About to call it a day. (By that I mean stop writing and do the little tasks such as having-a-life.

I once wrote an article called “A Few Keys to the Kingdom” for Writers Digest, which was directed to budding writers. It has been reprinted quite a bit, and I thought it might be of interest to some of you who are contemplating taking on the masochistic mantle of ‘writer’. <Grin>

Here are some of those “keys”:

(“A Few Keys to the Kingdom: Thoughts on Getting Published, and on Being the Best Writer You Can Be,” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1989 by Writer’s Digest. First published in Writer’s Digest, January 1989. All rights reserved by the author.)

1. You must begin. Every day you must write, no matter what.

2. Give the best part of every day to your writing. Get up early and write if you can. If you can’t, read or put your desk in order or do research. It’s important to establish the habit of working every day.

3. Make appointments with yourself to write. Make yourself feel as guilty as possible. Do whatever you must to get to the computer.

4. Copy! Don’t plagiarise, but find writers you admire, and read and reread their best work. Dissect their prose sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. Memorise passages if you have to, but get into the weave of the writer’s work. It will give an unconscious form and balance to your own work. Don’t worry, no one else will know. You will put these unconscious “forms” through your own sensorium.

5. Read constantly and widely.

6. Be prepared to be surprised and upset by what you write.

7. Don’t try to be a critic while you’re writing. The first stages of writing are often intuitive, right-brained work. But once you have a draft, or you become blocked on a story, you must rethink and rework.

8. If you’re having trouble with a sentence or a passage or a plot twist, ask yourself if something doesn’t need to be cut. If you have an especially elegant sentence that just isn’t working with the rest of your humdrum prose, cut out the sentence. It’s probably purple, anyway.

9. If you find yourself blocked, take a break and read and take notes and read and take more notes. Being blocked is natural. It’s your unconscious asking for more information.

10. Rewrite everything until you feel that what you have on paper corresponds as closely as possible to that wonderful image you originally had in your mind.

11. Keep working toward making clear sentences and building solid story structures. Style is really only transparency of thought and idea. Writing well is a result of clear thinking. Cut out everything that sounds nice but doesn’t convey the specific meaning you want. Find the exact word to express your thought: that’s what Roget made his Thesaurus for. The particular way you think, the way you experience and perceive the world, will become your “style”.

12. Read Strunk and White’s =The Elements of Style=.

13. Send your work out to editors!

Thought I’d just blog as if keeping a diary. I’ve been trying to follow my own advice these last few months, and that is to write first, and then take care of everything else.  It’s really easy to get up, then tell yourself, “Well, I’d better just take a grocery run, pick up the Fin Review, see a sick friend,” and so it goes, every day…do the taxes, take care of accounting, ah, there’s that ever-increasing stack of e-mail.

So I spent four hours at the computer, and then went out for groceries and visited a sick friend.

I’ve just started a new novel, first of what I believe will be a longer sequence. The series will be called Dark Companions, and the first book is titled Shadows in the Stone.  It’s a fantasy that takes place during the Renaissance (among other times!), and I’ve spent the past six months studying Enochian magic, the Gnostic Gospels, John Dee, Agrippa, to name a few off the top of my head. I’ve got one of the few extant 2nd editions of Dee’s A True & Faithful Relation of What paffed for many Years Between John Dee (a Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James their Reignes) and Some Spirits. And that’s not even the whole title!

Sorry, boring…

My favorite character (in the novel), so far!, is the angel Gabriel.

And tonight I’m going to read short novels for Australian Legends of Fantasy, an original anthology I’m co-editing with Jonathan Strahan. It is a collection of original short novels by major, bestselling Australian fantasists. The novels will either take place in the authors’ popular magical worlds or will feature new universes that the authors will be setting new novels and series.

And then I’ve got to revise a short story.

Oh, and go to sleep!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Hello, everyone. I had intended on getting online earlier, but just returned to the farm from Melbourne. As I type this, I can see Wilson’s Promontory, which is on fire. The destruction to wildlife is incomprehensible.

I’m available to schmooze about just about anything…the business and, er, art of writing; editing; where ideas come from; science fiction and fantasy as genres; historical fiction, etc. Some of you may be familiar with my novel about Leonardo da Vinci entitled The Memory Cathedral. I’ve also written a historical novel about the Civil War (from the perspective of a fourteen year old) entitled The Silent and an alternate history of the 60’s, 70’s. and 80’s, featuring James Dean as the protagonist. It’s called (as one might guess!) The Rebel. And I’ve written science fiction, of course. I wrote a novel called The Man Who Melted about which Robert Silverberg wrote: But Jack Dann, back there in 1982 or 1983, has one of his characters talk about having forgotten to send out for groceries on the Net, as happens late in The Man Who Melted; and those of us who are aware that there was no such thing as the Internet in 1982, let alone companies that will take Internet orders for grocery deliveries, feel that sort of shiver of surprise at the author’s gift of clairvoyance that readers of sixty-year-old Heinlein novels experience again and again as they find him describing the world of his near future — our recent past — with amazing accuracy.

There is also a game (alas, writes the author) called The Man Who Melted Jack Dann. To find out about that, you’ll have to do some Googling.

Just for fun, I’m pasting in the afterword from my short story collection Jubilee. It’s about…where I get my ideas.

Slip Me a Fiver:

by Jack Dann

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Every author has been asked that question hundreds of times. In fact, I remember being on a panel some years ago with authors Joe Haldeman, George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, Edward Bryant, and Harlan Ellison when that question was asked (yet again). Everyone tried to answer as best he could…you’ll find that writers (this one included!) tend to get longwinded when trying to answer that question. But when Harlan’s turn came to answer, he just nodded knowingly, and said, “Well. that’s easy, folks. There’s this idea service in Schenectady, New York. Every week I send them twenty-five dollars, and every week they send me back a fresh six pack of ideas. That’s all there is to it.” He folded his arms over his chest, and the audience laughed. Nevertheless, several people came up to Harlan after the panel and asked…

“Uh, excuse me, Mr. Ellison, but could you give me the address of that idea service in Schenectady?”

#

“Where do I get my ideas?” has always been a difficult question for me to answer because ideas not only come from my own personal experiences, books I’ve read, stories I’ve heard, etc., but they also take different forms. Some are narrative, while others are essentially visual; and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the idea is for a short story, a novelette, a novella, or a novel.

The idea for “The Diamond Pit” came to me when I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz.” After I read that story, I knew I would have to write my own story about the richest man in the world…a homage to Fitzgerald.

I saw the plot of “The Diamond Pit” rolling out ahead of me as if I was sitting in a locomotive and seeing the track twisting and turning as I whipped around this curve and that.

I glimpsed my protagonist, Paul Orsatti.

I “knew” he had been a mail pilot and a roustabout and played piano.

Although specific details might have been muzzy, the form of a rough plot and the cast of characters were all there. The rest was just connecting the dots…something akin to lucid dreaming.

In contrast, the idea for the title story “Jubilee” came to me as a single visual image some years ago when I was writing the novel High Steel with Jack C. Haldeman II. I saw in my mind’s eye, as if the scene was really before me, crowds of people milling around on stone quays in a decaying city like Venice. One by one, men, women, and children jumped into the water and became transformed into sea-creatures. I had used the idea of genetically altered mer-creatures in High Steel as a throw-away; but the image of people being transformed by some unknown force in the water was so powerful that it seemed to burn in my memory. I would think about it every few weeks. Just that image, like a recurrent dream.

So too did my novel The Memory Cathedral begin as a powerful visual image. I was sitting in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City and reading a biography of Leonardo da Vinci when I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye a squadron of high-Gothic looking airplanes flying over Renaissance Florence. It was as clear and detailed and real as Giorgio Vasari’s painting of Florence. I saw planes passing over the Duomo, saw them reflected in the mirror of the Arno River; and I knew, I knew then that I had to bring that image to life.

My story “Da Vinci Rising” draws on that same hallucinatory image (at least hallucinatory for me!), which became transformed in the writing.

Once I try to capture my original visual image in words, in a story, it changes. The image remains, informing the story, but the story creates its own demands and seems to rework the image according to its own needs.

It has been my experience that stories which begin with a powerful visual image become stories of discovery. I’ve likened the experience of writing them to being a sculptor working on a huge block of marble. He knows that the statue he’s going to create is in there, but he has to find it in the material. One of the central scenes in The Memory Cathedral, an exorcism of Sandra Botticelli, was not planned by the author. It felt as if the characters were leading me into the story, and I had to rework what I had written to accommodate them. I think that such discoveries give a story authenticity, a firm internal logic.

The structures of my “visual image” stories are often discovered in the writing. This was certainly true of my short story “Tea.” I had an image of a woman who covered all the windows and mirrors in her apartment with aluminum foil. I knew that the apartment was in Sea Gate, the tip of Brooklyn, New York…my old apartment. I knew that she would have tea with a shadowy figure, that she was Jewish and would confront the Holocaust. That’s all I “knew.” But as I wrote, I could just hear Lorelei Lanzman whispering, musing. I could make out her thoughts, her daily routine of shopping and talking to the neighbors—and talking to herself—and line by line, the story evolved out of and transformed my initial image.

I should probably come clean and admit that sometimes the characters mutiny. They take over. They make up the dialogue. They create new and unexpected plot twists. When that happens, I always have the sensation that I’m simultaneously typing and watching a movie on the screen of my laptop. I feel like I’m just a conduit for the dialog and action.

While I’m working on a story, it does, in fact, feel like a live thing.

When I was a child, I used to believe that the fictional characters and imaginary places in books were real. I’d open a book, and the words and pictures would come alive. The characters would wake up and dance and play and have adventures. And when I closed it, they’d simply go to sleep.

In the quick of my subconscious, I still believe that.

After all these years…

Which is probably one of the reasons I keep writing.

#

Oh…

To answer that vexing question about where I get my ideas, I can only say, “Slip me a fiver, and I’ll give you the address of this idea service I know in Schenectady…”

###

And for those heroic readers who have gotten this far, if you’re interested in talking about Australian sf and fantasy, the phenomenal quality of our writers, Dreaming Again, or anything else, etc., I’m right here…

Oh, yes, and my website is jackdann.com.

Cheers!

Dreaming Again is full of wonderful stories, which have put Dreaming Again on the 2008 Locus Recommended Reading List in the anthologies category… and Terry Dowling and Margo Lanagan’s stories have been selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List in the short story category.

Dreaming Again has been short-listed for the Aurealis Award, and Simon Brown and Margo Lanagan have been short-listed in the Best Science Fiction Short Story category… Kim Westwood has been short-listed in the Best Fantasy Short Story category…and Lee Battersby has been short-listed in the Best Horror Short Story category and … Simon Brown has won an Aurealis Award!

Richard Harland and Kim Wilkins stories have been selected by David Hartwell for his Best-of-the-year collection.

… and just in: The short-list for the Australian Horror Writers Association Shadows Award includes Sara Douglass’s “This Way to the Exit” and Christopher Green’s “Lakeside.”

Well done all!

Jack Dann, editor of Dreaming Again is next to blog on the Summer Read blog from 20 - 24 February.

Jack Dann has written or edited over seventy books, including Junction, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral, and Bad Medicine. He is also the editor of the anthology Wandering Stars, and is a recipient of many awards, including the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award, the World Fantasy Award and the Ditmar Award.

Dreaming Again is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

Following the success of Dreaming Down-Under comes Dreaming Again; a compilation of 35 short-stories celebrating Australian science-fiction and fantasy writing. This captivating collection features both acclaimed international bestsellers and fresh new voices on the speculative fiction scene, covering science-fiction, fantasy, horror, Aboriginal fantastical fiction, and mainstream magical realism.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria Jack Dann will host a conversation panel of sci-fi and fantasy writers Trudy Canavan, Adam Browne and Cecilia Dart-Thornton at:

Nunawading Library, 379 Whitehorse Road Nunawading on Wednesday 18 February, 2009 7.00 – 8.30 pm
For more information phone Nunawading Library 9873 5638 or book online at http://summerread37.eventbrite.com

What Jack says about summer reading

“It really is summer again.
Time to sneak away and…read.
I want to reread E. F. Benson’s coy and cozy Map and Lucia trilogy and P. G. Woodhouse’s exquisitely silly Jeeves novels. I want to take another look at Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels and try to figure out how the hell she did it…and I want to finish The Gnostic Gospels, read the Folio editions of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, illustrated by Blake and Dali respectively, and the last two volumes of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. I’ve also got my eye on Hilary Mantel’s historical novel A Place of Greater Safety and Anathem by Neil Stephenson. I’m going to read a lot more science fiction and fantasy, and I think I’ll reread Henry Roth’s 1934 stream-of-consciousness masterpiece Call It Sleep.”

Alex Miller’s novel Landscape of Farewell has been awarded the prestigious Chinese literary award, ‘Annual Foreign Novels, 21st Century’. The award is administered by the People’s Literature Publishing House, who ask literature specialists to vote annually for the best foreign novels of the 21st century. Each year, six of the best novels published in Europe, North America and Latin America are selected for translation and publication in China.

Alex Miller is the first Australian novelist to be honoured with this prestigious international award. The news follows a year of recognition for the twice-Miles Franklin and overall Commonwealth Writers Prize winning Australian author, who was also awarded the 2008 Manning Clark House National Cultural Award (announced 15 December 2008). In 2008, Landscape of Farewell was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction, and longlisted for the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award.

Last year the ‘Annual Best Foreign Novels, 21st Century’ was won by the 2008 Nobel laureate for Literature, French novelist Jean-Marie Le Clezio. It was also previously awarded to British author Julian Barnes for his novel Arthur & George.

The five other honoured titles are: Oe Kenzaburo (the Nobel laureate for Literature in 1994), a novel (Japan); Luis Leante, Mira si yo te querré (Span); Julia Franck, Die Mittagsfrau (Germany); Pierre-Jean Rémy, Le plus grand peintre vivant est mort (France); Karen Ardiff, The Secret on My Face (Ireland), Russell Celyn Jones, Ten Seconds from the Sun (UK); and, Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (US).

Thanks Peter for your thoughts on verse.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Peter will be appearing at:

Watsonia Library, Ibbotson Street Watsonia on Tuesday 17 February 2009, 6.30 – 8.00 pm
This event is co-hosted with The Australian Poetry Centre and Chris Wallace Crabbe and also features the
Launch of Watsonia Bookgrove

For more information phone Watsonia Library 9435 2397 or book online at http://summerread25.eventbrite.com

St Kilda Library, 50 Carlisle Street St Kilda on Thursday 19 February 2009, 6.30 – 8.00 pm
This event is co-hosted with The Australian Poetry Centre

For more information phone St Kilda Library 9209 6655 or book online at http://summerread29.eventbrite.com

Vote for White Knight with Beebox or SMS WHITE to 13 46 88

Poems can be sleepers, waiting to emerge for years or even decades.  But the hope is that when they do come into the light of day, they will have a newborn look about them.  Trying to reach that outcome is part of what keeps any poet in business.  And finding that the poems do have that look or air gladdens the reader, whether the poems were written yesterday or thousands of years ago.

Poet Peter Steele is next Summer Read author blogging from 15 – 19 February.

Peter Steele is a Jesuit priest who lives in Melbourne, and a Professor Emeritus at the
University of Melbourne. He has been a visiting professor at universities in Chicago, New York and Washington DC. He has also published homilies, criticisms on modern poetry and the art of autobiography.
His Poetry book White Knight with Beebox is one of the books on the Summer Read shortlist.

White Knight with Beebox is an inspired collection of poems showcasing Peter’s delicate and precise touch in traditional poetic form, his striking emotional range and moving lyricism. With 82 pages worth of new poems, and a rich collection of his earlier work, this compilation outlines a lifetime of passionate thinking.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Peter will be appearing at:

Watsonia Library, Ibbotson Street Watsonia on Tuesday 17 February 2009, 6.30 – 8.00 pm
This event is co-hosted with The Australian Poetry Centre and also features the
Launch of Watsonia Bookgrove
For more information phone Watsonia Library 9435 2397 or book online at http://summerread25.eventbrite.com

St Kilda Library, 50 Carlisle Street St Kilda on Thursday 19 February 2009, 6.30 – 8.00 pm
This event is co-hosted with The Australian Poetry Centre
For more information phone St Kilda Library 9209 6655 or book online at http://summerread29.eventbrite.com

What Peter says about summer reading

“About 45 years ago I found myself marooned in Melbourne for a good deal of one summer.  Taking a deep and greedy breath, I made my way through Proust’s great work in the English translation which was my only access.  I followed this up with most of Kafka and with a stiff dose of Thomas Mann.  I was probably too grave a young man for my own good, and heaven knows how much of this banquet of prose may have stayed with me.  But at least the exercise must have been good for me:  almost the whole affair was conducted walking up and down on grassy slopes in Kew.”

Thanks Jacinta for your interesting thoughts on the writing process.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, Jacinta will be appearing at:

Warrnambool Library, 25 Liebig Street Warrnambool on Friday 13 February 2009, 6.30 – 7.30 pm
For more information phone Warrnambool Library 5559 4990 or book online at
http://summerread22.eventbrite.com

Gisborne Library, Hamilton Street Gisborne on Thursday 19 February 2009, 7.00 – 8.30 pm
For more information phone Gisborne Library 5428 3962 or book online at http://summerread27.eventbrite.com

Vote for Dissection or SMS DISSECTION to 13 46 88