Tag Archives: publishing

Awesome writing resource: Diversity Cross Check

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I first heard about Diversity Cross Check on the Writing Excuses podcast (another amazing writing resource in itself).

So what is Diversity Cross Check? I’ll let them explain it for you….

Simple premise: You’re a writer interested in diversifying your characters, but you don’t share those experiences and you don’t want to offend anyone. A good resource is always those who understand firsthand what it’s like to live as such. So you visit the appropriate tag, find someone you’d like to work with, and contact them via whatever method they’ve provided.

How cool is that?

Often people lament about how little diversity there is in books. It seems an obvious thing to solve – write more diverse characters! Make them the protagonist! Avoid negative stereotypes!

It is easy, until you go to the next level down and start fleshing out said characters. Then you discover you have no idea what an Orthodox Jew would be doing at a certain point in their festive calendar – if you even know what that calendar is in the first place. Or the conflict a second generation immigrant from a specific nation in a certain city would be experiencing as they balance their new life against old world traditions and customs. Wikipedia can only go so far in answering these questions. It just provides more broad brush strokes for you to work with. The detail comes from those who live it.

The fear of accidental offence stops people from branching out from what they know. It’s limiting when it doesn’t need to be. Diversity Cross Check might be the best place to address an issue with a character you secretly want to write. Or it might ignite an interest in a minority waiting for someone brave enough to step forward and give them a main character voice.

Book review – Gone Girl

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Gone Girl

Warning: mild spoilers ahead if you’ve got no idea at all about the book

There has been so much hype around Gone Girl that I was a bit hesitant about reading it. I’d managed to successfully avoid being spoilered, even though there was some pretty heavy marketing for the film. General rule of thumb for me though is that the more people like it, the less I do. Call me a rebel.

However, I actually really enjoyed the book. Without giving too much away, the only part that I didn’t massively like was the ending, but I think that is often the case with many books for plenty of readers. A completely satisfying ending is something which is exceptionally hard to pull off. For the last 50 pages or so, I could not see how the characters would be able to reach a resolution that maintained the tension that had been so expertly crafted through the rest of the book.

On saying that – I’m not sure I could imagine an alternative ending given what had happened up until that point, so I’m hardly in a position to criticise.

The most interesting bit about this book for me was the fact there wasn’t a single likeable character. Deliberately so. No good guy to root for. It takes some skill to keep the tension high when all of the characters are lacking in redeemable features and you don’t know which one you want to come out on top. This was compensated for by the use of a tightly plotted narrative instead, with plenty of twists and turns. There were a few parts where I didn’t want to read what happened next, because it made me feel anxious about how nasty things could get. Reading is about experiencing the whole range of human emotions, not just the good ones, and effectively creating this sensation is the mark of great writing in my opinion.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, I would, as long as you don’t mind unlikeable characters and edgy tension. If you like your books to be happily ever after with some redeeming romance, then it’s probably not going to be for you. It’s also quite long in comparison to a lot of thrillers, so you might want to make sure you’re prepared to be in it for the long haul.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars on my imaginary ratings system.

 

I Hate Titles

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As I’ll be moving on from New Zealand shortly, I have a few weeks where I can be completely devoted to writing.  This has led me to the realisation of how much I hate coming up with book titles.

Sometimes, I know from the beginning, which is great. When I don’t, I come up with a placeholder, because every file needs a name, right? Then I get to the point where I need a title and nothing seems to work. Nothing seems to fit. Worse, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous my brain gets until I just feel frustrated. In the end, everything sounds like a bad porn movie.

This past week, I have had to come up with two new titles for books in very different genres. The first is one I am submitting to agents to try to take down the traditional publishing route. I know that if I am lucky enough for it to go somewhere, then the title will no doubt get changed anyway. But I still need something a little catchy to begin with if I want to grab attention.

The second is for the first book in a series I am intending to self-publish under a pseudonym. That means there will be no team of professional title-makers to come up with one for me. Annoyingly, the second and third books have had their titles from the start, but this has been stuck with it’s placeholder for nearly a decade. That’s made it hard to shake in my own mind. I finally had the breakthrough last night, which means I can finally think about getting the cover art done. Yay.

Titles. I hate ’em (apart from when I love them).

So, in the spirit of the writing focus and the coffee I have ploughed through to keep going:

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