My friend Laurie tagged me on Facebook with the above meme-of-sorts where writers talk about what major project they’re working on, possibly also explaining and justifying any anti-social or reclusive behaviour that might be occurring while the writing is happening. It’s hard, but sometimes you just need to hunker down, grit your teeth (don’t crack them though – I’ve done that and it’s not fun) and get on with the job.
However I’m doing this meme mostly because I wanted to talk a little about a market development workshop for authors that I attended at the beginning of this month, thanks to the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and put on by the Australia Council. It was a fascinating and illuminating day.
So, getting started…
1. My work-in-progress is called Back When We Were Immortal.
No, it’s not fantasy/speculative fiction (a reasonable question I was asked a few weeks ago). It has a contemporary Australian setting.
2. It might, in fact, be set in the place you see in the photo above.
Let’s see how many of you recognise it.
3. It is a novel that has taken me nearly twenty years to feel ready to write.
Aspects of the book are loosely biographical: among its themes are bullying and suicide, and I’ve needed the time to get a… rounder perspective. That’s not to say it has been easy – one particular scene was gruelling to write and by the end I was in tears. The kids looked at me with a mixture of interest and horror (it was a rare day when I was able to manage working with them around).
4. As well as being told by connected short stories, it is almost a parallel narrative.
Although set over the course of a single day, events in the preceding months are crucial to understanding character motivations and choices, so these are told in flashback. It’s ambitious and requires careful balance.
5. Here’s the strapline: Back When We Were Immortal is a YA novel of connected short stories about what happens when five teenagers face death together.
A book’s ‘strapline’ (basically, if you can sum up your novel in a sentence and leave the reader wanting to know more) is something I learned about in the author marketing and development workshop. It’s shorter even than an elevator pitch (30 words or less, or the time it would take to move floors in an elevator). I teach elevator pitches for blogging classes, so thought I had a handle on summarising, but it was a challenge to define and refine my book down further (and the workshop facilitator, Jaki, gave me a hand doing it). I think it can be hard for author’s to do so – we’re so used to thinking in a ‘bigger’ sense thematically, worrying about the plot, making sure the narrative is working etc. etc. that to then shrink it down almost betrays the effort you’re making. This is folly, of course, to marketers and salespeople wanting to sell your book, which is the whole point.
As someone who stands in the blogger-slash-self-publisher-slash-writer zone, believe me, I thought I understood all this. And as a freelancer, someone who has published in a variety of forms, I like think that versatility matters. But all these elements that float above my head in a big bubble matter little come time for a book’s release (unless they directly relate to it, I suppose). The workshop opened my eyes. So instead of answering the question “What do you write?” and I answer “A bit of everything” (boring!), I will, at this point in time, say “I’m a novelist”.
Now I just need to finish it.
