Category: Behind the Curtain (Page 4 of 4)

Adaptation

30th July, 2012 / Zoë / 0 Comments

Talking to writer friends online about a year ago, I realised how much I was missing being able to talk to other writers face-to-face. When I met Brian, a fellow writer and Oslo resident on a writers’ website, I got to thinking how great it would be to have a local network, especially of international writers. So I decided to start the Oslo International Writers’ Group. It began as a Facebook group, but a few of us quickly agreed to have regular meetings to talk about writing and critique each other’s work.

We’ve now been meeting regularly for more than six months, each month focusing on one writer’s submitted piece, which has been of great value both to the writer and the critics. We’ve read some great work so far, as well as talked about our own work and experiences in relation to the discussed pieces.

Now we’re venturing into new territory by putting together an anthology of short stories, both fiction and non-fiction, with the theme “Adaptation”. The theme will be interpreted by each individual writer in their own way, and each story will be written to showcase the writer’s personal style.

Many of us are ex-pats, so the theme of Adaptation is close to our hearts. First drafts will be presented and discussed at our next meeting after the summer break, and I’m really looking forward to reading what each of our talented members comes up with.

Watch this space for more details and news of a release date!

The Oslo International Writers’ Group is open to any writer living in or around Oslo, Norway. You are welcome to join the Facebook group without attending the meetings – join here. We exist to discuss writing generally as well as our individual writing projects, to support and promote each other and to add a social element to the oftentimes lonely life of a professional (or amateur) writer.

Genre matters

28th June, 2012 / Zoë / 0 Comments

As long as there has been literature, there has been a desire and need to group it into categories. There is no officially agreed set of literary genres, and the more I become involved in the publishing industry, the more I realise that these days genre is as much about target audience and marketing strategy as it is about stylistic categorisation or plot type.

It seems that many publishing houses and literary agents are increasingly focused on categorising books by what they believe a given demographic will buy and read, rather than the contents of the books themselves. This makes it incredibly difficult for writers whose work crosses age, gender or racial boundaries and has potential appeal to a wider audience. You’d think wider appeal would mean a more saleable book, right? Not according to the experts.

Let’s take the genre currently known as Young Adult, for example. (Note: to me this has always been a ridiculous name for the age-group spanning the years between 12 and 18: since when is a twelve-year-old ANY kind of adult? But that’s a rant for another day.) The basic requirement for a Young Adult novel is that its protagonist is between the ages of 12 and 18 years (though 13 to 17 seems to be the best bet), and deals with the sorts of issues kids in this age range are interested in and go through themselves (or, if we’re going to be totally cynical, what older people think kids in this age range are interested in). While I believe there’s a very appropriate safety-net involved in this categorisation, (you can at least be fairly confident they’re not going to contain a lot of gratuitous sex, swearing or violence), to suggest that all people this age like the same kind of books is ludicrous. Do all people between 30 and 50 like the same books? So then a sub-genre system is employed; we have YA Contemporary, YA Fantasy, YA Sci Fi… and so on.

So what’s wrong with that? you ask. Nothing. Except that it pigeonholes both the books and the people who might read them. If you categorise books by life-stage, you’re saying that once you’ve completed a life-stage, you no longer have any interest in it, even for nostalgia’s sake. Or if you haven’t reached a certain life-stage, you can’t be interested in it yet.

Have you ever felt embarrassed because you enjoyed a Young Adult title, even though you’re in your twenties, thirties or older? I know plenty of people who were embarrassed to admit they’d read and loved The Hunger Games trilogy simply because it was classified YA. And yet, had the protagonist been just a couple of years older, it would have been marketed as Adult Dystopian, and those people would have been able to proudly proclaim how much they enjoyed it.

Then there is the lost genre, dubbed ‘New Adult’ by St. Martin’s Press in 2011. A ‘New Adult’ is someone in the approximate age range of 18-25, dealing with the pressures of becoming responsible for his or her own life for the first time. It’s a period in anyone’s life fraught with change, stress, excitement, adventure… all the ingredients for a great story. And yet, this genre is a black-hole according to a vast number of agents and publishers. Why? Because apparently 18-25 year olds don’t read.

Next steps

23rd June, 2012 / Zoë / 4 Comments

Things became interesting this week when I received not one, but two requests from New York literary agencies who want to read more of Amaranth. It’s both exciting and terrifying to come so close: it could be the start of something huge, or it could just give me further to fall. But what I want to be able to take away from this development is the knowledge that there are at least two agents out there who think my work is worth their time. That is HUGE.

The Militant Author

18th June, 2012 / Zoë / 0 Comments

What does it really take to be a writer? Talent? Skill? What happens when everything else gets in the way and a writer can’t find time to write? After all, we have day jobs, bills to pay, children, partners and pets to love, friendships to maintain… everything takes up time, and it can begin to feel like things are attacking the time that could be spent writing. This is something I talk about in my guest blog on Bookkus.com.

As part of their blog series entitled “The (Vacant) Author”, my post, The Militant Author, explores what it’s like to fit writing in around life, and life in around writing.

Bookkus is a new, independent publishing house looking to enlist real people to choose the books they publish. They’re currently taking on submissions from authors as well as looking for readers who want to participate in getting the books they are passionate about published.

Interview with Barefoot Basics

14th June, 2012 / Zoë / 0 Comments

I recently got in touch with Rochelle Stone of Barefoot Basics, an Australian-based marketing company working to assist authors entering the publishing industry for the first time. She requested an interview about my novel, Amaranth, which has today been published on the Barefoot Basics website. I talked to Rochelle about the book itself as well as how I manage my time between writing, self-promotion and holding down a day job.

Vocal challenges

31st May, 2012 / Zoë / 2 Comments

My current work in progress is proving quite a challenge, and one of the key reasons for this is voice. When I mentioned my struggles to a friend recently, he said he could always recognise my voice in my writing, and that when he reads my work, he hears my voice in his head. I tried to explain this wasn’t quite what I meant, but I realised he had a point. I began to wonder if it is actually possible to separate the writer from the writing.

Amaranth is written in the first person, and the narrator is a nineteen year old girl named Eva. If I’m honest with myself, Eva’s narrative voice is very close to my own internal narrative; I wrote her much the same way I would write myself. She has a dry, dark sense of humour, is given to pessimism (and melodrama) and can be quite caustic. It was quite easy to write from her perspective.

However, the next book in the series is written from a different character’s perspective, and though she is also a girl in her late teens, she is a very different character to Eva. She’s bright, bubbly, mischievous and though she has a dark past, she refuses to let it get her down. It was a complete shift in gears for me, and I’m glad I took the time to write some short stories in between novels so that I could cleanse my palate of Eva, as much as is possible anyway, given the points I made above.

The interesting part is that two chapters in, though I’m struggling to keep the new voice authentic through word choice and structure, I’m finding the best thing I can do is to adopt her mindset. Method writing, perhaps? In order to know instinctively how she would react and what she would say in any given situation, I need to think like she would. I’ve found it rather therapeutic to shift my brain into nothing-gets-me-down girl; I’ve stopped for a break a number of times and found that I’ve been unconsciously smiling.

Reading back through the chapters I’ve written so far, I have managed to create a distinctly different voice for this novel, and yet my writing voice is still in there. Perhaps there are writers in the world who are true chameleons and can write in a completely different voice from book to book, but I am not quite there yet. And yet… I’m not sure I want to be. Not entirely. When I pick up a book by a favourite author, I want to hear his or her voice in there somewhere. It’s like a trademark. No, on second thoughts, it’s more subtle than that. It’s more of a watermark. Something at the nucleus of the writing that stamps it as theirs, and without it, I wouldn’t be able to trust the unfamiliar book to deliver what I liked about previous works.

Ideally, I want to find a balance. I hope that at some point my work will have fans who don’t know me personally, and don’t know what my real-life voice sounds like. For those people, I would hope to create something new and engaging each time, but with an intangible familiarity that allows them to trust that they’re going to get a healthy dose of what I do, no matter who the characters are, what they achieve or where I take them.