From Inspiration to Publication 
   Posted to Indies Unlimited
 13th July 2014 by T.D. McKinnon

With the assistance of my trusty editor/partner in crime and beloved wife, Zoë, I conducted a writer’s workshop seminar on the first of June this year. This Devonport Writers Workshop group, organised by Fay Forbes, has been running consistently, September through May, every year for the past eighteen years and each year the workshop participants produce an anthology of their work: poetry, essays, flash fictions, slice of life short stories and much more. Within this diverse group of individuals: school teachers, bush poets, business men and women, and housewives, who write for the sheer joy of writing, are many talented writers; some of whom have been published.

We began, as you might imagine by the title, with a discussion on inspiration, motivation and whatever in general provides the stimulus for writers to write. As most of you know, the muse comes in many forms but the main ones that came up were:

1. Something they were simply born to do

2. Someone who inspires their creativity

3. An inspirational experience: seeing or being part of a potentially fatal incident or other possible life changing experience

4. Through dreams or, seemingly spontaneous ideas and visions

The conclusion we came to, whatever the source of inspiration, was to treasure it and to never take it for granted. The muse can be a fickle ally, a capricious confidant that slips out the back door without so much as a by your leave; leaving you staring, despondently at a blank page.

If inspiration taps you on the shoulder, regardless of the circumstances, capture it in writing as quickly as you can. Always have something handy to help you in that endeavour, whether it be notepad, laptop, pen and paper or dictaphone; just as long as you get it down before it disappears into the ether like a dream.

Narrative Mode

We explored narrative mode in some depth. I was surprised that most of these talented writers had not previously explored this subject. They were certainly aware of the concept, but only in as much as each writer has a particular voice, which of course is a choice, and they wrote generally in whatever one came naturally to them. And so we looked at the overlapping areas that the narrative mode encompasses, most importantly: ‘point of view’, which of course determines through whose perspective the story is narrated, and the fact that the narrative voice determines a set of consistent features regarding the way in which the story is communicated to the reader.

We talked about the various POVs and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each and why, even if you chose to stick to the one you are most comfortable with, it is advantageous to understand the available options, their strengths and weaknesses.   I previously published quite an in depth post on the subject of writing perspectives here at IU in November of last year, and so I’ll just briefly describe the exercise I gave them to expand their experience of using the different perspectives.

A Tense Exercise

The exercise in perspectives I set for them was a fairly simple one but from it we had some interesting variations on a theme. I gave them a subject and a picture and asked the group to write a flash fiction in 200 words or less in first person, past tense.

                              
                                                                                     A Tense Moment
                                     Image by © Roy Janssen | Dreamstime.com

I then asked them to do the same story but to change it to present tense. I finally asked them to write the story in any tense they liked but to change the tense at some point, effectively using it as a device. In other words it had to work.

The Editing Processes

Zoë dealt mostly with this part of the workshop, talking about the various ways they could clean up their manuscript before sourcing an editor; basically, the cleaner the manuscript the less expensive the editing job. She talked about the different kinds of editing: developmental editing, copy editing, proofreading, formatting, book evaluation et cetera and the various costs involved. And after some questions concerning the huge discrepancies in what editors charge., she simply explained that, as in anything, you generally get what you pay for.

Publishing (which way to go)

Finally we talked about publishing. I basically told them that there has never been a better time for the struggling author to reach publication. Until recently, the goal of getting published was beset with a long, arduous road filled with rejection and delays and, in most cases, never actually ending up with a published book. I explained that, through advancements in technology and changes in consumer shopping habits over the past ten years, it is possible for more writers to become published authors than ever before, making this the best time in history to be an author.

Getting published once required securing an agent, submitting proposals and then waiting for a response… and waiting… and waiting… and waiting…

Now, while that traditional path is still available (more perilous than ever), the more preferred path to publication for many writers (myself including) is independent publishing.

We finished by saying that, to succeed as an independent author/publisher, one needed to develop many more skills than just writing a story, emphasising the necessity for constant endeavour in pursuit of perfection in all the skills involved.

Published to Indies Unlimited 7th July 2013

Truth in writing, what does it mean to the writer, how important is it? 
Nonfiction is a form of narrative whose assertions are understood to be factual; accurate or not. That is, it can be a true or false account of the subject in question; however it is generally assumed that the authors of such accounts believe them to be truthful at the time of their composition. I put it to you that, oftentimes, those prose are written from a highly prejudicial point of view. I can just see those nonfiction purists among you shaking your heads.

History, human history in particular, is written by historians around what they believe to be cold, hard facts. For instance, I was taught, in history lessons, at school that the early European settlers first arrived in what was to become the Americas in the late 15th century; that the first fleet arrived in Australia in 1788 and established the first colony; andthat the first colony in Tasmania was established at the beginning of the 19th century. All very clinical, very accurate, or is it? Who wrote the histories and for whom?


Historical fiction authors sift through the cold, hard, dry statements of fact and write what can loosely be termed ‘semi-fictional’ accounts of history. The history lessons I received at school were presented as fact; and yet, little mention was made of the standing residents of those newly invaded discovered lands; it was certainly never made plain to me that they were in fact dispossessed, and quite brutally so in most cases. Writers of historical fiction make reasonable assumptions in regard to what was going on in the heads of the people involved to give a somewhat fuller picture, and the general public, inadvertently, discover more by reading those stories than they otherwise would have. You tell me, who paints the more accurate picture of any, given historical period?

Science is a term referring to a body of knowledge of the type that can be rationally explained and reliably applied, and has come to denote a systematic enterprise that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about physics, chemistry, geology and biology: the physical universe as we understand it. Yes, a textbook description. However the truth is we, the human race, are constantly disproving earlier theories that have been quoted as fact, and so are continually reassessing what we accept as the truth.

Science Fiction is what we can imagine as possible future(s) development(s) in light of our currently accepted truth with regard to what we presently consider to be scientific fact. That’s one point of view. Personally, I like to believe that we the authors, with our imaginations, are the trail blazers; leaving the scientists then struggling to keep up.

Biographies, supposedly factual accounts, can be highly controversial; depending on who the biographer is, whether it is an official biography, from what perspective it is written and if the subject of the biography (or anyone else connected with the biography) is still around to take legal action. Also in this category are the autobiographies and memoirs, which by their very nature are subjective, and therefore biased; as, of course, are most truths.

Journalism, purported to be factual, as we all know can be highly erroneous. Focussing on certain factual details (and in some cases even that is dubious) while ignoring others, they oftentimes fill out the rest with supposition, which of course is subjective. There are many recorded cases where, with their methodology, journalists have wrongfully, devastatingly, hung people out to dry who were later exonerated by an author providing a dramatised account of the story.

True Crime; a lot of the previous paragraph on journalism could apply to this category of nonfiction; and ‘true crime’ stories rarely, if ever, try to get into the minds of the peopleconcerned, we therefore get no insights into the reasoning behind those crimes.

In the case of Crime fiction, based on ‘true crime’, a writer can use poetic licence, dramatise for effect and, through analysis of facts, hypothesise what goes on in the heads of the criminal perpetrators (now characters in the Crime Fiction); and perhaps even make some sense out of an apparently senseless episode.

Truth in writing, what does it mean to the writer, how important is it? Is it merely subjective as it is in real er… life? I believe this is a subject that could be serialised, explored from every angle, like most of the topics touched upon at IU. What is your truth?