Archive
A sense of adventure. What makes you read on? #1
The above picture is of the start of a demonstration in east Jerusalem in early 2012. As I photographed it I could feel the hairs on my head standing up.
Behind me there were crowds of people watching what was going on. Every eye on Sultan Suleiman street was following the action. There was yelling too. And a lot of young men. The main group was waving a Palestinian flag and chanting in Arabic. The mounted Israeli police were moving in. A demonstrator had died the day before not far away. He had been shot at an Israeli checkpoint. I had no idea what was going to happen next, but I felt it was important to be there, to understand what Jerusalem is like, because I was writing about the city.
I love adventure as much as the next person, but getting close to it has its downsides.
It’s a lot less threatening to experience such things through the eyes of others. I could never get to that bridge under the Misty Mountains as Tolkien’s orcs ran after me. I’d have been cut down. And I can’t get to the planet Trantor to see Asimov’s Haro Seldon give a speech, or to ancient Egypt during a crocodile hunt on the Nile as described by Wilbur Smith.
But I can go to all these places through the novels of these wonderful writers. And I can be sick in bed and as poor as Oliver Twist and still go there.
That’s what I like about reading. What I would like to know is, what adventure stories have you liked? They could be about the search for love, that’s a big part of The Istanbul Puzzle, or they could be about the edge of our galaxy or about the struggle to stay alive in a modern city. I would love to know about the adventure stories you’ve liked.
This is the first in a series of four posts in the run up to the launch of The Jerusalem Puzzle on ebook December 3rd and in paperback in many countries January 3rd. I truly look forward to you contribution.
The 1st 2 Puzzle Covers side by side:
The final cover of The Jerusalem Puzzle has been released. Here it is side by side with The Istanbul Puzzle cover. I hope you like it.
What I am trying to work out is what colour should the next novel in the series, The Manhattan Puzzle, be. Any suggestions?
Could Video Book Excerpts Help Us all Sell More Books?
Now!
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Short Post: Nominated for Crime Writing Award
My first novel, The Istanbul Puzzle, has just been shortlisted for the Irish crime novel of the year award 2012.
Everyone can vote for this award here. The ceremony is on the 22nd November in Dublin. It will be televised in Ireland on the 24th November.
I am humbled by being shortlisted with such inspiring writers. Thank you all for your support. From being an aspiring writer in search of a contract to being published to being nominated has taken twenty months.
Thank you for sticking with this series, and for buying the books. I hope you will enjoy the rest of this series as it unfolds.
Laurence
Get Your Writing Noticed: Emotion – what keeps us involved!
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Making an emotional connection with readers is critically important. If you don’t, they can easily stop reading. We are all familiar with emotions. They are what makes us have a great day or a bad one. But how does a writer use them to connect with readers?
One of the most basic emotions is desire. If your characters are motivated, if they have desire, if only for a glass of water, then readers will feel connected. And the more they want something, the more interesting your story becomes, as the reader is left wondering what the character will do to achieve their goal.
Desire is the basic emotion which keeps us involved in a story. If your main character wants something, you are obliged to put obstacles in their way too. Obstacles create conflict. Conflict will inspire an emotional response in your reader and keep them turning the pages.
Some other ways to build an emotion connection with the reader are:
* Creating embarrassment for a character. By making the reader feel that embarrassment you will build a connection with them.
* Having a character abused in some way. Natural sympathy will be evoked if you do something terrible to a character we have come to know.
* Placing opposing characters in the same situation. There’s a natural tension when opposing characters meet. Your readers will feel it if the opposing characters views have been shown to them.
* Fear creates tension in the reader too. If we know the murderer is coming up the stairs, and the woman is having a shower, we fear the outcome.
* Anticipation. If you foreshadow, occasionally, without explaining exactly what is going to happen, readers will anticipate something happening.
* Surprise readers. Readers will enjoy your writing if something surprising happens. They won’t have any idea what is going to happen next.
* Excitement is a powerful writing tool. You can move the plot fast, anticipate, and spell out what might happen, and then keep the reader waiting. All the above methods combined will produce excitement in your reader.
One of the hardest parts for a writer is in creating authentic emotional scenes.
The ability to understand how it feels to be in an emotional situation and to express that feeling in a genuine and new way, without resorting to cliche or to simply naming how characters feels, is vital to creating truly engaging writing.
People look for writing that truly explains how it feels to be in each situation. And they can tell if you haven’t represented the reality in a way that’s believable.
I wish you well with this, one of the hardest challenges of becoming a good writer in the 21st or any century.
This post is the sixth on a voyage exploring the world of getting your writing noticed.
The next post, the last post, covers the impact of social media on writing and how writers might use social media to enhance their work.
Here is a link to my previous post in this series on pace, keeping things moving.
Please leave feedback, make suggestions and engage. This series of posts needs you to get involved to make them fly.
And please sign-up using the secure sign-up button above right to receive notifications in your inbox when post’s are released.
If you would like to discuss this post or for me to review your writing and give brief feedback without charge (page 1 of your MS only please) contact me via the comments below or by email: lpobryan@gmail.com
Here are some links to useful information for writers:
socialmediaisdynamite.com for my blog on using social media to get noticed.
The reality of being published – 2 months after my first book came out all over the UK I wrote this post
The Accessible Author – how the author’s role is changing
Frantic Editing – a post on the editing process my first novel went through in the summer of 2011
Finally, a big thank you to all my readers, everyone who comments and everyone who visits. I hope you find this information useful on your journey to getting your writing noticed.
Please reblog, link to, Tweet, post or mention this post. There are links to do that above and mainly below.
- Image from The Jerusalem Puzzle cover art. TJP is arriving 3rd January 2013.
The Jerusalem Puzzle proofs & new tag line
A Brutal Murder. An Ancient Evil. A Secret Revealed.
This is the new tag line for The Jerusalem Puzzle
I sent my corrections to The Jerusalem Puzzle page proofs back to Harper Collins on schedule at 5am this morning. The proofs were a PDF document with 400 pages showing exactly how the book will look when it is released in paperback format 3rd January 2013 and in ebook format 3rd December, in a month and a half.
I listed corrections, words to be deleted mainly with some typos and a few insertions on twelve pages. This is probably the last time I will have a chance to make corrections before the book comes out.
I am excited and anxious. The book could do well, very well or badly. Welcome to the world of publishing. Being a writer is definitely not a steady job. The uncertainty, the expectations you have and the expectations of others, spoken and unspoken, all add to the pressure.
I don’t mean to underplay my excitement at having the second novel in the series published, I am simply being honest about how it feels on this journey.
There are some exciting things planned, I will be running a competition on this blog, and a different competition on my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/theistanbulpuzzle so do Like it if you are on Facebook. There is other stuff planned too.
Already a competition has started on the Authonomy, the aspiring writers site, to get short stories published along with my ebook next year http://blog.authonomy.com/
A series of announcements will be made in the run up to the ebook launch Dec 3rd.
You can Pre-Order The Jerusalem Puzzle paperback here on Amazon UK
You can Pre-Order The Jerusalem Puzzle ebook here on Amazon UK
You can Pre-Order The Jerusalem Puzzle paperback here on Amazon US (for all outside the UK)
You can Pre-Order The Jeriusalem Puzzle ebook here on Amazon US (for all outside the UK)
I truly appreciate all your support, and I want you to read The Jerusalem Puzzle. I won’t say what I think of it, but I will tell you my publishers Harper Collins have said many amazing things about it.
Writing through stress – what does it to you?
I don’t know when we all started talking about stress, but it’s a useful word to catch the pressure of modern living.
I am three days away from handing in the proof copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle. My pace has slowed in the last few days thanks to working seven days a week on the novel for the last few months and other factors.
I did take a day off a few weeks ago. But I had to, someone close to me died. My mother. And the memories are hard to put away.
Does real stress and grief affect writing? It does for me. Breaking into tears at odd moments, feeling there’s too much going on and obsessing about small things are just a few ways I have been impacted.
I don’t think The Jerusalem Puzzle will change because of this, as all I am doing is correcting some spelling and deleting the occasional wrong word, but my plans for the future are changing.
I plan to write The New York Puzzle to the synopsis agreed with Harper Collins. That will be out late 2013. After that the next novel in the series will be darker. Mainly because of my research for The Jerusalem Puzzle.
Humans can be a cruel species.
If you feel the stress of writing, have things you would like to share about how difficult you find all this please do so through the almost anonymity of the comments below.
None of us is immune to mental health issues. The darkness and the light struggle for many. I wish you well with your journey and hope that the light dawns soon and the valley leads upwards. Laurence.
In the Wicklow Mountains, Ireland.
Deciding what to read!
So much choice – so little time.
I have created a list of professional fiction reviewers on Twitter: http://twitter.com/i/#!/LPOBryan/greatreviewers
It includes fiction reviewers from the LA Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Telegraph, Love Reading UK, the Financial Times and Kirkus.
There are general Tweets and Tweets about books they are reading and reviewing. I believe we need more than Amazon reviews and top 100 lists to help us find good fiction. If you follow the list and know of any great global reviewers who should be included Tweet me and I will include them. If you think some of the current people should be deleted let me know too.
None of these reviewers have ever reviewed my first novel so this is not about me. Please follow the list on Twitter so it might get a bit of momentum!. Thanks. I find lists one of the best things about Twitter.
The Jerusalem Puzzle update
I am working on the page proofs of The Jerusalem Puzzle right now.
These are a pdf document with the pages as they will appear in the final book. I am deleting here and there, adding a word, but moving fast through them.
I will have them back to Harper Collins mid October.
I have also received good news on two other fronts, including the ebook of The Jerusalem Puzzle coming out December 3rd. When I get a link I will post it. The paperback will be out Jan 3rd.
Other countries will have a chance to buy The Jerusalem Puzzle at the Frankfurt Book Fair mid October. I don’t know what to expect. Expectations are one of the difficult areas of being a writer. You literally never know what is going to happen. Stay tuned for lots more news in October including something exciting I can’t talk about yet!
From the cover of The Jerusalem Puzzle
Get Your Writing Noticed: Pace – what keeps us reading!
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My last post was on theme, and it is critical, but even if you have a great theme you have to keep people reading. To do that your writing needs to have pace.
So what is pace? Pace is movement. Pace is driving forward. Pace is action.
If you spend too much time on exposition, back story and detail then you are going to lose pace. Getting the balance right is the tricky part with pace. Consider your genre and your style as you use the following techniques for adding pace to your manuscript.
I once had the letters RUE above my laptop screen. They were put there to remind me to Resist the Urge to Explain. I used to explain who this person was in my stories, why that person did something and where the others were going later. Now I don’t. Explanations are boring. In the 21st century readers want action. They want novels that zip along. They don’t need to know what the characters had for breakfast.
Another technique for keeping the pace moving is by having a real plot. Shakespeare did this. People get killed, people have fights, people make speeches to skulls. Something happens. You need to have a plot where something happens. I know there was a 20th century literary fashion for stories where nothing happens, but if you want a big readership something has to happen.
The next technique is called in media res. This simply means starting in the middle of the action. Don’t start your story with a lot of exposition, backstory or filler about who your character is, where he came from or why she is there. Start with the gunshot that changes her life, or at the hospital where her mother is dying, or at the club where she sees her boyfriend dancing with her best friend.
So we have three techniques for keeping the pace moving: RUE, plot and in media res. Stick to these and your story will have pace.
This post is the fourth on a voyage exploring the world of getting your writing noticed. Here is a link to the previous post on theme, the most important part of writing IMO. And here is a link to the next post, on how to keep your reader turning the pages using emotion.
Please leave feedback, make suggestions and engage. This series of posts needs you to get involved to make them fly.
And please sign-up using the secure sign-up button above right to receive notifications in your inbox when post’s are released.
If you would like to discuss this post or for me to review your writing and give brief feedback without charge (page 1 of your MS only please) contact me via the comments below or by email: lpobryan@gmail.com
Here are some links to useful information for writers:
socialmediaisdynamite.com for my blog on using social media to get noticed.
The reality of being published – 2 months after my first book came out all over the UK I wrote this post
The Accessible Author – how the author’s role is changing
Frantic Editing – a post on the editing process my first novel went through in the summer of 2011
Finally, a big thank you to all my readers, everyone who comments and everyone who visits. I hope you find this information useful on your journey to getting your writing noticed.
Please reblog, link to, Tweet, post or mention this post. There are links to do that above and mainly below.
And if you are interested in a Social Media Promotion Services for Authors go here: http://bit.ly/YwsGiB
- Image from The Jerusalem Puzzle cover art. TJP is arriving 3rd January 2013.
