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Post by marianne on Nov 15, 2004 21:41:29 GMT
Hi all,
Margo Lanagan is coming aboard from 28/11 -5/12. Margo is a truly gifted writer even though she'll hate me for saying it!!
If you want to ask questions about voice and originality and new ideas, Margo is your girl. She's also very technically sound and has taught writing to young writers through various programs.
SPREAD THE WORD....
Here's her bio: Margo Lanagan has published poetry, teenage romances, novels for children and young adults, and short stories for science fiction, fantasy and horror fans. Her books have been Children's Book Council Notable Books, Aurealis Award winners and shortlisted for the Ditmar Awards and the New South Wales and Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. Her short-story collection Black Juice won a Victorian Premier's Literary Award, and stories from it and her previous collection, White Time, have been selected for inclusion in several Year's Best (and in one case, half-century's best) anthologies. Margo lives in Sydney.
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Post by Chirugal on Nov 15, 2004 22:55:26 GMT
Yay! It will be great to talk to her. And we still have a week to think of questions... Welcome aboard in advance, Margo! ;D
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Post by marianne on Nov 19, 2004 23:57:43 GMT
Sasha Soren is going to advertise Margo's presence here as well, on her great website www.sashasoren.com. Only one week to go!
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Post by BrisVegasGrrl on Nov 22, 2004 11:33:32 GMT
Also, if you haven't read it, check out Margo's anthology "White Time." It totally flipped my lid. It's one of my all-time favourites and marked Margo out as one of the authors I most admire.
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Post by marianne on Nov 25, 2004 8:16:03 GMT
Hi there Bris VGrrl
welcome in! Yes, Margo is an amazing writer. She'll be logging on on Sunday, hope to see you here.
MDP
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Post by margol on Nov 26, 2004 19:21:59 GMT
Actually, I'll be logging in on Saturday morning. Hi, all! I hope to be able to visit regularly over the weekend, and on the evening most days during the week.
I'm going into the State Library of New South Wales to write every weekday, mimicking commuting to work so that the whole thing feels professional (also to thumb my nose as I walk past a few offices in town where I don't work any more - yay!)
I've spent four weeks pulling together first drafts of a third collection of short stories [working title RED JAM], and am now up to my ears in what I hope will be the first book of a YA fantasy quartet. Marianne has seen what I used to think was the first volume, which has turned out to be the second volume. I'm now in info-dump-management mode - so much history to tell before I can get on with the story!
Anyway, it's all interesting, and a whole lot better for the soul than working in offices.
Off to a Pilates class now - see you later.
Margo.
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Post by marianne on Nov 26, 2004 22:00:14 GMT
Hi Margo, good to hear you. In 'Black Juice' one of your stories is written from the pov of elephants. How do you get your head into that sort of mindset? Did you research much about them? With a short story like that how many times (or for how long) would you work on it? Months, Years? 'Singing Down you Sister' has been selected for a worlds best. How long did it take to get the way you wanted it? MDP
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Post by margol on Nov 27, 2004 3:31:20 GMT
Hi Marianne,
The thing that set me off were 2 documentaries, one about how elephants communicate using infrasound (the sound waves that are too low for humans to hear) and another that talked about how different animals perceive time. Beyond the infrasound idea and the idea that elephants would perceive the rest of the world besides themselves as being in fast-forward, I didn't do much research. There's a book called WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP, which I bought, but I don't think it added much to what I already thought about animals, which was that until somebody proves conclusively that animals have no emotional reality, it seems as sensible to assume they do as to assume they don't. And apart from that, I didn't do any particular research. I was just wondering what it would be like to be inside a big, slow, matriarchal-society beast with rough skin and a different-time view of the world and of 'peeple'. Oh, I'd also seen Dumbo a few million times when my kids were little, so I guess some of that huge-beasts-afraid-of-mice stereotype got in there too!
With short stories I have a go at telling the story end to end in one sitting, possibly in a single morning, possibly over two days (or, if I'm working full-time, over a week). I get the story told from beginning to the end I'm imagining. Then I word process it, print it out, and it's best at this stage if I put it aside long enough to forget it. (I've put the RED JAM stories aside like this - put them aside last week and won't start properly looking at them until December.) Then when I go back, it's very clear which bits I've written in a kind of shorthand, that I need to expand; and it's also clear whether I've actually got to the heart of the story, taken it as far as it can go - i.e. whether enough actually happens, or whether I've just told a story slightly to one side of the story I meant to tell. The more times I do the putting-aside-to-settle, then revising thing, the closer I get to the original aim (or to something better than the original aim). Most the stories in BLACK JUICE were written and revised over three years and many changing personal circumstances, and I think this did them nothing but good; it really sorted the wheat from the chaff, and I replaced several of the stories in the first proposed collection (as you know) with new ones. But with both 'Sweet Pippit' (the elephant story) and 'Singing My Sister Down' the main thrust of the story was there in the first draft; I didn't remake it in a major way, just kept trimming and polishing and thinking about the different characters. I cried when I wrote the first draft, and I cried every time I revised it. I'd get to a certain point and think, 'Hey, I'm going to make it through without crying this time!' And then I'd get to where the boy comes up the riverbank into his mother's arms, and I'd be gone.
So the answer to the how-long-does-it-take question is, the longer I take, the more I revise, the better the story gets. I don't ever feel that I've overworked a story - particularly as my idea of work is to pare bits away, and then try and stuff the meaning of the pared-away bits into the remaining words. But I do eventually start replacing commas that I took out during the previous draft, which indicates that I've pretty much finished.
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Post by BrisVegasGrrl on Nov 27, 2004 13:01:41 GMT
Hey Margo,
Welcome to the forum!
White Time is a well-thumbed, dog-eared favourite of mine and one of the stories I love best is Tell and Kiss. For me the interaction between Rock and Chump really rings true. You have a superb knack for 'voice' in your writing, particularly the adolescent voice.
Can you talk a bit about this? Do you simply hear a character's voice when you're writing, or is it more of a conscious construction? Do you find a strong voice is easier to achieve if you're writing a story in first person, as opposed to third person?
Kate.
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Post by margol on Nov 27, 2004 21:59:08 GMT
Hi Kate - I'm glad you are a fan of the short stories, as publishers seem to believe there are none of you out there! And I always love to hear of dog-eared copies of my books in the world.
I think being conscious of the way people speak and what they are saying/not saying/trying and failing to say with words comes from a lot of sitting slightly to the edge of conversations and listening in to the back and forth of people talking - I come from a fairly quietly spoken and not very social family, so it's taken me a while to work out how to do the conversation thing without awkwardness (and even now - but we won't go into that...) Also I've spent a fair bit of time eavesdropping on teenage conversations on the train to and from work in the last few years, noticing how, yes, some of the buzzwords change, but the same kinds of mannerisms are used as were used when I was a teenager. So I use the voices I've heard recently and back when I was a teenager myself, and turns of phrase from both periods.
HOWEVER, if I were to copy down what teenagers say verbatim, and present it as dialogue, it would sound pretty terrible - longwinded, often incomprehensible, too many buzzwords and repetition and lots of superfluous giggling for the girls. So it is also a matter of conscious construction, learning how much of the real thing you can use and how to moderate the voices you hear so that they sound realistic, but say things that most-people-you-hear-on-the-train don't get to say, i.e. move a story along.
Once I'd done this with a variety of voices (forced them to take part in a short story, so their conversations had to (a) advance the plot and (b) reveal their character - everything a character says should be an expression of their individuality, particularly in a short story - it became a lot easier to sustain a voice and spot where I'd made a character say something in the wrong way.
Yes, I think it's marginally easier to achieve a strong voice in the first person. But I do get sick of that point of view; after writing 3 first-person story drafts recently I thought, 'Step back, girl! Try something different for a while!' The voices can be in danger of merging and becoming samey, or too close to your own voice. Third person, though I don't think you need to lose any immediacy or be less inside the character, allows you to include, say, descriptions of surroundings that the character wouldn't necessarily think of, or be ironic (or downright nasty) about the character.
Whichever point of view I choose, though, I have to have the central character's voice clear in my head, to know who I'm dealing with, before the story really gets going. But I also need to know pretty much the trials I'm going to put them through - not necessarily the inner journey, which I'll discover along the way, but some idea of the crisis they're headed towards. I've started several stories with just character and voice and no thought where the people were going, and they've chatted on amiably and interestingly for many pages but never got up and done anything!
Best, Margo.
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Post by Cj on Nov 28, 2004 11:31:28 GMT
Hi Margo Have you always wrote all kinds of literature or did you try different ones out as you went along, as I see you’ve wrote for teenage fiction and then also horror and science fiction. I’m trying to develop my fiction writing skills and wondering if its possible seen as the majority of my work has always developed into science fiction (even if it didn’t start that way)
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Post by margol on Nov 28, 2004 19:06:36 GMT
Hi CJ,
I started out writing poetry in my teens. Throughout my twenties I realised that the readership for poetry was too limited for me to ever make a living out of that, plus I always liked the idea of writing FAT books, so I went off to university because I knew they'd make me write a thesis there - which they did, in history.
Then, because the market was there, I wrote and published some teenage romance novels, which taught me how to fill 100 pages with story.
Then, all of a sudden, the teen romance market dried up. That was when RL Stine was becoming popular, and publishers were saying, kids don't want romance, they want horror. So, I don't know what happened to all those lovesick teenagers but publishers weren't interested.
By then I'd had a few ideas for junior fiction novels with an element of fantasy in them - so, they were set in normal Australian society, but an animal escaped from a video game in one, aliens abducted a boy's father in another. I wrote and had those published.
Then I wrote 2 bigger novels for teenage girls, set entirely in this-world Australia. They were the ones that really taught me about putting myself into my writing, as up to this point I'd assumed I didn't seriously have to get the ickier parts of myself involved!
Watching how these different books performed made me realise that if I ever wanted to make a living from writing, I was going to have to choose a genre that had wider appeal than any I'd explored before. That was when I thought fantasy would be the go for me, and that's what I've really been writing since - with the occasional leakage into SF and horror, but I've tended just to write the story and do the classifying later, rather than think beforehand, for example, 'OK, now for a touch of horror.' In fact, it took me a while to realise that there was actually a place in the world (SF/F/H) for the weirder stories I kept coming up with.
I think when you're starting out, it's a good idea to try lots of different kinds of writing, to see what suits you best (this might change as you go along, so it's a good idea not to dismiss any un-chosen genres completely!). Then, even if you still end up being 'a science fiction writer', it's more of an informed choice you've made, rather than a genre you feel you got stuck in in the early days and that you haven't explored beyond.
Plus, I find it works well to have some fantasy writing going and some real-world writing. That way, when I go stale on the one, the other provides a rest without me having to stop writing altogether. I haven't published any real-world writing since 1996, but I'm slowly collecting some YA short stories together.
I should add that this story took place over the years 1989-2004, also that except for the poetry and the recent short story collections my aim was to write for children and young adults. The short stories I was thinking would appeal to adults as much as young adults, but the next few novels I have in mind will be YA.
I hope this is helpful - sorry, every time I sit down to answer a questions I seem to write a small novel!
Best, Margo.
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Post by Chirugal on Nov 28, 2004 20:14:22 GMT
Hey Margo! Welcome in! When you get to a point in a story where you have no idea where you'll go from there, what do you do?
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Post by Jocasta on Nov 28, 2004 21:16:24 GMT
Hi CJ, also that except for the poetry and the recent short story collections my aim was to write for children and young adults. The short stories I was thinking would appeal to adults as much as young adults, but the next few novels I have in mind will be YA. Hi Margo, hello again everyone! Gee it's nice to be back here! A couple of quick questions, Margo--first, re the 'voice' thread. You said "I have to have the central character's voice clear in my head, to know who I'm dealing with, before the story really gets going". But I have trouble knowing who I'm dealing with before I've actually seen what happens in the story. That is, I get stuck in a bind where I can't write the story because I don't know what the character's going to do, but don't know what the character's going to do because the story hasn't moved yet--any advice here? (assuming you can decipher this babble) Also, you said above that you write mostly for children and YA. Any reason for this preference? And do you approach writing for this audience differently to writing for adults? At a recent lecture, Terry Pratchett said he found writing for younger audiences far more challenging and rigorous because he has to discipline himself more. Do you agree? Have fun at the library. Best MM edited for quote tag - Amy
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Post by margol on Nov 29, 2004 5:52:53 GMT
Hi Chirugal - nice to meet you! On getting stuck. It depends. If I know how the story's going to end but I don't know what the next step is to getting it there (or I'm just getting bored plodding towards the end), sometimes I jump ahead and write the jammy climax bit and come back later when I'm feeling tidy, to put in the missing section. If I started with a good idea - say, one scene and I don't know what the next scene might be - and now I'm stuck, and I'm fresh and ready to write, I will look at what I've done, look at what initially attracted me to the story, and decide on an ending then and there, so that I've got something to progress towards. Often, the germ of the climax is there in that one scene - I've subconsciously put it there and I find it in a chance remark I've made someone say, or a detail I've put in for no particular reason other than that it suits the mood I'm after. (Sometimes what I decide here doesn't stick and I have to choose a different way for the story to go, but I'm OK with that. Any dying story can be resuscitated, just as any story idea can yield a short-short or a novel, depending on the application of willpower.) Sometimes, if I'm NOT fresh, I just put it aside in the ideas folder and wait for another idea to come along and activate it. I often find it takes TWO ideas interacting with each other to get me excited about the first one again. Sometimes I know that the way ahead is there on the tip of my mind's tongue, and all I have to do is go and do something manual and non-distracting (make a bed, wash a dish, check the mailbox) and it'll come. Or I might write out a little finding-my-way piece of journal describing to myself where this story might go from here, given what I have and what I know so far. Things I am careful NOT to do (these days) when stuck: . panic . throw out draft . beat self up about being a useless writer and no good for anything . sit and sweat blood over page These tips apply to short stories and to novels. Extra tip when working on novel - sit back and draw diagrams of plot (concentrating on main plotline and its forward movement), of characters (thinking about how they propel plot and how they are changed by event), of themes, of every aspect of the story until things start to come clearer. Or write experimental scenes for farther on in the story - sometimes stories come together as mosaics rather than in a nice neat linear way (dammit). If none of this works, take refuge in sleep and social life.
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