This week I’m going to explain why.

But first, a scenario: Not long ago I had a conversation with a woman who had an idea for a start-up company, in the area of sustainable energy. What was interesting about this conversation was that she wouldn’t reveal to me – or anyone – what the idea was.

I found myself wanting to giggle irreverently for much of the conversation because – as I see it – in a start-up context, it doesn’t make sense to ‘hide’ your story. Why? Because when you’re starting a business that’s going to require a lot of people-power, you’re going to have to trust the collaborative process, the networks, the people in your tribe to support you and invest their time, energy and skills to help you build your business. You simply can’t do it alone. I know this from my own experiences with Nuance, Scope, The Powerhouse, and The Woolf.

I wanted to share some contacts I had with Sustainable Energy Start-up Woman. I wanted to put her in touch with people I knew. I was open to the discussion.

Sustainable Energy Start-up Woman’s response?

“But I’m worried someone’s going to steal my idea.”

Here’s my take: People don’t tend to steal an idea unless they are perfectly, financially, technologically and networkingly (?!) poised to realise it. They might do something similar, but it won’t be the way you envisaged it. It will be different, because they have different resources. Besides which, while you’re sitting around fretting about intellectual copyright, you’re wasting time and energy. (Obviously, you need to be smart about who you share with, but you get the point.)

How is this related to writing?

It’s related because writers often think that talking about the writing process, or giving away the general overview of a book, will mean someone will steal their idea.

As I’ve said before (in a previous post), nobody in their right mind would try to take someone else’s idea and write about it. Do you know how much energy and time and creative juice it takes to write a novel?!

You can say exactly the same for a business idea: it takes years to get businesses off the ground successfully. Actually, it’s almost safer these days to ‘put it out there’ than to ‘keep it in’. At least there’s an electronic paper trail, and you can claim some kind of ownership over ideas with Creative Commons licensing. [NB. I am still learning about this, but as I understand it, Trademarking e.g. technology, is a different story. Feel free to comment if you have intel on this.]

My point: the spark and the story are two different things.

The story can also be called the plot, or the log-line.

• Writers = ’What’s the story about?‘ Example: ‘Person A meets Person B and, because of this, Event C happens‘
• Start-up = ’What’s the business?‘ Example: ‘Person B buys Service C, to solve Problem A‘

The spark, however, is something private. It’s the internal motivator.

• Writers = Often, it’s a theme. ‘Youth is wasted on the young’, for instance.
• Start-up = the reason you’re doing what you do.

As a writer, talking about the writing process and the writing landscape can be helpful for others who are trying to hone their craft. Or, at the very least, it can be good (ahem) therapy for the writer.

But there is something a bit precious about a spark, and it’s worth protecting. As a creator, sharing too early or with the wrong listener can result in a three-way relationship that just gets messy. Talking about it can kill it.

Charlotte will soon be in the hands of readers. I have discussed one or two aspects of the book with a few select writerly pals, and I’ve discussed process here and there, on the blog. But I’m waiting for the finished draft before I set Charlotte free, spark and all.

Then I can pass on the flame. Wish her well as she moves on to a new relationship with a reader.

…And then re-write her 16 times!

PS. Writers take note: a good book about starting a business (relevant to writers as much as anyone starting anything) is ‘The Art of the Start‘ by Guy Kawasaki.

The point being that you won’t be able to sustain the creative process if you’re not interested in the angle you’re taking or the story you’re telling.

Even with collaborative texts, where others have assisted in the research, or are perhaps a client driving the big picture – and I have worked on many of these – it’s still down to the writer to finish the text, to get the idea across, select and arrange the information in a way that tells an absorbing story. And this can’t be done unless there is a spark to set the flame roaring. A central question. A special angle, perhaps, that interests you, the writer, as a person.

Writing takes a lot of thinking, and I have learned that if people want your brain on a job, or your input for a collaboration, you need to be clear in your own mind that you can find a way in to the story. I know; I’ve tried to write without having been able to find a ‘spark’, and it sucked. It resulted in a lot of frustrating hours, and a not very convincing story at the end of it all. The client was okay with it in the end, but I think he knew I wasn’t ‘buying my own story’, so to speak. It was not a good experience for me.

This is why I think it’s OK to say ‘no’ to some jobs or collaborations.

(Aside from which, if you put something out there with your name on it and it’s a hunk of junk, you can’t point to it and say, ‘look what I did… now hire me’. You’ll be shoving it in the virtual bottom drawer and hoping nobody discovers it.)

‘But what if you have to put food on the table and buy the kids’ schoolbooks?’ I hear you ask. Well, sometimes you have to just do the job. That’s life. But if you are in a position where you could take it or leave it, just be aware that financial incentives or ‘sparks’ only work up to a point.

[Take a look at Daniel Pink's TED Talk on The Surprising Science of Motivation for more on this. Essentially, he says 'rewards narrow our focus and restrict possibilities'.  Fine for mechanical tasks but not tasks that involve even basic cognitive skill. Definitely not great for writing, which requires a warp core of cognitive engagement.]

I’ve heard people say, in business contexts, that finding a new recruit or a team member is all about the ‘fit’.

Fiction writers especially, take note: This goes for writing too. If you and your story idea don’t ‘fit’, it’s time to find another one.

Which doesn’t mean you can’t come back to it later when you have grown, or had different life experiences. (I’ve done this, too, and I sometimes find interesting angles I hadn’t thought of before, or noticed a particular theme I hadn’t perhaps intended in the original writing.)

If you think I’m warming up to saying, “And so, dear reader, I must now announce that I’m going to stop writing Charlotte and come back to it in a few years” … you’re dead wrong! I know what my spark is. And I know my way into Charlotte’s story.

But I’m not going to share it.

Maybe next week I’ll tell you why.

Pre-amble: I admit hacking into someone else’s blog isn’t exactly what you’d call Ethical. Or so Lyla keeps telling me. (But she can’t complain seeing as she’s the one who got talked into doing the password-blitzing.)

Point 1: Libby’s not around at the moment so I’m only looking after her interests seeing as she has a few followers these days, and she probably doesn’t realise you can ‘Schedule’ your posts. So here I am, providing some content so she doesn’t look incompetent. 

Point 2: Some people might think it’s a bit freaky that I can write this when Libby thinks I’m still stuck in the Alps in a blizzard trying to save my own sorry arse from the Wannabe Ninja. Because that’s where she’s up to in the writing process.

Well I say: suck it up. It’s fiction. Plus, the book she’s writing (about Yours Truly) is Past Tense. Ergo: it happened before. ‘Now’ is a different story.

Point 3: Libby’s doing quite a good job of writing the story, although she has been a little stochastic [I'm linking these for your benefit, Byron] with the way she lets me show off my vocab. But I shouldn’t be too captious. I’ve heard her daughter snorting with laughter when she reads it, so I guess that’s a good sign.

It’s just that sometimes you feel, as a character, having a go-between Author doesn’t quite cut it. But whatever. Lyla and I are finding interesting enough ways to ‘bleed out of the text’, as she puts it.

Okay. That’s it. It’s been a pleasure.

PS: If you are reading this, Byron, it’s called ‘transmedia storytelling‘. (Or it will be, if Libby ever finishes the manuscript.)

PPS: Lyla and I have been laughing ourselves to Level Puke over some of the spam comments that have been filtered by the WordPress gnomes. Example:

“Great post! It’s so meaningful to me. I follow you all the time.”

And then a link that has about seven words relating to normally out-of-view body parts in it. Who’s going to click on that?! #whybother?

During the preparation and writing process, I realised it was more of a learning curve than I thought it would be.

I’ve presented on radio before, and I’ve done my fair share of acting, but I’ve not had to speak to so many people with my own words.

And that’s A Big Challenge. It’s fine to hide behind other people’s words, or behind a producer or director. It’s a bit more confronting to have to speak with your own voice, about your own experience, to a sea of faces.

However, once the speech was more or less ‘written’, I realised I faced Another Big Challenge: I needed to find a few hot tips for presentation.

I mailed a few pals who have presented at big events, whose opinions I value, to find out what they do in this situation. (How they deal with nerves, and that sort of thing.)

Interestingly, the main points of their advice were exactly the same:

• Be yourself.
• It’s okay to not know the answers to questions.
• Be honest rather than clever.

It occurred to me that writing fiction is a bit like this too. Clever and Funny can only go so far without Authentic. [Meta: You can read more on my thoughts about humour and characterisation in a previous post.]

I suspect that while presenting is about entertaining, it doesn’t have to be witty and a-gag-a-minute. It all hinges on the story.

Some of the best speakers I’ve seen have engaged the audience without the aid of slides, precisely because their story was so good. They were able to pull pieces of the context together in an interesting, cohesive way. Other speakers have used slides well when their content is information-heavy, and the audience might need to take notes.

I um-ed and ah-ed about it for a while, but eventually I did opt for slides, even though my presentation was less information-heavy. Mainly because I’d seen some great images that I thought would enhance, rather than repeat my message.

(NB. For those who are interested, I used a set of images for my presentation that the photographers had licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike/Remix/Non Commercial/With Attribution, because I was speaking as a favour for an organisation, not for my own profit. It gave me an opportunity to tell people about these photographers’ fantastic works, and it gave me the freedom to enrich my story/presentation with their images. You’ve gotta love a spot of recreational Creative Commonsing.)

I’m happy to say the presentation went well. I am lucky to have had an opportunity to speak to such an open and appreciative bunch of people for my first real attempt. I’m also lucky to have had such generous advice from my colleagues.

Please feel free to comment and let me know if you have any hot tips for presentations and, if so, how you feel about using slides. 

If you aren’t familiar with it, the idea is that you read a page or a brief scenario in a book, and then you are offered an option to take the story in usually one of two different directions. If you want outcome A, go to page 27; if you want outcome B, go to page 90. Read and repeat until the resolution of the story.

As kids, my brothers and I devoured these kinds of books. Admittedly, the plots were often a little thin, allowed little or no character development, and ended all too quickly (they were slim books to begin with). Occasionally we felt ripped off that, having read the story to one conclusion, we’d probably get little or no satisfaction from perusing all the other pages because they were just alternate endings. They weren’t building on the story we first encountered. They were possible futures, but they were sort of irrelevant to the story we’d first encountered in that particular context. But we nonetheless enjoyed our sense of agency in the adventure.

Currently in our household, there’s a Fable II game for XBox Kinect that has been going for about 6 months. Partner in Crime has worked his way through Albion, discovering his entrepreneurial side and, yep, his leadership capabilities. Fable is an example of a Choose Your Own Adventure that seems to work pretty satisfactorily. It fits its medium nicely, providing a visual story as well as an unfolding adventure in which you, the hero, choose whether you are (loosely) on the side of good or evil.

It’s an up-to-date version of the early days of text-based computer games like Zork, where you typed in a few lines such as ‘l’ (go left), and your computer spat back a reply such as:

You are in front of a house.

You see a rock.

>

[NB. The Wiki has a better example of this, I just noticed.]

As with all these kinds of concepts, you never really have the freedom to choose any option you can think of. You are in the hands of the Architect of Choice. Or the writer.

When it comes to books, there are a number of ways to enable readers to experience the text as an adventure in different ways.

Aside from the now expected different reading platforms (digital, hard copy), choosing your reading adventure can come in many forms, enriching the text, adding to the characters’ worlds, or adding a cultural context for the manuscript.

Some examples:

• Extra information that can be accessed via the curated extras on an e-reader. I think of Penguin’s ‘amplified’ version of Hemingway’s On The Road as a good example of this Choose Your Own Adventuring. It includes sidebars with added text, maps of the road-trip, photographs of the areas written about. It’s a virtual tour of the manuscript that can be seen as an enrichment but also as a meta-commentary or meta-story of its own.
• Similar to this is the concept of being able to buy a bundle of related information in digital form – regardless of whether you choose a digital or hard copy of the novel – such as the package offered with Melville House’s Hybrid Books. With each Hybrid Book purchase, the buyer receives Illuminations. “The Illuminations consist of highly curated text, maps, photographs and illustrations related to the original book.” [from Melville House website]
• Elaboration of supporting characters’ worlds. This occurs in literature, where second and third novels or short stories follow different family members or different characters whose paths cross. I think of Alice Munro as the queen of this kind of short story, where she ranges across a landscape of characters and touches on one here, and another there. The reading adventure is an interesting one. In a digital form, this has already happened with Lyla, who ended up with her own website. That was kind of an accident, but it’s there now, it suits her personality, and it’s a bit of added fun.
• And, of course, Games and Apps. You might not necessarily learn more detail about the world of the novel you’ve read by pretending you’re Luke Skywalker, but these kinds of add-ons give a different type of experience or agency to the adventurer. (Think Potter, think Star Wars.)

Obviously some of this is more work for the writer. But, on the other hand, perhaps some of it is just the scenes that didn’t make the final cut. When you’re writing about a world of characters, you have to know a lot more about them than just what they’re doing at that moment in time. Backstory is important precisely because character drives story. Place is important because characters react to it; it’s the world they inhabit. If you don’t know your characters and their world, you’re going to find it hard to write them convincingly. Whether you choose to elaborate and build on them and make them public is just a matter of preference.

In my experience, kids love these kinds of additional goodies. They love the experience of delving and discovering, and choosing an adventure. So, when it comes to Charlotte, perhaps it’s just lucky that I do too.

Our project? Hmm. Seeing as Liz and I each have rather a lot of projects in various stages of development on the go at any one time, we realised this was going to require a truly creative response.

Our goal was not to present literally the kinds of work we do as Nuance Words (that would take months), but rather to present a scenario in which context matters. Because context is one of the universals in the world of words, whether you’re a writer, editor, translator, or branding and language strategist. It’s something Liz and Jill and I all think about a lot.

What I love about Switzerland is that it has four official languages, with English often used as a default. This makes understanding context an imperative – because with every language comes a whole raft of cultural connotations and, er, nuances.

Often, the English I speak on a day-to-day basis is much simplified. Indeed, Partner in Crime complains that his vocabulary has reduced since we moved here, through lack of use – I guess that’s one of the down-sides of working in a multicultural environment. But the other part of this is that speaking to non-native English speakers forces me to be clear about what I’m going to say. I have to think before I speak and make sure the words I choose can’t be misinterpreted. You’d be surprised how tricky that can be. It’s a bit of a challenge for me because I love my friends Colloquialism and Metaphor. Now, usually, I leave them at home.

Even within the Nuance team we have to be on Yellow Alert, because we come from three different English-speaking countries: Australia, the UK and the USA. When we write ‘organization/organisation’, for example, we quibble about ‘z’ or ‘s’. (In Switzerland, ‘z’ is most often used, by the way, even though most other spellings tend to be UK-English.)

So how does context matter for Charlotte? When Charlotte and Lyla needed to have a few languages up their sleeves, I opted for the obvious German (they live in the German-speaking part of the country), French (kids often start learning French in 4th Class), and a bit of Italian, even though the language they use with each other is English. (Got it?!)

[Spoiler alert: Byron happens to be fluent in French because he lived in Geneva, but Charlotte and Lyla haven't disovered this yet.]

I have yet to see how this will be received by readers other than Ms12. She lives and breathes this multi-lingual environment, but that’s not everyone’s experience. I guess the trick is going to be to try not to interrupt the flow of the narrative with ‘foreign’ words that might jog the reader out of the otherwise smooth reading experience. I also don’t want Ms12 to tune out when she comes across an English word (and there are many) that she doesn’t know.

On the other hand, I love language and so does Ms12, and I’m sure there’s a way to make having tastes of several languages – as well as encountering some stonkingly good English words – an integral part of the Charlotte Aimes reading journey.

And that’s the great thing about literature. Every time you plunge into a book you discover a different context in which ideas are played out or explored. So where the ideas themselves might not be new, the context probably is.

Building a convincing context, however… Well, that’s the challenge!

I have discussed this at length with various folk (writers, parents, random bystanders), and we all agree it’s a tricky one. On the one hand, you don’t want to desensitise kids so they become immune to appropriate emotional responses (‘yawn, another murder’) but, on the other hand, some of our natural reactions to stressful situations involve humour because it’s a coping mechanism.

When writing Charlotte, I let the characters’ emotional radars guide the gags. When Charlotte is in strife and it looks like there’s nothing else to be done/no way out, she often opts for humour. Lyla, on the other hand, enjoys Charlotte’s gags, but she’s a much more serious character in general.

Then there’s the saying: ‘Many a truth is told in jest‘. And I tend to agree. I heard an interview with Terry Pratchett on the ABC’s (Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s) wonderful ‘The Book Show’, during which he defended the fantasy and sci-fi genres because he believed them to be great vehicles with which to discuss serious real-world issues.

It brings up (yet more) questions about writing, namely: Why do we write? Is it to deliver a political message? To entertain? Both?

In the past few years in the world of advertising, branded content has become a Thing. Branded content blurs the line between entertainment and advertising. As the writer of this article on the Wikipedia points out, though, it is difficult to do well, and:

The process is truly more art than science.

I’d like to ask: how do we know when to call something ‘art’ or ‘literature’?  And when is it ‘branded content’? Aren’t we all, as writers, branding our content in some way… even if it’s just with our own voice?

More delving on this topic this another time. In the meantime, let me know if you can think of a book that brings serious issues to the fore via humour or any other device.

According blogger Kim Forrester of Reading Matters, January is Australian Literature Month. (This juicy intel acquired via Sue of Whispering Gums.)

I, too, have a lot of reading to do in the Aussie Lit department. However, because I’m on a Charlotte-flavoured Mission (you know the one) I haven’t had much time for reading, so I’ll just mention a few I managed to wrap my eyeballs around recently.

1. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

Having approached this book with my ‘Oh Lordy, not another WWII book’ goggles on, I was almost laughing aloud at how well and truly sucked in I was by the deft and energetic narrative voice of Death Himself, who treats the characters – and words! – with so much respect. The story is broken up into anecdotal sections which, once put together, build a rich and off-beat picture of the lives of the residents around Himmel Street, where Liesel, our 9-year-old book thief, resides.

2. The Secret River – Kate Grenville

I’d heard a lot about this book before I finally read it last year. I could use a whole rake of phrases like ‘beautiful, evocative writing’, for example, but I think lots of other people already have that covered.

I walked away feeling that I’d had a priveleged inside look at the lives of early white settlers in New South Wales, with the aid of Grenville’s exceptional eye for detail and ear for prose.

Really, I should just say ‘beautiful, evocative writing’ and leave it at that.

3. The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

Now a Tele-movie in Australia, this book has become a bit of a sensation. That’s why I read it.

Based around an event (man slaps boy who is not his son at BBQ) and its repercussions, I found the writing slick and fast-paced – it’s a page-turner – and the characters compelling, if only because they are extreme and not especially likeable. But, then again, friction makes good drama, and I suspect that’s the point.

It’s one of those books that defies genre-ization, which makes me happy.

(FYI, another genre-bending Aussie book is The Broken Shore by Peter Temple, which I’d suggest sits happily and simultaneously in the Fiction and Crime camps.)

4. My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin

I read this one at the age of 18, having just completed my final year at school. And I read it 20 years later with my book club, which was at the time comprised of gals from Sweden, Finland, USA, Holland and Canada. (And me, an Aussie.)

I would say that even though I love this book with all my heart, it is not an easy one to read if you are not prepared to take some time to ‘decode’ the language. Australianisms are all over the shop (this goes for ‘The Slap’ as well, by the way), and my book club colleagues struggled with the language. A shame, because Sybilla, with all her energy and runaway irreverence, is such a great character. A good one for young gals to read.

I can only hope my own Ms12 (and Charlotte, of course) imbibes some of Sybilla’s free-spirited approach to life, to carve out an adventure for herself.

Please let me know if you have any Aussie book recommendations. 

Happy Aussie reading!

Incidentally, for my Zürich readers, JJ informs me Christos Tsiolkas will be reading on 9th March at Kaufleuten. See you there?

The BBC has a great 3-parter running at the moment – (poor old Partner in Crime was on the verge of a breakdown the other night when he realised he’d missed the first half hour of the new series). We also have yet another Hollywood version gracing the big screens, and I can’t even count the number of books that have used or built on elements of the Holmes stories.

On one of the Holmes fan-fic sites I found around 110 pages of new Holmes stories posted; in other fiction, Kirsten Miller’s Kiki Strike series (YA) has a group of girls called ‘The Irregulars’; Kate Harrad’s Fausterella endeavour (in which she switches the genders of main characters in the great literary classics) gave us Shirley Holmes… to name but a few.

So why are there so many Holmesian adventures about? I suspect it is because the Holmes stories ignite in the reader a sense of adventure. Most of us love a good mystery, and when the mystery can be driven by wonderful characterisation, sense of place, plus suspense and a dash of humour, it becomes unputdownable. I can only hope Charlotte will be all this and more for Ms12.

Another reason could be that the Holmes stories are – all but one – no longer under copyright.

For the sake of the argument, and since I’m interested in copyright issues as they pertain to writers, here’s what I’ve read about the copyright ownership of Holmes, according to Sherlockian (quote taken directly from the website):

Notes on the ownership of the Sherlock Holmes stories

Copyright in the Sherlock Holmes stories expired in Canada in 1980.

The last copyright on ACD’s work in the United Kingdom expired at the end of the year 2000.

In the United States, the only Sherlock Holmes remaining in copyright is The Case Book, which will enter the public domain between 2016 and 2023.

Some people have suggested that ‘Charlotte Aimes’ sounds a bit like ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Waterson’ is reminiscent of ‘Watson’.

They’d be right!

The character of Charlotte is nothing at all like the real Sherlock, apart from the fact that she enjoys putting two and two together to solve problems. Neither is Waterson like Watson, apart from toying with the idea of becoming a doctor sometime in the future. The fact that they live in Switzerland is a glorious coincidence, since Holmes faces his arch-rival, Moriarty (Moira T. in my version), in Meiringen, not two hours’ drive from where we live in Kanton Zürich. (We’ve even been there, to re-enact the scene.)

But what about all those other Sherlock Holmes remixes? Am I embarrassed that I haven’t come up with an original concept? Nah. These days, one could argue, everything is a remix. I believe originality comes with the writer’s voice. The way they present their version of a story. Or life.

Yep, I’m derivative and proud of it!

“But why would you do that?” you may well ask. “Isn’t Charlotte for your daughter? Does it matter what another professional writer thinks about it?”

My answer is: Yes, it does matter.

I consider myself a writer. I get utter joy and nerdy pleasure out of creating a world on a page, of playing with words, of seeing my characters’ stories unfold. But I also want to improve my craft. I can entertain Ms12 with my stories, and she can tell me when I’m not being consistent with character names or details, but she can’t tell me the kinds of things another professional writer and editor can tell me. That my character motivation isn’t clear. That my wording is clumsy or inaccurate.  That I’m not working hard enough. (Oh, alright, I can tell myself that one.)

One of the things JJ pulled me up on (in that very first draft) was interrupting the flow of the action with asides and jokes. It was a very good reminder to stay on target with every scene:

• whose scene is it?
• what’s the scene about?
• what’s the central dramatic question?

That sort of thing.

There’s nothing like going with the comedic flow, of course, and sometimes [spoiler alert] characters’ trousers just drop down because it feels like the right thing to happen at that moment in time, and it might take the story off in a different direction. But, having never written crime fiction for youth before, I have to say staying on target is harder than it looks. Especially when your narrator is a 13-year-old who can’t keep her mouth shut. Couple that with a writing environment that the real world has a habit of encroaching upon, and the temptation to throw in another witticism to keep your spirits up is just a bit too tempting.

I guess that’s why it’s so invaluable to have a writers’ group, or a reliable reader of your drafts.

I have yet to show my writers’ group any of Charlotte, but that’s okay for the moment. I need to plough through, get to the end of the first draft, as is my Mission.

But then?

Hand it over to the group… and wait for the whippin’!