You Know You’re a Travelwriter when…

You only pack two pairs of shoes. Practical granny-style shoes and one pair of sexy sandals to remind you that you’re a woman instead of an automaton.

Your bathroom at home has miniature-sized everything – shampoo, body lotion, soap.

You spend half an hour going through your dressing table at home trying to find the room service menu.

You speak in hushed tones when you walk down your passage at home.

You ask your housekeeper what else is on the menu for dinner.

You forget you have a car parked in the garage and phone for a taxi.

You dial 9 hoping to book an early wake-up call.

Every inch in your handbag is accounted for.

You go to the bookshop and head straight for the travel guides.

The rotator cuffs in your shoulder are stuffed from lugging heavy wheelie bags through airports.

Roam on / Roam off is no. 2 on the speed dial of your mobile phone.

The constant concern in your life is how many pages you have got left in your passport for foreign visa requirements.

You wear three watches – New York, London, Johannesburg.

Your wallet carries US Dollars, Egyptian Pounds, Euros and Thai Baht, but you have no Rands to pay the local car-guard.

You phone your friends and they say, “Isabella who? God, I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth!”

Wordworx Writing Workshops

Award-winning writer Isabella Morris will be holding 4 writing workshops in Bedfordview, Gauteng.

Join Isabella to stimulate your creativity and writing skills.

Choose from one of the following dynamic courses:

1. Travelworx – Successful Travel Writing (Saturday, 1 August 2009) Book now for only R750!
2. Realworx – ABC’s of Successful Non-Fiction (September 2009)
3. Storyworx – Storycrafting for Successful Fiction (August 2009)
4. Passionworx – Successful Romance Writing (September 2009)

Guided workshops include comprehensive course material, writing exercises and feedback session.

R1500 per workshop includes lunch and tea.

email enquiries or to book your place : wordworx@webmail.co.za

Survival Kit for Romance Writers

Every romance writer needs a survival kit to help them out when they find themselves in a romantic writing drought.

1. A great memory of a first kiss.

I kissed Michael over the handlebars of his Chopper bike. He smelled of chlorine and he tasted of oranges. The memory of a first kiss brings back the tingly sensations that you have to relate in your love story every time your characters kiss.

2. A vine of jasmine outside their writing room.

The surprising hint of a delicious scent titillates the senses and awakens your response to sensational writing. Make sure your readers are as sensually aroused as you are by including sensational details.

3. A bottle of their favourite male fragrance.

Does he smell of pine or moss, does he exude a woody scent or a mature scent that reminds you of pine cones crackling in the hearth? Make his scent attractive and alluring; make it so your reader also wants to rip his clothes off.

4. Chandeliers and long white curtains that billow in their writing room.

Crystals catch and deflect the light and creates a sense of luxury. Long white billowing curtains adds to that full sensuality.

5. A day alone with love songs playing loud.

Play your love songs from morning til night on full volume, choosing the sad ones for the “we’re destined to never be together again” moment.

6. The handkerchief you kept from your first breakup.

That handkerchief you kept has got salt crystals on it from all the tears you shed. Cry all over again and tell your readers where it hurts.

7. Calendar of male pin-ups.

You know you’ve got a favourite part of the male anatomy – share it with your readers. Is it that delicious line that runs down his tummy separating his abs, or is it the hollow in his throat above his massive pecs?

8. Catalogue of dates.

Make a list of great places to spend a date and then keep them on file so that you’ve got a brilliant candlelit dinner in a nature reserve or an evening star-gazing when you need it.

9. A best friend.

Best friends always offer a shoulder to cry on or great advice. Turn to her or him when you’re not sure what your characters should do.

10. A great relationship.

You can’t write about one if you haven’t had one. Use the highest and lowest parts of your most sizzling relationship in your stories to create a believable romance that your readers will enjoy.

2009 PEN/Studzinski Literary Award finalists announced

The South African Centre of International PEN (SA PEN) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2009 PEN/Studzinski Literary Award.

The award for original short stories in English by African authors attracted an unprecedented 827 entries, 625 of which met with the rules of entry. Just under 200 stories were longlisted, and 34 stories were chosen as finalists by the PEN Editorial Board comprising Shaun Johnson (Chair), Anthony Fleischer, Justin Fox, Harry Garuba, Alistair King and Mary Watson. Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee is currently judging the shortlisted stories and will choose the winners of the first (£5 000), second (£3 000) and third (£2 000) prizes. The winners will be announced in May 2009. (Details regarding the announcement will be posted on www.sapen.co.za in due course.) The finalists’ stories will be included in an anthology of new writing from Africa to be published later this year.

The writers and their stories to have been selected as finalists for the Pen/Studzinski Literary Award 2009 are:

Ken Barris – The life of Worm; Nadia Davids – The visit; Ceridwen Dovey – Survival mechanisms; Joan du Toit – An informed decision; Graham Ellis – No match for Fanie Smith; Rosemund J Handler – Strident night; Jeanne Hromnik – Love In troubled times; Karen Jayes – Where he will leave his shoes; Suzanne Jordaan – Beulah; Bobby Jordan – Metalhead and Situation Orange; Chisanga Kabinga – Display cabinet; Ken N Kamoche – A kiss in Nanjing; Yvette Kruger – What I wore; Lauri Kubuitsile – Pulani’s eyes; Beatrice Lamwaka – The star in my camp; Jennifer Lean – To each his own; Irene McCartney – Pauline’s ghost; Jenna Mervis – The lives of dogs; Kirsten Miller – Only in art; NoViolet Mkha Bulawayo – Snapshots; Wame Molefhe – Rainbow-coloured dreams; Natasha Moodley – Spirit of Madala; Isabella Morris – Bluette; Kyne Nislev Bernstorff – The last supper; Naomi Nkealah – In the name of peace; Maik Nwosu – In Leopardville; Tolu Ogunlesi – River Falling; Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi – Area boy rescue; Andrew Salomon – A visit to Dr Mamba; Alex Smith – Soulmates;Dineke Volschenk – Glorious wounds; Phillippa Yaa de Villiers – Keeping everything the same; Hayet Z – Flypapered days

The PEN/STUDZINSKI Literary Award has replaced the HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award and aims to encourage new creative writing in Africa. It is open to all citizens of African countries writing in English, and offers talented writers on the continent an exciting opportunity to develop or launch a literary career. www.sapen.co.za

email: rudebs@icon.co.za

Ready, steady… win!

Contests are a fabulous way to announce your presence on the local writing scene. If you are placed in a contest, it helps you to establish a writing cv or bio that many publications require and it also boosts your confidence. Not having a publishing record can be intimidating for beginner writers, but don’t allow yourself to be disheartened. A story well told will be enjoyed by an editor or contest reader.

WHICH ONE IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

It is important to be selective about which contests you enter. Without diligent research you could end up sending entries that don’t comply with the rules. If a publication says they only want fiction entries, then that is all they want. They will summarily reject poetry and non-fiction entries, no matter how brilliant they might be. A recent local contest received hundreds of entries, but about a hundred of them were rejected because the entrants did not comply with the rules. If a rule states that you have to be a citizen of Burramunga to enter, then that’s the rule, don’t waste your time or the contest organisers’ time by submitting anything to them.

RESOURCES

If you’re serious about entering contests then you need to establish which ones are suitable for the genre that you write in. Good resources can be found in comprehensive listings in publications like The Writer’s Yearbook and Writer’s Market UK available at good bookstores, and obviously, the internet. Many writing sites have a listing of writing contests.

PLAN

The best way to ensure that you enter the competitions that you are able to comply with, is to have a Contest Plan. In November/December every year, I spend about a week researching contests online and in the Writer’s Yearbook and Writer’s Market. I make a list of those I want to enter by listing them according to the earliest closing date. I cut and paste the submission rules of each into a Word document entitled Contests 2009. At the beginning of every month I see what’s coming up, trying to read three months in advance. If I feel that there is a contest I want to enter then I print that contest’s details and put it into the plastic folder. Date order is essential because at a glance I am able to see what’s coming up. Being forewarned, so to speak, gives me time to consider what story I would like to write, it also gives me a chance to check through unpublished work for a suitable story. This list is invaluable and can be added to throughout the year if new contests appear. It also provides a template for the following year.

KEEP A SEPARATE FOLDER

I have a plastic see through box where I keep all research material, contest rules and drafts of competition entries, this cuts out the confusion of having to remember where I have filed an article or an idea.

JOT DOWN IDEAS

In the plastic folder I keep a notebook for ideas that I want to jot down. An idea don’t remember itself, if you don’t write it down, consider that idea a cigarette that you enjoyed, but once it’s gone up in smoke, you can’t reclaim it. If all your ideas and rules and research are centrally located you won’t waste time.

TRACKER

If you’re going to be a serious contest entrant then you need to keep track of which submissions you’ve made to which publications. Many contests do not accept simultaneous submissions, i.e. it’s not protocol to send the same entry to several competitions at the same time. Knowing where your stories are is essential. A good idea is to download manuscript management software. The best tracker that I’ve found is SAMM which is completely free and downloadable at this link. It’s fabulous because you can customise it according to your needs and it’s unobtrusive. You can enter all your manuscripts, you can enter markets and market types. It’s a no-fuss application that will alert you with follow-ups if you so require.

CHECKLIST

Before you send your entry, make a checklist from the rules sheet. Have you double-spaced your entry? Must you include your name on the manuscript or mustn’t you? Have you included your contact details? It is so easy to avoid silly mistakes by using a checklist, but remember to be flexible because different contests have different criteria, some want three copies of an entry and others require only a single copy. Some contests allow email entries, others do not. Make it your business to establish the rules for your checklist.

Good luck.

Resolving to Write

New years are notorious for setting up people for failure, and writers are no different. A new year is a blank canvas waiting for you to fill in the colours of your aspirations, but it is easy to get carried away. With eagerness you allow the colours to swirl into each other so that instead of having a clear picture of what you’re hoping for, you end up with a chaotic picture full of muddy colours that have bled out your pure intentions.
There are a myriad of resources to consult in order to design a writing plan and books such as Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within and Jurgen Wolff’s Your Writing Coach can also get you upright at your desk with ideas about how to best approach this business of writing. But there are some basics that you don’t need a book to tell you about. Trust me, this I know after years and years of making plans, or should I say, setting up the traps of self-sabotage.
Firstly, spend some time thinking about what you want to achieve as a writer. Do you want to be a novelist or a environmental journalist? You need to have your mind firmly set as to what it is you want to achieve. To establish a career as a writer, you can’t be a jack-of-all-trades. Case in point: I decided to go to the Richmond Book Fair. I approached a local newspaper to do an article on the fair, but the books editor didn’t want a general piece on the fair, she wanted a review on one of the books being launched at the fair. Interviewing the writer and going to the launch took all my energy away from the fair itself, and it took another two to three weeks of reading the book and writing the review. I am not a review writer, I don’t want to be one, I shouldn’t have agreed to do it! The review was okay, even if the editor didn’t like it, and yet it was a colossal waste of time and energy. Time and energy that would have been put to much better use at the writing projects that I’m committed to and passionate about.
Secondly, take some time to plan out blocks of time to devote to the writing projects that you’ve chosen to do. If you are aware of deadline dates for short story competitions or for novel chapters, then you’ve got an idea of the amount of time you need to allocate to achieving each one of the projects.
Thirdly, don’t set yourself up for failure. If you’re writing erotic science-fiction short stories, don’t send them to You magazine for consideration. Don’t send a non-fiction book proposal to a poetry publisher. You must identify your markets so that your writing has the best chance of succeeding. Also, don’t over-extend yourself. If you’re a part-time writer, then your output is going to be considerably less than a full-time writer, so try not to be over-ambitious. Be realistic – the amount of time you have will usually determine how much you can achieve.
Fourthly, write. I am amazed at how many people consider themselves to be writers, but don’t actually write. They either read about writing or they have ideas in their heads! Neither will get you published. To be a writer you have to write – I believe every day, but you may disagree. However, if you’re not putting words on a page you cannot be a writer. Writers write, it’s that simple. And the more you write, the easier it gets.
Finally, if you don’t have the luxury of being able to share your writing with anyone, invest in Peter Elbow’s book, Writing without Teachers.

Writing Inside Out

A Discussion of From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler

Writing from the unconscious and from an emotional base is not a new concept. In his 1930-something book on the craft of writing entitled Storyweaving, Francis Vivian posits that a writer should have all the knowledge of the story in his unconscious before the actual act of writing begins. That’s the theory – the practice however can be a slippery process altogether.

What Butler suggests is that if you’re writing a short story you should know the beginning the middle and the end and then you must sit down and meditate the entire story. You allow your mind to write the story before the fingers do.

If I don’t write down an idea when it springs to mind, it slips through the mesh of saggy brain tissue and I ‘m not limber enough to retrieve it. I didn’t have confidence in my retentive memory**, so I jotted down my idea about the character, what she did for a living and what item was going to connect her and the story together. Then, a firm believer in back-up – I put new batteries in my voice recorder, lay back in a recliner and meditated myself into a blissful haze and finally drifted into the story ‘world’. As ideas came, I whispered them into the recorder balancing on my chest and in about half an hour I’d spoken the story from start to finish.

I was so inspired I dashed to the keyboard and typed out the short story in one session – without referring once to the recording. I think there may be things that I didn’t include that I’d verbalised, and things that I included that hadn’t featured during the meditation. But that’s not the point really; the big bonus for me was that I succeeded in surrendering control – oh boy that’s a biggie for me, didn’t ever think it was, but looking back at all my previous short stories and articles it clearly is. It seemed like I wrote like a first-time mom who took each toddling idea and yanked it up by the arm onto the stable path and forced it down the road whether there was anything there that was good for it or not; ouch, I won’t be doing that again.

By relinquishing control the benefits were as follows: I achieved a story with better flow; the calm meditative state suggested a natural trajectory and found the natural fit for the kernel of the story, thus the story doesn’t feel at all contrived. Images, because they were felt – sensationalised – were pure and powerful and rendered a richer story.

As a writer with ten years experience, I was afraid that my stories were starting to get stale, so it’s fabulous to feel energised and excited again about a craft in which I’ve invested so much of my life.

**This retentive memory should not be confused with Robert Olen Butler’s opinions on literal memory. He proposes that literal memory is no place from where to draw ideas; he believes that it gets in the way of creativity.

What useful techniques have you discovered or read about? Please feel free to share them here – crazy, pedantic, etc., we want to hear about them and try them out.

The First Time I Got Paid

My first writing job was as an online writer for Big Brother II.

During each 8-hour shift I was expected to produce daily diaries for half of the contestants, write one feature article a day and one ‘he did, she did’ short per hour. If I was on a day-shift it was my duty to do a poll at a local shopping centre or write a quiz for online viewers, and if it was an elimination Sunday I had to interview the eliminated housemates and family members of other housemates present at the elimination. I also had to capture my own stills from the daily live feed. What a brilliant experience it was and I had great fun making up tittilating article titles and provocative photo captions.

It was chaotic at times and hilarious at others and the writing came easily when the house was full of housemates, each one eager to out-perform their competition. But once the contestants were eliminated, my shift-mate and I found ourselves writing about the house cats because the two remaining housemates slept the days away, and really the writers were forced, as our editor said, to make “koek from kak.”

Towards the end of the event, I was tasked with interviewing the mother of one of the contestants; the press had slated her for being a bad mother and so when I telephoned her, it took a lot of calm negotiating to get her to agree to the interview. She was embarrassed about the way her family had come across in the local sensationalist mag that had already interviewed her and she was eager to minimise her family’s exposure to public scrutiny, even though her daughter had already outed the family skeletons in such a public way. It must have taken me well over half an hour of just listening and reassuring her until she agreed to be interviewed.

Families are not perfect, parents are fallible. When I interviewed the contestant’s mother and when I finally wrote the story, I realised that as a writer I didn’t have to add to her pain and humiliation by continuing to present the hardships of her family in a judgemental way; there is more to a person’s life than some bad choices they’ve made. It was my first interview and an extremely valuable lesson: writing about other people demands respect and an ethical responsibility from the writer.

Since then I’ve written a few profiles of people and I’ve managed to present the people as I found them, allowing their own words and their environments to paint them, trying to minimise my own prejudices or views.

For one of the elective courses that I took at varsity I had to interview someone I didn’t know and I interviewed a biker who trawled our suburb like a contemporary cowboy. He agreed to the interview and all was going well until he launched into a sermon on Krishnamurti and then he reached across the coffee table and pinched me viciously on my arm – to illustrate a point about feeling. I was stunned at how he reached across the boundary of writer/subject; this wasn’t supposed to happen. He then told me that if I had not interviewed him that morning, he had planned to end his unravelling life! At the end of the interview, he gave me his card, I gave him mine, but neither of us ever used each other’s number again and although I wrote the article, I never attempted to publish it. The experience sort of turned me off writing profiles.

However, I’m still a voyeur, what with my Big Brother training and all that; but these days I watch and I write and I imagine and I use all of those imaginings in my fiction. Fiction is a much smarter genre in which to manipulate the lives of your characters without anyone really getting hurt.

For the record, I haven’t watched a Big Brother episode since I uploaded my last story on the Big Brother II website. But, I’m a girl in touch with my roots, and I know that I’m the writer I am today because of the lessons I learned in the green room at M-Net in Randburg.

Diary of a Romance Writer 2

It’s been almost a month since I went on the romance-writing course and I have to say that I am having fun. I’m halfway through the novel, just over 20 000 words and I am astounded by the positive effect it is having on all the other writing that I do.

I do the romance writing during the morning session of writing, and I am able to just sit down and carry on from where I left off the day before. I have found that writing the first few sentences of a new chapter helps to kickstart the session’s writing and I’m always rather sorry when I finish my quota for the day.

Unfortunately I have had to divide my day into writing projects so that they all get the attention they deserve – unfortunate in that I can’t just write until I’ve had enough or until the book is finished. But I think that the break from it also prevents me from just rambling on.

The most amazing benefit of writing a light romance has been the effect it has had on my other writing projects. I have been able to make a committed effort to shaping my completed novel into its final form to send to a publisher; it would seem that the light writing segues into the heavier novel, having exercised the writing muscles, making them ready for the serious writing that the completed novel deserves.

I have a smile on my face while I write the romance novel. My fingers fly across the keyboard as I capture the raunchy love scenes and the fabulous settings; it is fabulous to have fun when you write. The completed novel demanded so much research and reading and getting the facts absolutely right, whereas the romance novel just lets my imagination run wild and I think therein lies the magic for me: my imagination has been fired up again, dampened as it was under two years of research and writing the completed novel.

Oh, and I’m in love, with the escapism of the genre! Who would have thought that the Mills & Boons novels that I hid between the covers of my Afrikaans text book as Sister Margaret Mary pounded out our weekly woordeskat, would re-emerge in my life twenty years later.

I Do It My Way

The great elaborator of fact, Bruce Chatwin said, “There are books you read for pleasure and books you plunder. Every writer is a cutpurse.” It seems he had a lot of support from well known writers, even the author of Jaws, Robert Benchley said “Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s sole. If that upheaval is not present, then t must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.” However, I agree with Robert Burton who said, “They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.”

Writing is frigging hard work. It entails thinking, researching, thinking, researching, re-thinking, writing, thinking, editing and some more rewriting. Every day is a challenge to find new metaphors for tired topics; some days I spend the whole morning session on trying to arrange the words in a single sentence for maximum effect. How much easier it would be to take someone else’s beautifully arranged, meticulously researched work and plop it into a paragraph – perhaps, but where is your sense of satisfaction? When do you get to slump back into your chair, throw your arms in the air and say, “I did it!”

The first article I sent into the big wide world was a satirical piece on talk radio. I sent it to a local woman’s magazine and did not even get the courtesy of a reply. Lo and behold, about six months later, there was my article, almost in its entirety, and with the same title: “Radio Rats” in the magazine’s brother magazine, supposedly written by a very well-know South African boykie! I was outraged and made several phone-calls and wrote a letter to both editors but neither of them ever responded. I was too stupid and too naive about my rights to take it further, but if it happened again I wouldn’t hesitate to sue the publication or the writer who dared to steal it.

So, when I hear about writers stealing from other writers, my hackles rise and I reach for my granny’s blood-pressure tabs. Writing is hard work for every writer and research is a bummer; sitting in cavernous libraries in silence for weeks on end, or scrolling through pages of Google returns looking for the right bit of info, is a labour of love. But it has to be done and then comes the actual writing. And the simple rule about knowing whether or not you’re plagiarising, is: If you did not write the words, they are not yours to use! It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

I’ve heard the whingy whines of those writers who have been caught ink-handed, stealing paragraphs and ideas from other writers. Pamela Jooste, Darryl Bristow-Bovey and now the hallowed Zakes Mda, who is the critics’ heir apparent to the status of Great South African Novelist. “We didn’t know,” these weasels whine; that is their feeble and untrue response to the treachery they have committed. Or, they’re arrogant enough to say, “So what, I cited the source at the beginning/end.” The worn excuse that hobbles beneath the crutch of intertextuality is starting to squeak in protest.

What is their punishment: a feeble apology to their victims and unconvincing taps on the wrists from their publishers and advice to lay low until the whole stinky mess blows over?

Readers forget, but quickest of all to forget are the publishers. Shame on them; if publishers were harder on the thieves of words then perhaps the writers would be less likely to fake ignorance and get away with it.

It’s about time writers, as a fraternity, climbed off the fence and said: “Fuck you, you can’t steal my work.” It’s about time publishers, popped their heads out of their ivory towers and said: “Fuck you, we won’t publish stolen work.” It’s about time the government made a law and said: “Fuck you lazy little writers, you can’t steal work from other writers.” It’s about time plagiarists were slapped down from their arrogant daises and charged for the crimes they commit.

If you’re not sure what constitutes plagiarism, intertextuality and common knowledge, then go to Google and find out; if you’re a writer you should make it your business to know.