What Goes into the Ad?

It needs to capture interest with minimal information. I kicked around some ideas using the ‘rule of three’: this, that and the other, or ‘not this, not that, but the other’. Since I don’t really have graphic illustration skills beyond creating book covers, I’d need to use text. I came up with:

One heroine

Three books

Lost in time

Overall, I’m happy with them. They’re short. They tell you that the main character is a woman, that there are three books (so far) worth of story, and that the genre is science fiction (time travel).

My girlfriend looked at a draft of the finished GIF and said that readers wouldn’t know anything about the quality of the books. I agreed, and added a quote from an SFX of Déjà Vu as a ‘zero slide’ at the beginning.

How Does it Look?

The standard dimensions for a banner ad is 728 x 90 pixels. Once I’d stuffed that full of my text, there was no room for the book jackets, and it generally looked shite. #advertfail

Fine, I thought. I’ll just create an animated GIF.

For the uninitiated, an animated GIF (pronounced ‘fish’) is a little video.

Creation: Keynote

I don’t have any fancy animation software. I do, however, use Apple Keynote to give psychology lectures. Keynote is a particularly advanced presentation platform that has text effects, slide transitions, and timings. Crucially, it can also export a presentation as a Quicktime movie file. That file can then be dropped into a Mac app called GIFBrewery to make an animated GIF.

• Open Keynote and select one of the standard templates

• Next, you’ll want to have Keynote change its slide size to 728 x 90. Guess what? It won’t, because 90 is too small. You will need to create a slide with the banner ad proportions but more pixels. I’d suggest 2184 x 270.

• Create as many slides as you like. Each one of these will be a ‘moment’ in your animation. For my own banner, there were seven moments.

• Set the timings and transitions between the slides. You’ll see that, for the example below, I’ve set the transition between the first slide and the second to be the ‘sparkle’ effect; the sparkle moves left to right; and the transition activates automatically after three seconds.

• Once you’ve set up automatic transitions between slides, Keynote should be able to play through the ‘presentation’ without manual intervention. About five-ten seconds long is probably enough—but if your banner ad is awesome, maybe people will watch it for longer. Who knows.

• Now export the presentation as a Quicktime video. Go to the File Menu > Export > Quicktime. Keynote will offer the following options, which are set according to those I used for my own banner:

Creation: GIFBrewery

The Quicktime file is something that GIFBrewery can happily use to produce your banner.

GIFBrewery has many options, which you can explore. The two main things to point out are:

• ‘Resize’ will allow you to reduce the pixel dimensions of you video. If you’ve imported from Keynote, these dimensions will be too large, so here is where you can reduce it to 728 x 90 pixels.

• The ‘GIF properties’ pop-up allows you to tweak the frame-rate (and therefore overall speed) of the GIF. You will also find options for reducing the numbers of colours. Remember that the webpage hosting your advert needs the GIF to have a very small file size. In the case of kboards.com, this is less than 60K.

Wrapping Up

Here is the finished GIF:

I hope that’s helpful. It took me a couple of nights of pokery, not to mention jiggery, to realise that I could use Keynote to produce a movie file, and then a good piece of software to generate the GIF.

If you want to use my files as a head start, here they are:

The GFBrewery settings file

The Keynote presentation file

The Keynote Quicktime export

In the last excerpt, I had finished the first draft of the story, which came in at 15,000 words. I next turned to the problem of dealing with an editor.

Thursday, 4th April

For my next trick, I’ve been in contact with an editor. A few things are rolling around my head on this subject. First of all, the cost. It’s expensive.

As I’m going to publish this short story (calling it a novella, now!) to the Amazon Kindle—i.e., in electronic format—it needs to be in good shape. That means editing. What does an editor do? Well, there are different types of editing. There’s nothing about these types that a writer can’t do alone (indeed, many writers edit the work of others, too), but they usually find it difficult because they lack perspective. The editor gives a kind of ‘sanity check’. They work as a professional, experienced sounding board. I liken them to record producers. They don’t fundamentally change the text itself, but they lend it a certain perspective that can be helpful. They suggest deletions, additions, and so on.

Is it worth it? Undoubtedly. As a writer, I feel it’s my duty to get my work into the best shape possible. If my story were a boxer, this would be about hiring the best trainer.

Friday, 5th April

It’s a struggle to make the story as alive as it can be; what is the best way of presenting it?

I’ll need to increase the tension in certain parts. I’ll probably do this by setting the characters against one another rather more. The final scene, in particular, is a bit too friendly.

I go on to write:

There’s a character I’ll probably delete, and another I need to be very careful about. His identity is

(Redacted.)

For that [redacted] to work, his motivations need to seem consistent during the initial read (when the reader thinks [redacted]) and also when the reader goes back over their memory of his actions and thinks, ‘Aha!’ My model for this ‘Aha!’ moment is the reveal at the end of The Usual Suspects. That is to say that I aspire to create the same effect.

Good luck with that.

During this stage, the story tends to dog my thoughts and give rise to that faraway look that friends often comment on. The story is a multi-piece jigsaw puzzle where I’m allowed to change the size of the pieces as well as their arrangements. There’s no way this can happen consciously. You have to let your unconscious percolate.

One more thing is happening. As I become more familiar with the story—dream about it, ponder about it during idle moments—I think of certain metaphorical connections that could be made. For instance, I’ve decided that Saskia should be ‘awoken’ at the beginning of the story by a vase of flowers falling over. Not entirely sure, at this stage, whether the flowers should be red or white. Anyway, it complements the ending of the story, where [redacted].

Sunday, 28th April

I often recall something that Steve Jobs said about designing a product. Good design, he claimed, is about leaving things out. By eliminating what is not great, you leave the great bits. I’m often reminded of this when I read student work, like an essay. I’ll look at a paragraph and think, ‘You should have left that out,’ because the other paragraphs were written at the top of your game; they work well. Only leave in the stuff that works well. If something doesn’t work—a character, scene, metaphor—then you can try to fix it, but must always remember that deletion is also a fix.

Structurally, I’ve decided not to include some flashbacks (of the future, where the main character comes from). This should give the story a tighter, more focused feel. You can’t have too much focus.

I’m aiming for this story to work in the same way that a third act works.

The final draft was 20,000 words. That’s the version I sent to the editor.

The experience of reading this collection is like being waterboarded by an angel. Shocking, heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, this is some of the best writing I’ve ever seen. If you like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, you will love Witchcraft in the Harem.

I had a high old time on Monday night at the launch. Given that I’m talking occasionally on this blog about the creative process, I thought it would be nice to ask Aliya about how you get the full world feel in something as small as a short story. Take it away, Aliya.

How do you make a short story feel full?

Thomas Hardy was an amazing novelist. You only have to read the first pages of The Mayor of Casterbridge to realise you’re enjoying the powers of a master of description. And there’s a lot of description to get through. I mean enjoy. There are long paragraphs about the Wessex countryside and the meaningful weather. However much you love Hardy, you have to admit that the modern taste in prose has moved away from such loving build-up. A book that starts with three thousand words describing the landscape is unlikely to meet with the approval of a big publisher nowadays.

Description gives depth, but if you’re working on a short story, then you need to provide that rounded feeling in other ways. And if you write flash fiction, then you need to create the entire world in under 1000 words and lose none of the reality. So how do you do it? Here’s some helpful advice. Bearing in mind that I don’t give good advice and cannot be trusted.

Set your story at the bottom of the ocean.

Deep, see? No, okay, that’s not entirely serious. But do set your short story in some place that will be evocative with very little work from you. The Orient Express, for instance. Or choose one really good detail and describe that rather than going large-scale. Describing the swivel of the golfer’s hips as he hits his first shot is as meaningful as writing about all eighteen holes.

Don’t bother to set it anywhere.

If you’ve got brilliant characters, amazing dialogue, and an exciting plot, then let them do all the work for you and forget describing the colour of the carpet. The setting doesn’t always matter. Sometimes it’s more powerful if we’re not provided with a framework.

Piggyback.

The first story in my new collection is called Galatea. It’s a piece of flash fiction about a lonely orphan boy who grows up to be obsessed with naked flesh. There’s no mention of the Pygmalion myth in the story but the title brings with it a whole mythical set of expectations that say more than an extra thousand words could manage.

Avoid the natural world.

If you find yourself describing the types of trees in the field behind the house the characters live in (and they aren’t even looking out of the window) then you’re not keeping the word count down. Unless you’re writing a story about killer plants or the passing seasons or something, obviously.

Use default settings.

When it comes to describing what people look like, there’s very little point unless it’s remarkable. We all assume people look a certain way. Alas, Hollywood-style pleasant beauty has won over our imaginations in this regard, so instead of wasting time with hair and eye colours concentrate on the way the characters respond to each other. If they’re attractive, don’t bother describing your idea of attractive. A reader might hate muscled men or women with long legs. But what happens when they enter the conversation? That’s more interesting, and it tells us all we need to know. Then the reader becomes the detective of the story, solving the clues you leave behind. Artfully arrange your breadcrumbs rather than supplying a whole loaf of bread. It keeps them hungry and takes up less wordcount too.

So that’s what I know about turning a short story into a satisfying and rounded experience. I’ve set stories in the Canadian Rockies and in Viennese Concert Halls; I’ve used mythical figures and fairy tales; I’ve pared back the weather reports and the natural world. Except in the one story that’s set in a cabbage patch, obviously. And I’ve kept them all short and sweet. Even the one set in the Mariana Trench.

No, okay, I made that bit up. I told you I couldn’t be trusted.

Saturday, 30th March

So the theme today is a somewhat technical. I’m trying to get myself out of plot knots that I’ve become ensnared in. For this story, I’ve given myself a general view of what goes on—a high-altitude version, if you will—and relied upon my unparalleled writer’s brain (sarcasm alert) to figure out the fine details during the process of composition. This is one way of doing it; it’s also a way of creating panic. That said, the panic is probably necessary. What it means is that I must solve problems as I go along. It makes me focus much more. They aren’t really difficult problems, to be honest. They’re problems like ‘Character A needs to do X because otherwise things will be boring; but why would Character A do that?’ and selling them to the reader.

The theme of ‘selling’ is certainly one that I keep coming back to. The story itself might be mundane, but it can give the impression of being a cracking story if it is sold well. A magician will have only a small staple of tricks—misdirections, etc.—but they can be sold as things like mind-reading and levitation. That’s why you can paraphrase a story like Hansel and Gretel and it sounds like a piece of crap. In selling it, in putting it together as a story that the reader can almost experience, almost touch, you create something like fiction. So much of my ‘problem solving’ is really about doing up with solutions that the reader will ‘buy’. Not to have the characters be clever but seem clever. Much the same applies to the writer, I’d suggest.

Sunday, 31st March

The struggle continues. Since I finished the writing session last night, I’m bugged by the little universe in my head. The story has reached the point where several interesting things have to happen simultaneously. To be specific for a moment…

Redacted!

Last night in bed, and this morning in bed, I’ve been thinking over the mechanics of what needs to happen.

In my last session, I left Saskia…

As the Fonz says, redactamundo!

I did that according to Hemingway’s principle that one should always leave something in the tank for the next session. That is, you should always be able to pick up where you left off.

But once I’ve written the next bit—which is fairly easy—I’ll then hit the murder-wall of the coming action scene, where all things come together. I know I’ve written good action scenes in the past, but it does, at moment, seem difficult to scope out.

As ever, the best way of getting the thing done is to do it. Let’s rock. (Pun-tastic!)

Wednesday, 30th April

Well, I’ve finished the first draft of the short story.

Came in at about 15,000 words.

The idea now is to let it mellow—but not too much! The first draft works, essentially, as a rough map of the final territory. It now needs to be finessed in a couple of ways. The first is a ‘developmental pass’. I’ll need to read through the thing in its entirety and check that there aren’t any major errors of geography, motivation, and so on. Next, I’ll do a ‘research pass’, where I’ll ensure that visual descriptions, etc., are accurate. Finally, I’ll finish the text itself; this will involve re-writing the story from the ground up. I’ll probably start with a blank document and have the original open to one side.

Developmental pass

This comes first. It’s about a high-level overview. Here, I can change structure to maximise things like pace, clarity and parsimony—but however it’s described, it means producing a structure that is the best way of telling the story. In a sense, when you change the structure, you change the story, but there’s a distinction between plot and story. (There might be a technical one; but I’m using my own distinction here.) The story is what the text is about; the plot is what happens, and in what order. What is the story about? This is a question I don’t like to ask beforehand, because it stifles the creative process. It’s important for me that I don’t really know what it is about to start with. This needs to be discovered during the writing. In the case of Red Star Falling, I guess the story is about a woman going…

Redacted.

Research pass

This is quite good fun, though there is a pervasive anxiety that I’ll uncover a crucial detail that renders implausible a key aspect of the story. What I need to do in this stage is identify locations, the weather, sound patterns, smells, fashion—anything specific to the situation of the story that I’ll need to mention or imply. Red Star Falling is set in Switzerland in 1908. It begins in a mortuary and finishes on the Eiger Nordwand, or ‘north face’. I’ve been looking up descriptions and pictures of Edwardian mortuaries and dropping them into an application called Evernote. I’m not sure how much of the detail I’ll need to use, but I want to have it at my fingertips.

It might be worth saying something about the interaction between the research process and the first draft. I’ve learned, over the years, that the story-based element is quite independent from the research-based element, even though they may appear to the reader (and the amateur writer) to be tangled inextricably. The problem for the writing process is that you’ve already got a ton of stuff rolling around your head. Essentially, you are trying to simulate an independent reality in your head. The less you need to think about research the better. If you write peripatetically, the flow of the story will suffer, and it will be very hard to write. It’s better just to crack on. So, these days, when I write (and this is true of the draft as it stands today), I’m writing the letters TC (standing for ‘To Come’) whenever I need to write something that I would need to look up—time of dawn, name of a minor character, or street, and so on. This means that I can crash through and get the draft finished. However, it’s not easy, because you’re well aware that what you’re producing reads like a goddamn lubberly mess. (It doesn’t help that prose is shot full of cliches, either, but you’ve also got to postpone beauty to a later draft.)

Finalising the text

This will be laying down a new bed of prose that is all-guns-blazing, possibly overblown, and certainly purple. It’s when I’ll start to think: What is the absolute best way, aesthetically, to describe a night/mortuary workbench/lake lit by moonlight? The draft will probably be much longer than the first draft. Decisions of tone, pace, and all that will need to be made. Then it will be drafted a few more times. Probably, that’ll involve printing the thing out, correcting the language, and doing it again.

The fun you can have. Next time, the journal will look into issues like the cover for the book.

I’ve been thinking about an episode in The Amber Rooms where (spoiler alert) our own Saskia Brandt jumps into the body of a parallel universe Saskia Brandt. The parallel is called Saskia Beta. This Saskia Beta is on a mission with a mysterious agency (perhaps governmental, perhaps private) that sends people backwards in time for unknown reasons. The agency is called Meta. Our heroine, Saskia Brandt, left the body of this Saskia Beta with the mission incomplete. Our Saskia continued her story as we read it in The Amber Rooms. Of Saskia Beta, we hear no more.

A couple of months ago, I decided that I wanted to find out more about the mission of Saskia Beta. What was her goal? What is Meta, for her? I’m looking to fill in what you might call a lacuna from the manuscript of The Amber Rooms. So doing, I’m investigating, along with Saskia Beta, her lacunar amnesia of those days when her body was possessed by the first Saskia.

Sounds complicated?

It is. But complex good (The Big Sleep; Fire Walk With Me), I hope.

Anyhoo, I’ve been keeping a private journal of the writing process as part of a wider project to get at creative processes in writing (in my day job, I’m a psychologist). The journal is private only because it contains spoilers for the new story.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting extracts from this journal. I’ll redact some of the spoilers. My aim is to give you some insight into how I put the story together. Without getting too meta (ooh, see what I did there?) I’ve included some comments about the comments.

Draft cover incoming.

March 28th, 2013

So, this is the first episode of my journal. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. The main issue is the choice of what to include. These choices will probably shape up over the course of the work; I shouldn’t think too much about them now.

Oh so mysterioso.

Let’s start with what’s worrying me. In order of importance, I suppose I could start with audience reception. It’s the case that, thus far, I’ve been lucky to have some readers who liked Déjà Vu (book one of the Saskia Brandt series) and Flashback (book two). However, reaction to book three (The Amber Rooms) has been mixed. The book moves away from the high-tech feel of the first book until we’re almost into literary territory (shock; not to say horror). I don’t feel bad about doing this on one level. After all, I consider The Amber Rooms to be a better book. But I’m saddened that some of the people who were looking forward to the work (for more than a year in some cases) found it disappointing.

I remember one guy who wrote that The Amber Rooms was the biggest disappointment of the year. That was depressing to read.

So that is foremost in my mind as I make the decisions behind Red Star Falling.

Cool title.

I’d like to have an impact not dissimilar to Déjà Vu but with the quality of The Amber Rooms. Hah! Like that will ever happen.

Looking back, from a 90%-done perspective, I’d say I’m approaching something like that. There are the ‘literary’ things that I always struggle to keep a lid on (certain repeating metaphors; visual images I return to) but the story should also be a kinetic, third-act-type of story in the mold of Déjà Vu.

Time pressure is another issue. I never have enough time to write. And because my day job involves using a computer, I often sit down to write with a certain amount of fatigue. I’ve tried writing using pen and paper but it’s not quite the same. Rather too manual, and not how I like to write.

What else? There’s a financial aspect. The cover I plan to use involves a picture that will be quite expensive to buy. Is it worth it for something that will a short story alone?

Ultimately, I went for a much cheaper option, which the image you see in this post.

Then there’s the wider business side of things. I’m trying to arrange an editor for Red Star Falling and there are plenty of machinations involved. They take away from the writing time and are quite annoying, but… I do know from experience that it is better to be aware of all these processes than to cede control to a third party who might very well fuck it up.

That’s quite enough for one day, Ian.

Yes, I believe it is. Such language! I hope Dad’s not reading this.

The next journal entry, which I’ll publish in a few days, will look at some of the technical aspects of the writing the story.

Free in the US store and the UK.

If you’re interested, do read on:

The experiment will ask you to continue writing a scene after a brief genre-based prompt to get you going. You’ll do this three times. There’s also a brief pre-experiment questionnaire and post-experiment questionnaire. Your participation is entirely voluntary and you can stop at any time.

There’s more detailed information on the experiment page itself, which you can get to via this link:

https://cccusocialsciences.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_08jkUORvegQXDcF

When I retired from writing and prepared to let my books lay down and die on the Kindle, I was as surprised as anyone when they did well. Since March 2011, I’ve sold almost 20,000 copies, and they’re still selling.

I’m now out of books to publish and it’s good time to take stock.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. You can read more about my personal history in this post, which is rather more emotional than this one, partly because it was the first time I’d voiced those thoughts, and partly because it’s now a Sunday teatime and we all know how dampening to the spirit they can be.

So, one the positive side: I have many readers. It’s been a pleasure to receive their emails and respond to them. They’re nice people. Can’t have too much of that.

On the negative side, writing exacts a toll. I spent the few days before Christmas sorting out my taxes, for instance. I spent the entirety of yesterday sorting out formatting issues with The Amber Rooms. In the months leading up to now, I’ve organised my own editing, proofing, typesetting and all the other crap that comes with publishing a book—even one published for the Kindle.

Parenthetically, I should say that the publication of The Amber Rooms has not been pleasant. This is my fault. While I think that each of my books has been better than the last, my idea of what makes a good book has changed somewhat between writing Déjà Vu (finished when I was about 27) and The Amber Rooms (a grand old 36). There’s a good decade of life and writing experience between the two. The Amber Rooms is too different a book to work well as the third in a series whose readers probably think it should continue on a Jason Bourne-meets-Back To the Future theme (not denigrating either of those; they’re great movies). You can read the extent of the difference between my expectations and those of my readers in the Amazon UK reviews (as of writing, there are six; four of them trash it.) I’m not so flighty as to down tools in reaction to so few reviews (like most writers, I’ve written for years in the total absence of feedback other than my own, which is largely negative), but I have a feeling that subsequent reviews will be of a similar nature. It would have been better to write the story as a standalone. Either way, it’s a lesson, and doesn’t bode well for any future Saskia Brandt novels I have in mind, which would be more like The Amber Rooms than Déjà Vu.

Reader, it’s a seesaw. On the one side, we have the joy of actually publishing the books. On the other side, we have the paperwork, the usual artistic frustration, and the complete absence of anything approaching a spare time. Since August of last year, finalising The Amber Rooms has taken up most of my evenings and weekends. Routine: Come home from work around six, eat something, play one of three musical instruments for a bit, work from seven until nine, and then relax. I could just about manage that for one academic term, but I can’t keep up that kind of pace for the next one. And bear in mind that I have day job that regularly requires me to work evenings and weekends; indeed, it’s expected, and I can’t perform on par without doing so.

I could probably write fifteen minutes a day, but God knows what kind of rubbish I’d produce under this circumstance. I could write just for myself, a la Salinger, but that would be equally pointless. Real artists ship. Am I going to write my own bedtime stories? What about the spoilers?

The seesaw is further weighted on the negative side by the continuing absence of any interest from traditional publishers. I joke about this a lot, but it is frustrating because I don’t have any wish to organise my own cover, editing, typesetting, and the thousand other smaller things you need to do when shipping a book. These are far more time consuming than the actual writing. They’re one of the reasons I’ve been writing The Amber Rooms since 2007. Over the past couple of years, my hardworking agents in both the UK or US have had no interest whatsoever from any publisher beyond, wait for it, ‘interesting’. I find chaotic processes in connectionist models of artificial neurons easier to understand than the editorial decisions of publishers.

There is one more positive thing; a production company in the US may option the film rights—but (i) that’s ‘may’, (ii) we’re talking about an option, not the rights themselves, (iii) the probability of a film being made is vanishingly small.

There was a Steve Jobs quote I always liked. I believe it’s taken from his Stanford graduation address. To paraphrase, he said that your job is something you’ll do most of your working life, so you might as well do something worthwhile. For me, writing is a job, even though it is synonymous with my spare time. I have to ask whether it is worthwhile. I feel more worthwhile playing music with my friends, or holding a Beaver by the ankles while he coughs up glitter, or reading fiction that isn’t my own.

I won’t say that I’m never going to write again. I’ll revisit the situation later in the year. September, perhaps. But if you ever see a new book come out with my name on it, I will be surprised; more likely, you’ve misread the latest from Amanda Hocking.

Thanks to all those who’ve read my stuff. It’s still out there.

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

The man who wrote these words is William Goldman. They are taken from his classic movie, The Princess Bride. He is also the screenwriter behind Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, All the Presidents Men, The Great Waldo Pepper, and A Bridge Too Far. In short, he’s been around the block a few times, and he knows what he’s doing—although he would have you believe that he does not.

The notion that nobody knows anything about movies, least of all Goldman, permeates the book Adventures in the Screen Trade. It is not wholly a practical guide on screenwriting. That aspect of the process is covered in a short but informative section towards the end of the book. Rather, for the most part it is a record of his journey from novelist to screenwriter. As you can imagine, the journey is not a smooth one, and in the process, Goldman has collected many anecdotes.

I won’t relate any of them here. Indeed, I don’t really remember them in any detail. Dustin Hoffman does not come out well. Laurence Olivier does.

The really interesting thing for me about the book is that Goldman finds a way to speak entertainingly about the creative process behind screenwriting. His main message is that the screenwriter is a somewhat impotent figure within the movie making process, constantly usurped by the director, the producer, and any friends of the director all producer who wish to improve his screenplay. It’s not a happy situation. He recommends that the screenwriter try to make as much money as possible from his scripts, and then return to some kind of properly creative pursuit, such as novel writing.

Nothing very new here, then. But the book is engaging nonetheless. The real value in this book lies in its final chapters. In these, he begins with a short story that he published many years before and then converts right there into a screenplay, outlining along the way his struggles in transforming it. He goes on to interview a cinematographer, editor, producer, and director to get their impressions on producing a movie from the finalised screenplay. The interview with the director is worth the price of admission alone. The director is not a big fan of the screenplay. Indeed, he rips Goldman a new one. It’s a great illustration of the combative process through which a movie is constructed.