Writing shorts

Writing a novel is a monumental task.  I should know.  I've written a few.  My last book, "Besotted", took me nigh on 18 months to complete.  Of course, regular followers will know that I was mugged in January 2013, and lost much of the original manuscript, but that doesn't alter the fact that it took up a lot of my time.  Days and nights spent writing, other days and nights spent trying to break through that writer's block, yet more days and nights spent drinking vodka, becoming my character, Benjamin Beerenwinkel.  The weeks spent editing and redrafting, fine-tuning the book, and finally the publication.

Now, in the past, I've written lots.  Even during "Besotted", there were days when I wrote 10,000 words.  I've generally been able to deliver the first draft of a full novel within 3-4 months.  But as I said, it's a monumental task.

Short stories, on the other hand, are easier to finish.  But a short story needs something special.  You have 2,000-4,000 words to deliver a tale to the reader.  Lots of shorts, they don't have that whole beginning, middle and end bullshit.  They just have a concept.  They should grab the reader, give them a bit of a shake, and then put them back down.

I'm working on a collection of shorts at the moment, entitled "Crime and Irresponsibility".  A couple of the stories have appeared on my previous blog.  Three of them have been developed into screenplays and have been shot as short films.  One of the stories, "Life", is actually more of a novella (and is another of my stories that I'd like to develop as a screenplay).  At the moment, all of the stories in the collection deal with crime or situations that have come about because of the irresponsible behaviour of the protagonist.  I used to work as a prison officer, on the lifer wing.  Some of the tales (some of which haven't been written yet) deal with the crimes committed by the men I met inside.

The thing with shorts is that you can write them really quickly, see something materialize in a short space of time.  You don't agonize over them, or wonder for weeks how you're going to end them.  You start to write them and if you're halfway through and you fall out of love with the story, you've not invested so much time that you have to finish it.  You can just leave it, maybe return to it, or just ditch it.  I've started to write novels, been 40,000 words in, and given up.  The writer's world is full of unfinished novels.  Short stories, on the other hand, well, they're easier to finish.  They're like quickies.  You start writing, you build up the tension in your head, let the words flow through your fingertips to the keyboard, and then, orgasmically, you complete the story.

I would say to any writer who is struggling with his or her writing, if they're partway through a novel, put that to one side and write a short story.  Call it mental masturbation.  Even if you don't show anybody else the short story, you're practicing your writing.  You're finding your writing voice, and it's a damn sight easier to find in a short story than at the start of the monumental task of writing a novel.

Also, there's the opportunity to get short stories published in collections, in magazines, if monetary gain is your aim.

As I struggle to write another novel (and I do aim to finish 3 this year, 2014), writing shorts is a good way to keep my creative juices flowing.

Sequels and series ...

Let me get this part out of the way first, before I go all hypocritical.  I fucking hate sequels.  I hate writers who publish their first book and call it, "Book Title 1", the first in a series of books featuring ...

Fuck that shit.  What happens if your first book isn't a success?  You're gonna look a bit of a twat (and also feel pretty fucking disheartened) writing and publishing a follow-up.

So, after that ... here comes the hypocrisy.  "The Journal".  I followed that up a few years later with "Journals" (which wasn't that good, to be fair).  Fans of mine (yes, I do have a few) have been asking for sequels to "die Stunde X" and "For the Love of the Devil", and I must confess that I have started writing follow ups for both of those.  Both, naturally, are languishing on my hard drive somewhere.  "Blood Money" was written with the intention of writing a "series of books featuring Alex Savage".  I did write a follow-up, but it needs a lot of work before it's ready to parade itself in front of readers.

I guess in a sense I'm averse to the cynical idea of writing a book with the intention of turning it into three books, when once could suffice, or the notion of rehashing the same characters, because it's far easier than inventing a new character.  A true sequel shouldn't come about immediately.  When I wrote "die Stunde X", I wasn't thinking about a sequel.  Similarly with "For the Love of the Devil", there was no plan to write a follow-up.  But some people, they either love the characters you've written, or you've left a book with an open ending and they want it resolving, as I did with "The Journal".  I personally love a couple of my characters.  I love Gaz Carmichael, one of the supporting characters in "Putrid Underbelly".  I love Benjamin Beerenwinkel from "Besotted".  But as a writer, am I that unimaginative that I can't think of any more characters?  That I have to regurgitate the ones I've already created?

Hmm, perhaps I am, because this year, 2014, I definitely smell a sequel to "die Stunde X", tentatively entitled "nach Schema F" (look it up and then consider whether I'm joking ...)

What about that Internet then?

I'm bored with the Internet.  There, I'll say it.  And yet, I bet you don't believe me.  But let's take a look at my current browsing history.  The BBC News website, BBC iPlayer, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Documenting Reality (yes, even after all these years, look after I've completed "Putrid Underbelly", I still pay it a visit), Peterborough United website, Stamford AFC website, a couple of job websites, Wikipedia, even Plenty of Fish, for fuck's sake.  But on the whole, unless I'm researching for a book, those are about the only sites I stumble across on a semi-regular basis.  I look at the news site in the hope that some big story has broken.  I check Amazon to see if there are any startlingly fantastic new books I should buy.  YouTube, I occasionally check for music videos.  Netflix and iPlayer (I'm amazed crApple haven't sued the BBC for using a small "i"), out of sheer boredom.  Twitter and Facebook, well, just for that social interaction (...).  PUFC and SAFC because they're my local football teams.  The job sites - well, isn't everybody looking for a new job?  Wikipedia, not the world's greatest encyclopedia, but a good starting point for research - gives you ideas of what to Google for.  And that's it.  Well, okay, I confess, occasionally I'll pay a visit to my own website (that's www.shaunstafford.co.uk to you).

So, there's this massive source of information out there, and I'm using just a tiny, minuscule fraction of it.

What's the point of the Internet?  Mostly, we still to what we're familiar with.  Nobody really goes surfing anymore.  You get your basic stuff from a handful of sites and you travel no further.  Nobody goes off the beaten track.  Christ, even the stuff I've checked out on Documenting Reality, some of that shit ends up on Facebook.  A bit of shopping, that's about as daring as people get.  See if you can get a tablet or a camera a couple of quid cheaper elsewhere.

I still recall those halcyon days of the Internet, where you waited an age for a page to load in, so you actually read it - the whole fucking thing - because you were on dial-up and it cost you money to download it.  Now, if we can't find the information on the landing page within a few seconds, we're liable to say, "Fuck this," flick back to the Google tab and click on another link.  Everything about our lives now is "fast".  Fast food, fast shopping, fast dating.  The POF people, they flick in and out of profiles, ditching most of them as though they're shopping for a pair of shoes.  A sentence to capture the interest of the person reading.  The same applies to books (if you haven't captured their interest in the first paragraph, you're fucked), and to music - why bother writing new stuff when the latest fast boy band can just churn out a cover version of a well-known classic, and churn it out fast ...

Why do we want to do everything so fast?  Is it because we can sense our own mortality now.  The Earth is billions of years old, but we're alive for less than a hundred years.  Is that why we want to rush everything?  Plenty of fish?  That saying was intended to help a person who'd been dumped by a partner.  "Ach, there's plenty more fish in the sea, pal."  It wasn't intended to be used as a line for a dating site.  "That's an ugly-assed fish - throw it back.  There's plenty more of them out there."

Most of us, we're not running out of time.  Not so much so that we can't waste a bit of time reading a book, finding something original to watch or listen to, or spending a bit of time actually getting to know somebody before we judge them.

Let me tell you, you're alive for eighty years.  That's still a long fucking time.

Slow down, chill out ...

... surf the web again.

The Importance of a Website

Let me get this bit out of the way first.  A website is far more important than Twitter.  A website contains a wealth of information about a writer (or at least, it should).

But here's the problem with websites.  If you have a shit host (as I currently do) then your website will go down more often than a Kings Cross prostitute.  And when do you know that your website's gone down?  Well, unless you're incredibly vain, and you check your website every couple of hours, you would have to wait for somebody to tell you.  But who's going to tell you?  After all, if your website is down, there is no way for anybody to email you.  Your email becomes non-working.  So while it's all very nice to have an email address such as shaun@shaunstafford.co.uk, if nobody can email me on it, what's the point?  The issue of a website being down is compounded further for an Indie writer because people will bang that URL into their browser, nothing will pop up, and they'll immediately think, "Fucking amateur."  And then they won't get to read anything about you or buy any more of your books.

I'm currently having diabolical issues with my hosting company.  The website just keeps going down, and I have to email the hosts and wait until they pull their finger out.  The latest outage, they fixed it so that the index page (or landing page) worked, but none of the others did.  I'd rather not waste time emailing the Internet hosts.  I shouldn't fucking have to.  They should be capable of doing their job.

I chose this particular company because they're based in the UK.  I guess it was just that "loyalty" thing.  But over the last few years, they've been particularly useless.  On one occasion the website was down for 2 weeks because they had some kind of server crash.  Now, things can go wrong.  That's obvious.  But 2 weeks to put it right?  How many people do this company employ?  I won't name them here, but they're a cheap company - the cheapest, even - and they're based in the UK.  I think once my hosting comes up for renewal, I'll migrate to another host.

Anyway, the importance of websites.  A website is like a glorified advert.  If a person googled "shaun stafford writer" my website would come up in the search.  It should be near the top.  This blog will also come up.  Twitter will be there too.  And all of those things should be right at the top.  But it's the website where most people will go for all of the information about me.  Now, I'm not saying my website - when it's actually working - is fantastic or high-tech, but it does everything a website is supposed to do.  And from there, people can visit this blog, and look at me on Twitter or Facebook.

A website is a useful tool when it comes to marketing your work.

But when the website is down, it just makes you, the writer, look like a tool.

Come on, UK-Cheapest, pull your fucking finger out.

Twitter or Twatter

I've brushed upon this before, but I feel compelled to do it again.  Twitter.  Is it actually worth wasting time on?

I'm convinced that nobody on my Twitter list actually reads any of my tweets.  How can they?  My tweets must get lost amongst the myriad marketing tweets from other Indie writers and associated spam.  Yet we have to maintain a Twitter presence, being writers, in spite of the fact that we're limited to 140 characters.  Yeah, right, try to find a writer who can only write 140 characters ...

Tonight, I was trying desperately to find a reviewer for my latest book, Besotted.  But 98% of reviewers were looking for YA books to review and the remaining 2%, they were looking for YA books that didn't feature vampires or anything supernatural.  What the fuck has gone wrong with this world?  I'm presuming that adults still read books?  And yet everybody seems to have gone mad for YA fiction.  Indie writers seem to write nothing else, as though they think that by having one of their main characters a young werewolf and the other a teenage girl with parents who ignore her will make them a best selling writer.  It won't.  Of course it won't.

I'm not averse, totally, to reading YA fiction.  I read "The Book Thief" a few years ago when it first came out.  Some YA books can be compelling or otherwise intriguing.  But must the Kindle market be saturated with this kind of stuff?  To see a woman in her forties writing YA fiction, I don't know ... it just depresses me.  Clearly, they can write, but their imagination cannot stretch beyond adolescence?

Anyway, I'm doing what most writers do.  I'm digressing (hell, isn't that what editors are for?  To wipe out our digressions?).  Back to Twitter.

Here's the thing.  If Twitter was actually a network for people who were actually interested in what other people tweeted, then we'd probably all be able to sell a few more books.  See, if I see a book advertised and it's something I think I might like to read, I'll download it to my Kindle.  I'll even pay for it.  But on Twitter (unlike Facebook) there is no interaction with the people who tweet.  If you comment on their tweet, they never reply.

The problem with Twitter is that there is a lot of twaddle on there.  And writers, they don't have enough characters in a tweet to say what they need to say about their book.  And nobody can really see what other people have been saying about that writer's book, because everything is so disjointed and unconnected.

I've been getting some pretty good feedback about Besotted.  People have said it's the best book I've written, though it has a way to go to outsell "die Stunde X", my current bestseller.  But can I find a reviewer to give an honest review?  Can I hell.  Well, bollocks to it.  I'm not going to write YA fiction.  I'm not going to sell out.  But here's a thought.  If you're here, reading this blog post, and you haven't read Besotted, you need to ask yourself why.

It's only a couple of quid to download it.  That's less than a pint of beer or a large cappuccino from Starbucks or Costa.  Go on, go here, download it, read it, and then review it.  I love to find out what people think about my books, even if they don't like them.

A writer's retreat?

My good friend Dan Wagstaffe (fellow writer) recently informed me that he's going to take a week out of his life and rent a cottage in Laugharne, the place were Dylan Thomas used to get himself utterly wankered before writing.  His intention?  To be inspired to labour intensely on the book he's currently writing.

I'm jealous.  

Not so much because of the Dylan Thomas connection - I'm more of a Steinbeck/Bukowski sort of guy, and the work of Thomas has never done much for me - but because the notion of getting away from it all to concentrate solely on writing for a week sounds so appealing.

All last year, it was my intention to disappear with a backpack, a tent and a sleeping bag, and do some wild camping, away from modern life.  Write in longhand rather than type.  Pack 7 bottles of cheap vodka, loads of tuna and pasta, and just spend the time writing in complete solitude.  I never got around to doing it.  This year, 2014, I know that I definitely will.  Thing is, should I go wild camping, or should I do what Dan is doing and rent a cottage for a week?  I don't want any distractions.  No Internet, no television (not that I actually watch TV), not even any music.  Just the tools to write with.

I guess there are pros and cons with both ideas.  The main con with camping is that I'm liable to get lost or, I don't know, eaten by a werewolf?  But the biggest pro is that I'll only have to roll out of the tent to vomit up a bottle of vodka after a heavy session - roll out of the tent (bed) in a cottage and puke my guts up, and there's a massive cleaning bill the next day.  But with the cottage, I guess I could take my laptop (sans Internet), and I wouldn't have to type up my longhand manuscript afterwards.  Also, I won't have to shit in a plastic bag, and I can have a shower or a bath every night so I don't end up smelling like a dirty, skanky, manure arse.

2014, I want to write lots.  It's conceivable that I could get a lot done during a writer's retreat.

Or maybe I'd just get pissed every night and lie on my back looking up at the stars.

Things that stop me writing ...

When I'm in the zone, I can write up to 10,000 words a day, though generally I probably hit about 1,500 to 2,000.  On days when I write.  There are so many days, however, when I just can't write.  So what stops me from writing?

Like the majority of writers, I have a day job.  I only work part-time, but all the same, it's something I have to do in order to survive.  As one of my friends recently said, you can only get so far being a struggling artist.  At some point, you have to pay the electricity bill and the Internet bill, and you have to buy food etc etc.

My day job interferes with my creativity.  Generally, if I'm working the next day, I cannot get in the zone.  I can't concentrate or focus on writing.  The thing is, I can write in a busy Starbucks, I can write in a pub with all of that noise going on around me, I've even written when I've been travelling on a train (most recently when I travelled up to York to see good friend and fellow writer Dan Wagstaffe), but if I'm at work the next day, I don't have a hope in hell of being creative.  My day job is sometimes a night job.  I work irregular shifts, and invariably I'm at my place of work for 24 hours.  I can see - and it's more noticeable now, after the fact that I struggled to get my last book, "Besotted", written in over a year - that this job affects my creativity much more than a standard 9-5 job does.  When I worked 9-5, as soon as I left work for the day, my mind was already writing paragraphs.  

In reality, I need either a change of job, or else a bestselling book so I can concentrate on writing 24 hours a day.

But I guess as I haven't written a bestseller, I should adhere to that maxim, "Don't give up your day job ..."