I got diverted this week by the.. twitteriness.. of Twitter. It is, after all a social network. So as well as posting writing links, I found myself engaging in a feud about cats and hats, and ultimately cats in hats. Along the way I came up with reasons why writing is like sex, and posted far too many altogether uninteresting progress reports on my daily wordcount target.

All this digression may have been influenced by reading Grace Dent’s excellent and very funny book about the network (How to Leave Twitter).

I have also just embarked on one of my periodic US trips, so the writing-related links might be a little more sparse this time round.

some tough love from Alex Epstein (Crafty TV Writing – recommended) in response to an unsolicited request for advice.

Nina Badzin’s Twitter basics: “No pictures of your cat”. *sigh* my cat is so much better looking than I am. I did change my cat avatar – a controversial decision as it turned out. In taking new cat photographs I invoked the spirit of Mrs Slocombe but don’t watch the video if you’re not a fan of infantile innuendo

Moving from cats to dogs: Chris Dolley had me at ‘Zaphod’, but this tale of a dog’s life is lovely enough without the hook. Zaphod’s Last Run

Some found graffitti, which suggests just because you know how to write doesn’t always mean you should. Still, possibly the name of my new band. If I could sing or play an instrument.

Charles Stross in Q&A at session at Apple HQ (videos).

An Anne Patchett piece on writing became available in Kindle format, discussed at LATimes’ Jacket Coy

Log your activities, and find time to write you didn’t know you had: quickwritingtips – #writing

“You can learn a lot of things from a great first page (also from a bad first page…)” – Maggie Stiefvater

Formula for a compelling plot. With examples. RT @CDaleyAuthor: On the blog: The Plot Skeleton.

I have no attention span. But upped my writing sprints – – from 10 to 15 minutes. Seems to be working #amwriting

less fun alone? over too fast? overexposed? sometimes messy? MT @Chindu: How #Writing is Like Sex | Psychology Today

Neil Gaiman quotes Gene Woolf: “You never learn how to write a novel… You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”

How do you keep conflict alive when you’re only going to meet the nemesis at the end? GITS on True Grit

I’ve always had a difficult time with networking and marketing. I’m at my happiest building websites, and applications and stories, and at my worst putting my work about.

Back in the 90s I ran a Web design/coding company and I hated the pitching side of the job so much I gave up the favoured-partner status a big agency had conferred upon us so I could focus on the Web pages. That’s Great Decisions I Have Made No. 27, by the way

But networking is just meeting your peers, and marketing is just talking about what you love to do. Given that publishers have almost no marketing budget for new authors and self-publishing means just that, perhaps it’s time I learned my lesson. To that end I’m signing Inflatable up for The Third Writers’ Platform Building Campaign, run by Rachel Harrie at her blog Rach Writes.

I’m looking forward to making contact with more writers in the coming weeks, and I’ll document the process here. Of course, I’m going to be on the road for much of September, so it should be an interesting challenge.

Another post from another airport. This time it’s Toulouse. A quick word to the wise. Don’t look for coffee after 9pm in Toulouse Airport once you get through security. If you’re desperate, though, there is a machine which will remind you nostalgically of the Share and Enjoy machines from Hitchhikers Guide. So with a cup of something which is almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee I intend to summarise some tweets.

Parenthetically, I’m not bringing back the weekly roundup, so much as expanding a little on the week’s Inflatable tweets. Call it a tweet-up. Not sure I can live with that, but never mind.

[Edit: Well duh. I learn from How to Leave Twitter by @gracedent that a tweet-up is a twitter related meet up, and so couldn't possibly be a Twitter round up. Ho hum. Title amended].

I’m not yet sure about the best format for this, either. For now I’m going to leave the tweets themselves more or less alone apart from inlining the links and adding minimal context. After that I’ll riff a little about anything from the list that leaps out at me. First the tweets:

Flying home, I encountered a child with “Little F***er” uncensored on his t-shirt. Turns out the motto was accurate. Did the slogan cause or just reflect this?

Soundtracks for ebooks. Is it just me, or is that a TERRIBLE idea?

Eve of family return from French vacation. Charging 2 iPhones, 1 iPad, a PSP, a camera, an iPod, an iPod touch, 2 laptops, a DSI. Oh my god.

Juliette Wade posted a link to some famale combat attire which was altogether more sensible and less chilly than standard fantasy book cover fighting wear.

An Inflatable link: Flashbacks considered harmful? I’m not so sure.

One step further than editing in passes: writing in layers – The Daring Novelist

Connie Willis wins Hugo Award for Blackout. Really? Where is the retrieval team? Maybe history has gone wonky? Help!

Chuck Wendig of Terribleminds on putting yourself about online: “You are not a logo, a marketing agenda, a mouthpiece…” Damn. There goes my social media strategy.

@eliselbert asked me if I am the author of a book called PHP Objects Patterns and Practice. Turns out, why yes. Yes, I am.

Missed too many of the 10 thingies to make your writing wotsit type posts? Try this list of lists from Write it Sideways

At Writer Unboxed James Scott Bell argued writers should treat dialogue as a weapon – ie every utterance should be yoked to a character’s agenda.

How many pages of inaction should you suffer before you chuck a book? I have a low tolerance for books in which nothing happens. On the other hand I recently read a bad book twice just to work out why it sucked. Guess which book? Hint: it won a major genre award recently.

OK, so I just can’t leave the Hugo win alone. I don’t really follow these things, so I’m unaware of the politics and traditions that surround both the Hugo or Nebula awards. And I’m not so confident in my critical faculties that I’m entirely sure I’m not wrong here. Perhaps there’s a layer of irony in Blackout that I’m just missing. Maybe it’s like the ineffable quality of greatness that completely eludes me but apparently means the output of Mark E Smith is not utter drivel.

In both cases plenty of people I respect seem to get it, while I remain mystified. So, seriously. I may be missing something. Certainly, I understand that Connie Willis is a talented writer, and that some of her previous novels have been very fine indeed.

After reading it closely twice, however, and making copious notes, it seems painfully and abundantly obvious to me that Blackout is just not a very good book. And it seems strange to me that a not very good book should win prestigious awards. In fact it seems to me this is a Bad Thing, because other, good, books won’t get the recognition they deserve, and a genre is then misrepresented to the reading public.

Next week I’ll post some practical thoughts about the book itself. In the meantime.. I’m home now, and the coffee is much better. And better still it’s a Saturday night. Time for a beer.

By the way, you could follow @inflatableink on Twitter. Just saying.

When I describe a plot I tend to talk about a succession of events.

Something happens first. And then something else happens. A character works to achieve his desire. Fate, and other characters with their own agendas, first stand in his way, then push back, raising the stakes.

But fiction dances to another temporal beat. This is the unfolding of past time, shown in flashback or told either through the thoughts of a character or the words of the narrator.

Books and courses for writers often discourage the flashback. A flashback slows down present action, it is argued, and therefore dissipates tension.

It’s true that a flashback interrupts action. But that’s true of a shift between POV characters, too, or a chapter break. You can use a time transition in the same way as you might a switch between plot and subplot—to tease the reader, to defer a resolution and to keep her reading.

The fact that turning to the past will put a brake on a narrative’s pulse, though, is a good reason to be wary of switching back too early in your story. You may want to establish your characters and the momentum of your plot first.

I have seen this rule of thumb ignored in short stories, however. These frequently use brief impressionistic flashbacks–sometimes no more than fragments–to establish a protagonist’s current situation. So a possible pattern might be:

1. Present action (in media res)
2. catch up with flashbacks and exposition,
3. Back to the action

So:

1. Marcus pulled the garrote tighter around the squirrel’s neck, and cursed again.
2. He’d always had a thing about woodland animals. Perhaps it was down to all that time he’d spent helping Grandpa modify cadavers at Terrific Taxidermy. Or maybe it was those off-duty chipmunks he’d watched going at it in the CuteAndFurryLand Theme Park parking lot.
3. Either way, there was one less critter in his yard now. He tossed the body and reached for his dart gun.

Of course the background in the last example is telling rather than showing, but with a bit more space we might have slipped back very briefly into the world of the young Marcus, chased by an aroused chipmunk, or listening to a snatch of wisdom as grandpa explained a particularly baroque gutting tool.

In fact, used well, flashbacks can heighten the drama of the present moment. Events in the present unlock memories or past scenes, which then provide new and transformative insights into the current world of the story. Flashbacks used in this way are more than dramatized exposition. They enter into a dynamic relationship with present time. They offer a steady supply of story and character reveals which change our perspective on the present. And then new present action can alter our understanding of the past. Of course, in order for this to work, the past must be an exciting place to visit. A good example of this can be found in the best episodes of Lost, in which suspense, back story and emotional climax were all simultaneously served by the relationship between current and recalled action.

And while you’re doing all this switching, you need to watch out for the point of transition. This is difficult, and worth watching for when you read. This point always seems to me a bit like that awkward moment in a musical when the characters shift a gear or two from speech to song.

One trick for handling transitions is the use of objects. The crystal ornament on the mantelpiece that reminds Mary of that market in Bruges where she and Richard first met, or the tire iron Henry keeps in a box submerged beneath half a foot of styrofoam packing peanuts. Or if you want to be less on the nose about it you can also use key words or images to signpost the shift.

The object, word or image might serve as a reminder, a pretext for a bit of time travelling. But it’s also a marker for the reader, signalling both an entrance to and exit from the past. So the trigger has the dual effect of establishing a convention for flashbacks in your narrative, and providing information to the reader about where and when the hell they are now.

The question here is: where does story live? Is a story really only told in a narrative’s live action, and therefore interrupted by flashbacks? Or is the story the sum of its parts, parts which may span time and point of view, and which coalesce to produce a satisfying emotional climax?

In summary:

• Flashbacks interrupt action: use this to hook the reader, and heighten tension.
• Flashbacks must provide more than just exposition or background. Make them a dynamic part of the story.
• Establish a convention for transition which makes the switch seem natural and acts as a signpost situating the reader in time.
• As a rule of thumb, don’t use flashbacks in the early parts of a story. In short stories, though, early scene-setting background is common.

In my next post on this subject I will play around a little with the pace of time in literature.

In case you’re were wondering, Inflatable Ink is not dead. It’s just pining for the fjords very very quiet right now.

In fact I’m working on a new version of this site for launch in September with a new look (nothing too flash, mind) and on a new platform. In the meantime, I may even post some more content.

The trouble is I’m an obsessive about process. It’s in my nature as a coder. I tend to lose sight of the why of things, and disappear into the how. I can easily spend a week happily poking about the innards of WordPress, for example, writing code to grab images from posts and turn them into thumbnails. After all that work I’m convinced I’ve made blog-type progress. In fact, up here in content-world where it matters, turns out I’ve not written or posted a line.

Perhaps too much of my professional life has been like that, in fact. It’s very easy to become obsessed with the challenges and mechanics of a project and, at the same time lose sight of the fact that someone’s going to spike all your work anyway and you might as well not bother. Or, worse, that you’re actually designing a better machine for shooting kittens.

Here are Mitchell and Webb in the grip of a similar revelation.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t work for News International or anything. No-one’s really murdering kittens or invading Russia. At least not in my department.

Even around fiction, I’ve been concentrating away from the page. In order to win more time writing, I’ve been doing none at all. I can’t talk about the fruits of that yet, but I hope there will be some in the coming weeks. However useful this process may turn out to have been, I’m acutely aware that I have done nothing of late to get me closer to that all important 10,000 hours.

What’s the takeaway from this post? Note to self; writers write. The clue is built-in to the word

I have been preparing for something of a new start recently, and what better way to mark that than getting the study painted? When it came time to return my books to their shelves I noticed that the huge pile in the hall was teetering ever so slightly. “Good job I’m doing this now, then,” I thought, and plucked a couple of volumes from the tallest pile in the structure.

No cats were harmed in the ensuing collapse.

If I can be Candide with you…

If you wondered what’s been happening chez inflatable over the last three weeks or so (is it really that long? apparently so).. then this is a partial answer.

The sun has finally come out, and the magazines and books say I can cautiously begin to plant out seeds and seedlings.

I haven’t had my own garden for a long time and old-gitdom has been calling me for a while. We arrived in this house a little too late to plant anything and I’ve been going a bit crazy waiting for spring. I constructed those beds over the winter, and I’ve been waiting impatiently for my chance turn them into more than big brown rectangles filled with well rotted manure.

They may not look like much now, but they have have the makings of carrots, beans, garlic, broccoli, potatoes (two kinds), turnips, kale, lettuce, onion and leeks in them. I may have missed something. In the background there are some huge rhubarb plants. Up against that wall various berry bushes are beginning to show some leaf. At either side of the picture are an apple tree and a cherry tree.

What’s that got to do with writing? Well not a lot, I suppose unless we want to try a metaphor about nurturing plants like ideas, and thinning out the failures, and all that malarky? No, me neither. I’m still writing every day, and studying too. But sometimes.. you have to cultivate your garden.

Wait, I have a picture somewhere of the beds under construction. Here you go. I had to go to Facebook to get that, and a couple of things struck me.

Firstly, I didn’t have a single notification waiting for me after six months absence. NOT A SINGLE ONE.

Oh.. but.. It dawns on me that this might have something precisely to do with the fact that I’m the kind of person who puts up pictures of raised beds on my blog. Damn. If I go to a dinner party (really very unlikely), I’ll probably discover that I’ve become that guy who spends all his time weighing up the merits of competing A-roads and their traffic patterns.

And secondly, I note that friend of Inflatable Cheryl Ossola has signed up for an MFA. I was supposed to be doing that this year. Hmm. I’ll have to give that some thought.

In the meantime, here are my seedlings. There are two kinds of tomato there, and some peppers. And brussels sprouts. And a lemon. I’m chitting potatoes too.. which sounds a lot more unpleasant than it actually is. Oh and lots of stuff.

I’m going to buy an irrigation kit thingie tomorrow. And a thing for extracting dandelions.

Thought you’d like to know that.

Here’s an exercise courtesy of the Introduction to Playwriting course that will probably be powering many of my posts in the coming weeks. This is best undertaken with a group, but you can also work with another person. All on your own? You can read through the participative section, and apply the principle to your work anyway.

Ask everyone in your group to think of someone they know well and to write down five phrases or sayings their subject uses heavily, the kind of mannerisms we all rely upon as verbal props to get us through the sentences of our day. Nominate a couple of participants. For each participant, take their phrases and write them up on a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper.

As a group, use the phrases to guess at the answers to a set of questions. These should give a sense of the person behind the words. What might the subject’s age be? Her ethnicity, gender, and so on. Write down the answers in a list. Does the subject live in the city or the countryside. Does she live to work or work to live? Is she sociable? Talkative? Fit? Is she loyal? Does she have lots of friends. Does she have a sense of humour? The phrases may suggest other characteristics. Try to get them all down. Finally you should have a pretty detailed picture of the subject’s personality.

If you’re working with one other person, simply swap sheets, and apply the questions to each other’s phrases.

When you’re done, ask the phrase compilers to compare your reconstructed personalities with their targets’ originals. There are no points for accuracy, though it’s fun to discover how close you got. The real objective lies in seeing the wealth of clues that a very few verbal characteristics provide a reader, and how a complete-seeming person can be conjured using relatively little information.

Now, on your own, apply this trick to your own work. Write down a small vocabulary for each of your major characters. Think about what the words and phrases you select say about their background and temperament. Read through a draft, and see where these words might naturally appear.

Do your edits enliven your characters (without pushing them too far into caricature)? As well as providing a richer insight into your characters, do the edits add variety and life to your story? Is it  easier for your readers to recognize a speaker even without attribution?

I’m somewhere over the Atlantic as I write this, near Reykjavik in fact. Which I guess shows that I do occasionally work on planes, even though the passenger in front of me has just cranked back his seat, clam-shelling my laptop so I can no longer see the screen. Suddenly my iPad seems like a very wise purchase.

I went along to the second session in the Liverpool Everyman’s Introduction to Playwriting course this week. (pausing for inflight food – I had the chicken, and no sweetcorn for once – nice). This week we started on character and already I have material for a good few posts. I was particularly grabbed, though, by a variation on the character questionnaire technique.

The questionnaire we looked at was very full, and reasonably familiar. My favourite of these is still this one, which I came across at the Everyword festival last summer. New, this time round though, was the idea that you should answer all the questions twice.

First in character: Is she happy? Sure! Outgoing? Absolutely. 

Then as the author: Is she happy? She’s obsessed with seeming that way. Outgoing? She tries, but often too hard. She’s constantly watching for signs of judgement, and often comes across as brittle and forced.

I like the fact that this approach captures a character’s intentions for her public persona as well as the author’s assessment. It’s in the tension between these two perspectives that much of the drama of a narrative might be found. Knowing that the tension is there right from the start helps you to look for opportunities to show the fractures in the action of your story.

Not much action round here for next ten hours. Time to check out those inflight movies.

I’ve been working to combine various drafts into a single good one over the last few weeks, and I’ve found myself strangely reluctant to use old work. If it’s bad I’m contemptuous, and I rewrite, If it’s any good I’m seized by an urge to start again from scratch just to prove that I haven’t lost it. When I use any work that’s more than a few days old I feel almost as if I’m plagiarising myself.

In fact the whole editing process sometimes seems like cheating, as if I should have got it right when I was in the happily churning out those successive first drafts.

There is something to be said for getting it right first time, of course, and I have huge admiration for those that can do it. And perhaps it’s true, as some have argued, that the wordprocessor has turned us all into endless rewriters. I had a computer at university, but only just (ah, the Amstrad PCW with its tendency to ghost type characters at random – now that’s personality).

Despite my evolutionarily challenged hardware, I’d not quite got to grips with working straight onto the screen. Instead I wrote in long hand and then (usually throughout the last 24 hours before a deadline) I laboriously transcribed my work. If I’d spent a summer learning to touch type in South Kensington before and not after I earned my degree, it woould have saved me a lot of time. But no, I was essentially a scrawler still.

Even with a pen and paper, though I was a cutter and a paster. I chopped up bits of lined A4 and taped them back together in tattered and malformed configurations. I also numbered paragraphs, and swapped the numbers about [5 GOES HERE], until my dissertation drafts looked like those roleplaying books (if Harry attacks the monster go to page 7, if Harry engages it in debate about the contradiction of Plato the Apollonian playwright turn to page 26).

So here I am. The innate editor, reluctant to edit my own work. Partly I think this stems from the attractions of the first draft. The act of writing is romantic, even heroic. First drafters invent new worlds, destroy word count records, engange in mysterious relationships with their characters who spontaneously develop independent lives.

Editing on the other hand is analytical. It’s code and accountancy. There’s less flow, and you have to bring a different kind of concentration to the process. It’s also much harder to quantify. I love to announce I polished off 1000 words. It’s like a mileage count to a runner, a good end in itself. There are fewer bragging rights to be had from an editing session.

On the other hand, and this is where it gets good, I also love the fact that it’s cheating. I can take something I know is bad, and have a shot at transforming it. I start at the high level, fixing structure, character, motivation, and then work down to enhance scenes, setting, symbolism, until finally I allow myself to agonize over paragraphs, sentences and words.

Editing is where you pay the bill for all the flexibility you enjoyed in the draft. If you changed a character’s name three times, that’s fine. If you left notes to self like [Bill says something funny here], then great. Three versions of your story in three parallel rewrites? Super. Now you pay by making it all work.

The first draft lets you pretend you’re a writer. It’s in the edit that you have to prove it.