On researching, writing and revising

These are challenging times. For me as a writer, that is.


Not only am I in the middle of some very intense research for my next novel (a historical novel for the young-adult audience), I am also revising several Abigail stories of my own, working with a fellow writer on her early draft stories, incorporating readers' suggestions into my draft play and starting to work on the novel itself.


And also writing blogs and doing a great deal of writing at work.


Yes, busy, interesting and challenging times, for sure.


The research, I love, and I am finding that the internet is really coming into its own as a research tool. As recently as five years ago, I would be bemoaning how limited online resources actually are on certain issues but now I am impressed. I've been able to find, for example, daily weather reports for London from 1940.


Of course, the more factual details you can find about a historical period, the more pressure there is on you to ensure that your fictional writing reflects those details. It's fun but challenging.


The revision (of stories and plays) is also very interesting. Unfortunately, I am a writer who enjoys hammering out the original draft a lot more than I enjoy the revise-and-rewrite process. So I have to force myself to focus on the task of improving on the original and one way I do that is by having excellent readers review and make suggestions on my drafts.


When the feedback is so strong and on-point that you wish you had thought of it yourself, it's a lot easier to decide to incorporate it into your work.


Working with other writers on their work is also a fun challenge. I hope I can be as good a reader and as diplomatic a purveyor of feedback for others as my own readers are for me. I always try to start with the positive and to make constructive suggestions on the ways I think the writing can be improved. But I also feel very strongly that giving feedback on someone's writing is not just about focusing on the detail -- you have to be willing to raise issues of structure, of tone, of point of view even.


It's a lot of work to keep up with all these different paths in my writing career. But very rewarding too.

What is my natural writing voice?

I'm still struggling with my next writing project. Actually, that's not exactly true: I'm not struggling with my next project because I haven't yet decided what my next project should be; I'm struggling to decide on a next project.


I have completed drafts of the four stories that will form part of the next Abigail story book and, if I might blow my own horn for a moment, I think they're really good. There's action, a little bit of comedy and quite a bit of character development in them. And I didn't struggle at all in getting them written. As with the original 12 stories, they really just poured out of my fingers and onto the computer screen.


But what next? My partner tells me that I should stop struggling to write mysteries and court-room dramas (the two genres I thought were my thing) because, in her opinion at least, they don't represent my "natural voice". Based on how smoothly the Abigail stories seem to flow out me, she argues, my "natural voice" must be in the genre of middle-school or young-adult fiction -- more specifically, the voice of an innocent, somewhat naiive and optimistic young girl who isn't afraid to take on life's bigger challenges.


Yes, you read that right: my natural voice is apparently that of an adolescent girl, preferably one who lives in the middle part of the 20th century.


Is my partner right? Is that really my natural voice?


I am having a hard time arguing with her, to be honest. The Abigail stories flow so remarkably smoothly for me. I can generally produce a very strong draft of a story in perhaps two hours of writing and that draft will require very little editing or revising to get it into final form.


That being said, I find it something of a bewildering situation. I have spent my entire life thinking that mysteries were my genre and, almost from the start, my protagonist was going to be a lawyer turned investigator, so that I could incorporate elements of courtroom drama into the mix. I have, in fact, completed three novel manuscripts in the mystery genre and have come very close to having two of them picked up by mid-sized Canadian publishers.


I have also written five or more short stories in the same genre, though none of those have caught on either.


What I keep having to accept is the fact that the writing process for every one of those particular pieces (novel and short story alike) was a fairly tortured, drawn out experience. They were really hard for me to write. The final product was good but the process was painful.


So maybe I should take these Abigail stories, and the ease and pleasure with which I wrote them, as confirmation that I've been wrong for most of my writing life, that I really should be writing middle-school or YA fiction.


I had thought my next project would be to go back to my mysteries and revise them some more with a view to resubmitting them to new publishers. But maybe, just maybe, I should be planning a full-length book for young people, with a female protagonist.


It's the decision of what to write next, rather than the writing itself, that is currently bogging me down.

Much to Digest in new Writer's mag...

As a gift for a recent birthday, I received a one-year subscription to Writer's Digest magazine. It is not a publication with which I am particularly familiar so I was very interested to get the chance to explore it first hand.

My first issue arrived yesterday and it is a pleasant surprise. Sure, I have my concerns and criticisms (I always do) but I am impressed overall with the quality of the articles and the expertise displayed.

I am even more impressed because my first ever issue, May/June 2014, is focused on "Writing for Kids & Teens", with a healthy secondary focus on "Humor Writing".

Now, when you consider that the last three years of my life have been dedicated to writing and publishing a series of stories for young people (the "Middle-Grade" market, apparently, according to WD) and that my current project involves penning a "comic novel", I think we've got a pretty good match between my interests and WD's focus this month.

I don't plan to do an article-by-article review at this moment but I will say that one of the highlights for me in this issue was Marie Lamba's interesting article on the differences between fiction for the "Middle-Grade" (MG) market and fiction for Young Adults (YA).

I have gotten used to calling my Abigail Massey stories "YA fiction" but I now learn that I have been doing my self, and my work, a disservice by using that label. Based on Ms. Lamba's article, my three volumes of Abigail stories are better described as "Middle-Grade stories" or, even more particularly, "upper Middle-Grade" fiction.

Interesting.

Even more interesting is the argument Ms. Lamba makes that I should be marketing these stories mostly toward the "gate-keepers" for children in my target age group (gate-keepers like parents, teachers, librarians) rather than directly to the kids themselves. Where YA readers generally choose their own books, MG readers often have such decisions made for them. They are introduced to new books and authors by their parents or people in the educational system.

I am finding Lamba's article to be both helpful and comforting. Helpful in that it has provided me with some interesting ideas to ponder as I head into marketing my Christmas novella, featuring Abigail, this fall; Comforting in that it has helped confirm that, other than mislabelling my books as YA rather than MG, I have generally gotten most things right in creating the Abigail Massey stories as MG fiction.

All in all, I'd say my relationship with Writer's Digest is off to a very good start.