The latest edition.

Taiwan!

A Música das Borboletas.

I noticed this morning that my blog and website have had a sudden influx of visitors from Portugal, which alerted me to the fact that A Música das Borboletas, the Portuguese translation of The Sound of Butterflies, must be out! It's a lovely cover, I think. I'm intrigued to see what will happen to the translation in the places where, in the English language version, I wrote some dialogue in Portuguese. I guess some copies will inevitably find their way to Brazil, and I wonder what the reaction to the book will be there (I did give it to a couple of genuine Brazilians to read before it was published).

Полет бабочек

The Sound of Butterflies for those of you who can read Russian... and I now know that my name in Russian is Рейчел Кинг. 

Progress. And the importance of different types of readers.

Despite my diminished working time, I feel that I have made some significant progress in the last week or so. You might say that I have broken the back of the novel, although given the mood swings that go with writing a novel, it could have knitted its own spine back together by next week for all I know.

At this point I can see the end, and know just what I need to do in order to get to the end of the first draft. It's just a matter of systematically working through each section that needs to be added (in contrast to the last one, I have not worked from beginning to end, I have jumped around a lot). It's been slow. I have installed a picometer to the right (you may have noticed it creeping slowly upwards), but I have written many more than 42,000 words over the past year - 42,000 is just the number of words that have stuck. And I do tend to revise somewhat as I go, so I don't race through a complete draft and turn around at the end, breathless, to see what I've got. I know what I've got. Now. I say 'now' because a few weeks ago I definitely lacked clarity; clarity which I now have gained. I think. (Hark at her, how certain she sounds!)

I decided it was time to send some out to a trusted reader. Most of my readers are other writers. I will be having a long overdue meeting with my writing group when I go to Wellington in March (I say long overdue, but I have not been ready up until now). But in the meantime, I needed another type of reader. Not a writer-reader, but a reader-reader. So I sent it off to my friend Mary (not Mary McCallum fyi). What is great about Mary is that she is a very careful and intelligent reader. She will not only get excited for me if she is enjoying it, she will tell me exactly what works and why. She is the perfect person to send my first four chapters to because she will ask a lot of questions about what is going on, and then tell me whether or not I am answering them sufficiently.

I got a wonderful email back from her, saying all the things I needed to hear right now to give me the boost to keep on going. And I don't mean just unconditional praise such as you might get from your mum or husband, but useful positive criticism. From a very clever reader's perspective. She added, at the end, somewhat apologetically, that the new novel is more sophisticated and complex than The Sound of Butterflies ("not that there's anything wrong with The Sound of Butterflies," she said). And I wrote back and told her that in fact that was the highest praise she could give me, because any novelist's fear for their second book is that people will say "well it was OK, but it wasn't as good as her first one".

I'm looking forward to my writer-readers' feedback too, which will no doubt be more critical, but for now, Mary has given me the energy to keep going. You could say that she is that elusive 'perfect reader' I have in mind when I write my books. Now that she's given it the seal of approval, I can continue with confidence. Because sometimes a writer can't see the bloody wood for trees, and some outside help is what is needed. Thanks Mary.

Are you a putter-inner or a taker-outer?

Not the most technical of terms, I know. As my first draft starts to move more swiftly and I work out just what I need to write in order to get there, I've been thinking about the different ways people write their first drafts. Some just write and write and end up with many more thousands of words than they need; their second draft, as well as reshaping and rethinking, is a process of trimming and cutting to find the essence and minimise the waffle. Others, and this is the way I seem to work, use the first draft to sketch scenes quickly and end up going back and filling them out and adding more scenes to expand the novel.

For example, in the second draft of The Sound of Butterflies, I remember going over each scene and slowing it right down. Closing my eyes and imagining myself into the head of whoever had the point of view. What were they thinking about? How were they feeling about what they were thinking about? Where were they physically in the space they inhabited? What could they see from their vantage-point? What did the air feel like on their skin?

Of course I don't necessarily put all these details into the scene when I'm re-writing it, but it helps me find what is important to the story and to the characters' states of mind. It fully immerses me in the character's point of view and enables me to write a more authentic scene. The result is often a more sensual experience for the reader I think, and helps create empathy for the characters.

The first half of my first draft tends to move quite slowly as I explore the characters and their voices (and doing research, but that's another post topic altogether), getting to know them to the point that I can race with more confidence through the second half to get the story down, knowing that I'll be coming back to flesh things out at the end when I know more about where things will end up.

The second draft isn't just about expanding scenes. It's also about a structural overhaul, looking at the pacing, adding a scene here and there to develop a theme or an aspect of the story that seems rushed or contrived or just wrong somehow. At this rate my first draft will probably only be about 60,000 long, but ultimately I know that the book will need to be about 75,000 to tell the full story that I need to tell.

How do you work? I'd be curious to hear from a taker-outer.

New banner.

Look at my new banner. Isn't it lovely? It was designed for me by the seriously talented Sarah Laing. I think it shows I'm serious about this blog thing, and that I don't just want my blog to look like everyone else's. But more than that, it captures the aesthetic that drew me to Thomas Edgar as a character in the first place. Before I started The Sound of Butterflies, I was already a collector of antique prints, the very kind that appear above. I never had any butterflies, but I have shells, bugs, birds, flies and plants, many of which I found in a funny out-of-the-way spot at the Portobello markets in London. I wrote about it on the Picador blog a while back (scroll down a fair way to find my post).

So I'm happy. Looking at this banner makes me happy, in the same way that looking at my prints made me want to write about the sort of man who might have done these drawings in the first place. And clearly I keep coming back to this aesthetic - my new novel has a collector as well. Two, in fact. I just can't leave them alone, it seems.

German paperback.

I just noticed that this is up on Amazon in Germany, so it must be all right for me to share! I hadn't seen this cover before, but think it's quite lovely and mysterious. It's the paperback version which is coming out in March 2009 (available here), or if you speak German and can't wait, you could look at the hardback, published by Pendo, here.

Beginnings.

For obvious reasons, I have been thinking about first lines and beginnings of novels a lot lately, trying to choose which approach to take and experimenting with different kinds of beginnings.

How many novel start with arrivals, alarm clocks, hang-overs, descriptions of the weather? The Sound of Butterflies originally began with an arrival at a train station; my new novel at the moment begins with an arrival at a house. The challenge is how to make it different from every other arrival. This beginning is by no means set in stone - I have many other forms to try out before I settle on one, and it probably won't be truly written until the novel is finished. It was only at the last minute that I changed the beginning of TSOB, as if only when I knew what the completed novel was going to be could I know the best way to begin. Now it starts: "Nothing in the letter suggests to Sophie that her husband will arrive home a different man." Rather than starting with a (not very active) action scene, with Sophie standing on the platform, thinking whimsical thoughts about spring flowers while she waits for Thomas, I went for the first line that drops you into the heart of the matter and asks you to read on. What letter? How is he different?

Often it is an atmosphere that we are trying to evoke in the first lines, but I think that can be as much about getting the writer into the book as getting the reader, and once the writer is off and away with the story, it can then be changed. Ditto it might be about establishing the voice of the narrator or the main character.

There is the arresting first line approach, where you shock a reader into reading on ("The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut"). There is the action scene that starts the story in the here and now. There is the general backstory kind of beginning. A lot of it depends on the point of view the author has chosen to tell the story in: first person can add the confessional beginning, a few words about who the narrator is and why they think their story is important to tell. An omniscient narrator can comment about the characters' situation, the place they live etc and set the scene for the events to follow.

While I was writing TSOB, I picked up Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (one of my all time favourites) and read the first line: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy in an emergency room near Peteoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." Because the grass is always greener, it made me yearn to be writing a first person narrative, and I decided then and there that my next book would be told in the first person (which it is, well half of it anyway). The way I saw it, it gives you much more freedom than the third person limited that I had chosen to write TSOB in, but of course it has its own problems, which no doubt I will discuss at a later date when I'm having trouble with it.

So while I've been thinking about the beginning a lot, I do know that there is no pressure to get it right immediately, which is worthwhile thinking about when starting out with a new novel. I recommend starting it ten times, in different ways. Have fun with it. You never know how it might turn out, and you'll probably go back and change it at the end anyway.

In translation.

I haven't really used this blog to plug my book, at least, not as much as I might or, as much as, ahem, others have. But I was looking at these two beautiful covers tonight and just wanted to share them. Der Ruf des Schmetterlings is published by Pendo Verlag in Germany and De Stilte van de Vlinders by Artemis in the Netherlands. I love these covers and the production on both editions is superb. Now I can't wait to get my hands on the Russian, Greek, Italian and Taiwanese editions. Watch this space.

Overheard conversations and Mailer's unconscious.

I recently read an interview with a local writer whose debut novel has just been published. She talked about how she always carries a notebook around with her and writes down snippets of overheard conversation, how people will often find her in the bathroom at parties, madly scribbling.

I don't do that. It seems to not be a part of my nature. I used to think that made me a bad writer, that I wasn't always observing people acutely and using interesting conversations I'd heard and characters I'd met. Sure, I carry a notebook around with me, but that's usually to write down things my imagination dreams up before I forget them.

I think I did, once. I did it because I thought that was what I should do, and I certainly wrote descriptions of some interesting people I saw or met, but I don't think I have ever directly used them. I once saw a young girl standing at the counter of a cafe with her mother. From behind, she looked about ten and she wore a long pink cardigan, a pink floral skirt and frilly bobby socks. She also clutched in her hand a packet of Holiday Lights and a lighter. Then she turned around and I had a moment like Donald Sutherland must have had in the movie Don't Look Now, when the little girl in the red coat he has been following all over Venice, thinking it's the ghost of his daughter, turns out to be a wizened old crone. Who then stabs him.

I didn't get stabbed, but the little girl I had observed was actually about 35, still dressing like a child but smoking cigarettes.

Anyway, I dutifully wrote down a description of her in my notebook, but she never made it into any of my novels or short stories. Why would she?

Despite not jotting these things down anymore, I know that I do observe, in my way, and these observations get chucked on the pile with all the others in my unconscious mind, where they fester and ferment and come out, in whatever form, when they are ready.

I also hardly ever use my own direct experience in my fiction. I once quit my job and travelled around Europe for three months in preparation for getting serious about writing. Listen, I needed to. After four years at a job with no proper holiday my mind was gunked up and needed a bit of freeing. Upon my return, my aunt asked me what I had written while I was away, and what was I going to write based on my experiences, and I said "nothing". She couldn't understand and thought I had wasted my time somewhat. But I know that bits and pieces from that trip are still all buried in there, and they will, and probably have already, come out in some shape or other.

Imagine my delight when I found an essay by Norman Mailer in his book about writing, The Spooky Art, called 'The Unconscious'. Everything I have talked about above was not even something I had consciously thought about before, apart from having a vague sense of confusion at my inability to use real life conversations, characters and experiences. So it is fitting that an essay entitled 'The Unconscious' helped me to understand my own methods that I had buried deep inside me.

Here is what he says about creating convincing characters: "As we go through life, we do, after all, observe everyone, wittingly and unwittingly. Perhaps, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse someone in a restaurant who represents a particular inspiration or menace or possibility, potentially friend or foe -- and the unconscious goes to work on that. It needs very little evidence to put together a comprehensive portrait because, presumably, it has already done most of the labour. To use an unhappy analogy, it's as if the unconscious is a powerful computer that does not often need much in the way of new data to fashion a portrait, considering how much material it has stored away."

And about using your own experiences, citing 9/11 as an example: "If you never write about 9/11 but were in the vicinity that day, you could conceivably, in time to come, describe a battle in a medieval war and provide a real sense of such an event. You could do a horror tale or an account of a plague... All kinds of scenes and situations can derive ultimately from 9/11. What won't work is to go at it directly."

This has helped me to understand that the child-like woman and the three months around Europe (for example) have all become a part of the mish-mash that is my unconscious brain, the animal that I get to work so hard for me on a regular basis. I might not write about that woman, or those train journeys, but they contribute to the composites that end up in my work. The Sound of Butterflies is ultimately about a long-distance relationship, of which I have had plenty. And as, Mailer points out, I need to take care of that animal: "Sometimes, I think you have to groom the unconscious after you've used it, swab it down, treat it like a prize horse who's a finer animal than you."

A boost.

You always hear stories about new authors obsessively checking their Amazon ranking, and I can tell you this: it’s all true. I have to say that since my book has been out for a while I don’t check it nearly so often, although I started again in earnest when the UK Picador paperback was released recently, but only for a couple of weeks. That's when I realised it wasn’t ever going to get to 4 digits.

I had long since given up looking for readers’ reviews after the hardback drew only two (admittedly very nice) responses, including from one RN Morris, author of A Gentle Axe. But today I thought I’d check how my wee book was doing (still clinging to the 5 digits, but only just) and found a glowing review by someone who loved the book so completely that it has really given me a boost. It’s all very nice to get good reviews in the media, but there is something just so heartening about getting one from a reader who has obviously gained so much pleasure from what you’ve written. It sounds like a cliché, but it really does gives you the strength to carry on and write that person another book they can hopefully enjoy as much. So thanks, Mr P Wood from Bristol, whoever you are, I’m having another crack at it.

Another Picador Blog.

I have done another guest blog over at the Picador site, this time talking about my obessession with collectors and how they ended up in The Sound of Butterflies, and also in my new novel.

The little one said "Roll over".

You think that once you have written a book and it has been published that you move onto the next one and that's it. But I’ve had to put the new one on hold this week to put together the ‘extra’ material for the American paperback of The Sound of Butterflies, which comes out in October. I am certainly not complaining about this – it’s a great fun project, and I still feel a lot of affection for that novel so don’t mind discussing it all again. And I feel very privileged to be in this position at all. It just feels a little odd because I first had the idea for the book in 2001. I wasn’t able to start work on it until I had finished my MA in Creative Writing at Victoria, which took me to early 2002. I had to put it all aside halfway through 2003 as I had hit rock bottom on the finances and needed to get a full time job just to live on (let alone begin to pay back the huge debt that had mounted from trying to write a novel). I wasn’t able to pick it up again until the beginning of 2005, but I worked like a demon and had the novel finished by mid-2005.

And here I am nearly 3 years after I finished it – 7 years after I had the idea (one fifth of my life!) – still having to think about it. Going back and visiting in my mind the writing process and all the research I did, which is all a bit of a blur if I’m honest!

I am so excited about my new one, and have set myself such high standards for it (must…be…better…) that I hope I’m not kidding myself that I will get it finished by next March. Even then, I guess that means I could still be talking about it in 2012. Maybe I need to become more prolific, as I suppose having a new book gives you something new to talk about, and each one knocks the last one out of the way. Or is it more like the song ‘Ten in the Bed’ and you need to write a whole lot before ‘one fell out’ and you stop talking about the first?