one step at a time,
you have to keep putting one word after another if you want to write a book.

He’s quite right. Writing a novel is also like batting to save a cricket match. One ball at a time, one over at a time, one seesion at a time. Looking too far ahead spells disaster. But the novelist, having to be all-seeing and all-powerful, sometmes has no option but to look up from the detail. 

I used to compare writing a novel to an impressionist painting, but there’s a better metaphor, I’ve now realized. A novel is like a picture made up of 100,000 pixels, with each representing a pixel. Miss out a thousand words, and you have a picture with a hole in its whole.

And today I looked up and was paralyzed, as if my wall had been put on its side and was Everest-high.

I had fallen behind from my (admittedly) self-imposed target of 1400 words a day by the end of August. I had had to work in the morning, whereas I like to write before the day’s smorgasbord of irritations, distractions and events can fill my head and push out all thoughts of Terraformers and Pantropists.

Worse, when I awoke this morning, I realized that my chapter outline wasn’t going to work — so not only was I 600 words behind, but I had no idea how to write my 1400 for today, let alone catch up the backlog.

The answer? Stare harder at the pixels. What’s missing? Some necessary detail on motivation. Why is the hero a mercenary? Why has the heroine come to do her duty on a world that doesn’t like her? How do I show that the hero is gengineered? Through conflict, of course. There’s another mini-scene. One word at a time. One sentence at a time. One day at a time.

When you feel that awful sense that you’re going to fall and/or fail, stare hard at the detail and fill those pixels in.

I was supposed to be working on a synopsis this morning, but I hit a bit of a road block. So when I saw a recent  Guardian article that tied in with a couple of recent conversations, I thought it worth taking a few minutes out to post something at Suite101.  

But now I’ve done that, I’d better get back to work.

Various bits of Odds and Sods-ery for your erm, pleasure today.

First of all, I’m pleased to see that I’m not the only person who was pissed off at the BBC for allowing a cartoon Graham Norton to clamber across the screen at the supposed climax of Doctor Who last night. What were they thinking of when they decided to do that? Were they thinking at all? Seriously, Beeb, WTF?

It’s enough that we have to cope with a new Doctor (jury still out, but generally OK) a new assistant (thumbs up) and the most intrusive music and background noise since 1972 (thumbs very much down) but now this? What’s the point of making drama programmes if you throw the audience out of the drama at key moments?  If you want to complain, here’s the link.  I urge you to do so, or we’ll have no quality of programming at all.

And I’ve posted the latest review at Suite101; in line with my continuing fascination with Children’s Literature I borrowed The Wolves of Willoughby Chase from Newton Park Library. It’s a good-ish book, marred somewhat by the moron who borrowed it before me deciding that they were an editor, and that they could ‘improve’ on Aiken’s prose. So many, many passages have been pencilled through and ‘alternative text substituted in the margins or over other text.

Are you sensing a theme this morning?

Well, if so, here’s something completely different. The launch of Silversands yesterday included Gareth L Powell reading a chapter of his debut novel and free vino. What more could you want? Certainly not me desperately improv-ing a 30-second interview on AudioBoo…

This will only be a short post, as it’s just before 9.15 am, and I have to be out of the door by 10 o’clock, to get to uni for the first lecture of term.

At the end of last term I was faced with the prospect of handing in five assignments in eight calendar days, from Monday the 10th to Monday the 17th of May. It’s clearly do-able, but needed planning and to get ahead.

I’ve at least made a start on four of them, although all will still need further polishing. But on the back of 1400 words written this morning, I’ve posted over at Suite101 about one of them. It’s a children’s novel about a boy with the (deliberately) unfortunate name of Brian Brain, and which contains a single element of fantasy to what is otherwise a mainstream novel.

The clamour of the alarm at 05.30 announced that the Easter holidays are officially over.

Not that it was –the middle week aside– ever a holiday in the proper sense; all writers know that there’s always something that needs to be done, and there were still assessments to be worked on.

So I wrote the first 1100 words of my Creative Writing assessment, which one day may become a Middle-Years novel tentatively titled Brian;  submitted a 1500 word proposal for an anthology to the Arts Council; and wrote a 2500 word article on spec on SF. Plus there are always books and magazines to be reviewed and blog posts to be written.

But I also had a lovely week off with Kate, and last weekend we went down to Poole and Wimborne (in Dorset) for a charity pub quiz (we raised £537 for a bursary in memory of our late nephew), and the next day it was our great-niece’s 1st birthday, which called for a big family party.

But now the alarm’s gone off and it’s back to work…officially.

The judges have released their shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a fine list it is.

A lot of what I’ve been writing lately is intended less as Words of Wisdom than as the electronic equivalent of me thinking aloud. This has the benefit of enabling me to argue with myself as I grope toward understanding of the genre I work in. The latest musing is just how separate (or inter-connected) the short fiction and novel markets are.

After a couple of recent ventures into Children’s Lit I’ve gone back to genre, with a review of Lavie Tidhar’s wonderful The Bookman at Suite101.

Those of you on Facebook, LJ and other fora may have noticed updates for some of my book pages on the website yesterday. They were generated by my adding links to The Book Depository.

Partly this is to generate a little additional revenue, since I get a 5% commission where customers buy through the link –as well as royalties– but partly it’s also a little dig at Amazon. I missed a trick in that I’m not an Amazon affiliate, so any time you click on the ‘buy from Amazon’ link, I got the royalty on sales of new titles, but no commission.

However, I’ve held back at becoming an associate. I’m sure I’m not the only author tired of their recent bully-boy tactics; in removing the ‘buy buttons’ from our titles as a negotiating tactic with our publishers, it smacks of the way totalitarian regimes have parked their tanks alongside neighbours’ borders over the course of the last century or so prior to making demands or invading. 

So this is my little protest. It won’t amount to a hill of beans, but it makes me feel better.

Oh, and today’s review is Anne Fine’s classic Goggle Eyes, or The War Against Goggle Eyes as it was published in the USA. Part of my new reading regime….

When I started writing about the differences between novels and short stories, I envisaged it as one blog post, but as so happens with writing, it turned into a trilogy, despite my best efforts to keep each post as lean as possible.  Here is the last part of the post, with thanks to Sheila Crosby, Jim Hawkins and Gareth L Powell for offering their thoughts along the way.