On writing fiction

Here are two articles that may be of interest to writers, or potential writers of fiction. 

I've sometimes wondered whether there's any point in writing stories that no one will want to read anyway. Is it just a way of filling in time between retirement and death? "Why kill time when you can kill yourself?" as one character said in a film I saw a long time ago. So this article is an encouragement to carry on writing: 

Is writing a waste of time?  

But there is also the question of what to write, and, even more important, what not to write, and that is where this article comes in: 

Find your own well  

... which is a criticism of those who write fan fiction (fanfic) and write on National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). 

Now I have in the past challenged people to join NaNoWriMo and write a novel in the genre of Charles Williams. 

I don't regret giving that advice, but I do see its limitations, having taken my own advice and tried to write such a novel. The critique I received, comparing it with other stories I had written, showed that trying to write a 50000-word novel in a month is not a very good idea, at least not for people who write stories the way that I do.

The problem is that journalism has deadlines, but novel-writing shouldn't, unless you are suffering from a terminal illness or are under a death sentence.

No matter how much editing, rewriting and revising one does, a novel written in a month is likely to have a lot of shortcomings that no amount of patching can fix, unless, perhaps, you are one of those people who can outline a plot well beforehand, and simply write to fill in the outline. But I'm not one of those. I often start writing a story and have no more idea than the characters in the story where it will end up.

Now I'm writing a story that leads me into unfamiliar territory, and so I have to check other books to see if I've got the background information right. One can't do that in a month when one is dependent on fortnightly.trips to the library. But I'd still like to see more stories in the genre of Charles Williams and the early Alan Garner, so, to my friends who like those authors I say:  please get writing, but do find your own well and don't try to write fan fiction.

Most of the fiction I have tried to write have been children's stories (like the early Alan Garner), and some of my reviewers have compared them to Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" stories. I don't find the comparison flattering, because I never liked the Famous Five as a child, finding the very term "Famous Five" rather pretentious and silly, and preferred Blyton's "Adventure" and "Secret" series, which had more interesting plots, even if they weren't better written. And it surely doesn't take much to write better than Enid Blyton (What a surprise!)

An online friend, whose own writing was cited in the first article mentioned above, commented that he had written a few children's books, but was deterred from preparing them for publication, or self-publishing them on a site like Smashwords, because as an academic he would not be able to put them on his CV. 

Now my academic field is one where works of fiction wouldn't be much use on one's CV, so I don't face his particular problem, but I still say don't let your manuscript moulder in a drawer or on a hard disk somewhere, but publish it on a site like Smashwords where anyone who wants to can read it. 

I mention Smashwords because publishing there is dead easy.

They give you a template. You format your manuscript according to the template, upload it and it is done. The first time I did it, it was sent back for a few tweaks, but my subsequent books were accepted first time. And, if you want to publish on Amazon's KDP, a simple Search and Replace, on a copy of the manuscript, changing every instance of "Smashwords" to "Kindle", will do it for you though Smashwords also produces the MOBI format used by Kindle readers. 

If your first few readers spot any typos you missed, you can upload a corrected version, and offer those readers a free coupon for the corrected version too.

How does this compare with commercial publishing? 

If you don't need to put it on your CV, I think it compares quite well.

For my first children's novel I queried dozens of literary agents who  said they handled children's books. I didn't get any rejections slips. None of them rejected it, they didn't want to read it at all. I thought writing books was more fun than writing query letters, and gave that up. 

I have had a couple of academic books published by university presses. The most recent one, where I collaborated with two other authors, did not produce a single review, at least not any that I have seen. My most recent children's book, The Enchanted Grove, has had several reviews on the GoodReads site and elsewhere. 

OK, these are not reviews from academic specialists in children's literature (I'd love to have a couple of those, if any such people could be persuaded to read it), and even more I'd love to have reviews from kids in the target age group (9-12), but at least there are reviews, whereas the book published by traditional academic publishers produced none. And while not all reviews are useful, a good review (which is not necessarily the same as a flattering one), can show you how to write better next time.