Battling the Beast by Savita Kalhan

Writing a synopsis of a book is very different to writing an outline. An outline is something a writer might write as an overview of their manuscript, usually for his or her own benefit. He or she might write it before beginning their manuscript as a plan, or after the first draft to delineate the story arc, to check for inconsistencies, and to ensure all the loose ends are tied up.

 

A synopsis is a different beast – a beast I’ve been battling with over the last few weeks. I’ve been in the process of finishing a manuscript and rewriting two other novels, which has meant writing three synopses. It has to be my least favourite part of the writing process – I’d rather clean the house top to bottom, or, given the choice, work on a short story instead. But writing a synopsis is a necessary evil and essential when submitting a manuscript to a publisher or to a literary agent. They will read, hopefully, the three sample chapters and when they finish those the synopsis will tell them what happens in the rest of the book.

So, where to start? I’ve said before that when I finish a manuscript I stick it in a drawer and try to forget about it for a while, so that when I take it out to read and edit, I’m seeing it with fresh-ish eyes. The time before you take your manuscript out of the drawer is probably the best time to write the synopsis as you’re not too close to it. The main story-line is still in your head, but not all the little ins and outs of the plot, or all the little details you might be tempted to include that will make it harder to get the synopsis down to a page or two.

A synopsis has to include the story line, the emotional or psychological journey of the main characters, the story arc, the genre, the tone, and it must also include the ending. Everything must be shown to be resolved by the end of the synopsis.

So, it’s a tricky thing to write and there are lots of things to think about when writing it. There is help at hand, though. Nicola Morgan’s book Write a Great Synopsis is excellent. There is lots of advice available online too. I read all the books and took all the advice because it’s so important that each element of the submission package is the best it can be.

I’ve finished my synopses-fest now, and turned my hand to writing a blurb, a pitch and even a tweet for each novel. It’s a very interesting exercise to do, as well as being useful. But it’s also quite a challenge – particularly the tweet, which only allows you 140 characters! If you can get the essence of your novel into 140 characters, then writing a synopsis should be a doddle. 

Twitter @savitakalhan

www.savitakalhan.com

 The Long Weekend book trailer

A People's Palace in Every Town Savita Kalhan

The Edge are going to be running a great feature with those very important people who know more about children’s literature than probably anyone else – librarians! So in the spirit of celebrating libraries and the amazing people who run them, my blog today is about what libraries have meant to me.

I’m not sure whether I would have dared to pursue the dream of being a writer if I hadn’t spent most of my time in a library when I was growing up.

I came to live in England with my parents just before I was one, and I was brought up in a very traditional Indian environment, so my childhood was completely dominated by school and homework and books, the key to knowledge. Both my parents were in complete agreement about this. They shared a reverence for books, holding them in awe and respect. Books were cherished. They were the means to knowledge. A book was never allowed to be put on the floor or anywhere else it might get damaged.
 We couldn’t afford to buy any books. So we joined the library, which became my second home. Wycombe Library had an amazing children’s library, where my sisters and I used to max out our library cards. It was also very much a sanctuary and refuge during more troubled times. We devoured every book in the children’s library, and lost ourselves in a thousand different worlds. I found my voice there.


The Old Wycombe Library

Before I was old enough, the librarian at the adult library, worn down by my entreaties, allowed me to have a library card for it at twelve. Amongst other books, I really wanted to read more John Wyndham as The Kraken Wakes wasn’t in the children’s library. For a while she vetted what I took out, but after a while left me to my own devices. I wish I could remember her name, but I thank her from the bottom of my heart.





New Children's Section

High Wycombe has a brand new library building now. It's right in the middle of town and is part of the new Eden Shopping Centre.

It’s big but far from being one of the new ‘super-libraries’.



These new super-libraries are more like mega-complexes, housing thousands of books as well as having music rooms, exhibition galleries, theatres etc  Birmingham has one such super library, or in the words of the Dutch architect, ‘a people’s palace’.

Well, not everyone can get to the palace. There are people everywhere, most of whom live miles away from a super library. They would be happy enough with a smaller local library, and it is the local library that is under threat. We need a people's palace in every town, one that everyone can get to.
I firmly believe that libraries are precious and should be placed under a protection order. And as for the school library closures that have happened in many schools, well they need all the help they can get. An IT department obviously has a place in the modern world, but not at the cost of a library stocked with real books.

So hooray for librarians and long may they have a library to reign over!

Fear and the First Draft

I’m coming very close to the end of the first draft of Hell Wood, my current WIP. Hurrah! But wait a minute... It’s only a first draft. I will type those precious words, THE END, when I get there, but one thing is for absolute sure – it won’t feel like the end. In fact, it will feel as though I’ve only just begun the journey. Even as I’m writing it, I’m thinking ‘Is it good enough? Is it as good as it can get? Have I told the story well? Or is it a pile of drivel?’ It’s better not to question it too closely if that hinders your progress, although sometimes that’s quite a difficult thing not to do! What’s important to constantly remind yourself of is getting the first draft down on paper. Then you can worry!

I will leave the first draft in a drawer for a couple of weeks, resisting the temptation to take it out and read it only by keeping myself ridiculously busy doing other things. But I know from experience that taking that step back from a story that has consumed your every waking hour, is an absolute must. It’s better to leave it even longer than two weeks, but, at least for me, that’s never going to happen!

Then I get the manuscript out to read and I approach it with those familiar feelings of fear and dread, and those self-doubting questions: Is it going to be awful? Is the voice clear? Does the story have a good arc? Is it gripping, absorbing? Etc, etc, etc!

It’s very, very unusual for a first draft to be dead on target, ready to be read a final time before being sent off to your agent or publisher. It’s only ever happened to me once and I doubt it will again.

Of course my “first draft” has been read and edited as it’s being written, and once the book is finished that process will begin again, and go on and on until I’m happy with the book in its entirety. The process may begin again when I’ve had feedback from readers, my agent, and my publisher... Basically it’s never over until the ink is drying at the printing press.

Then it’s the end.

But I’m not quite there yet and I’m panicking. It’s too close to the Christmas holidays. I can’t afford to take a week off because I might lose the plot, in the literal sense, and I don’t want to be the party bore who lugs her laptop around like a chain and ball! Instead, I’ve decided to write the last few chapters into a notebook by hand – something I always used to do a few years ago, but not recently. I’ll let you know how I got on in the New Year!

Happy holidays!

Phobias and Fears... by Savita Kalhan

I have lots of them. Heights, sheer vertical drops; wasps, bees, hornets, well almost anything that buzzes and gets anywhere near me; enclosed spaces like tunnels and caves; dark places – even a deserted street at night, which is more frightening because it is deserted, and then, bizarrely, becomes even more frightening when you see a lone figure walking towards you; cemeteries, at night; the woods, at night, but also in the daytime if they’re deserted. Yes, there is a general night/dark theme going on here, and a fear of bumping into someone when no one else is around. People do go for walks on their own all the time. But not me.

I have lots fears and phobias where those came from, and I haven’t even started on the nightmares. No, I don’t eat cheese just before going to bed, and I’m not completely insane.

We’ve all got irrational phobias and fears, and some rational ones too. I think I have a lot of them. Am I unusual? I don’t honestly know. I’ve asked family members about theirs, and I do seem to have far more than they do. They tell me it’s down to my overactive imagination. They tell me I’m far too superstitious, and suspicious, and that I always see the worst possible scenarios and imagine the worst possible outcomes.

Life would be so much easier, and far less scary, if my imagination wasn’t so overactive.

But I guess I need it to be that way. I’ve found a way of using it in my writing. Writing about them has not made the fears and phobias lessen in any way. They’re still very much present. I just wonder what would happen if I underwent hypnosis to sort out some of them. How would it affect me? How would it affect my writing? Would it become less dark? Would I find myself drawn to writing humorous light-hearted, heart- warming fiction? I did try my hand at writing that way, but it didn’t last long. It didn’t feel right.



The book I’m working on at the moment is getting very dark. You’re probably not surprised to hear that if you’ve read The Long Weekend. It’s not an intentional thing. It’s just the way the book is flowing. The story is set mainly in the woods and I found a local wood called Hell Wood, yes, that's its real name, and it's very apt. I haven't summoned up the courage to go there at dusk, and I'm not sure I'll be able to venture there at night. It'll give me nightmares! I was going to add a piece about my worst nightmare – one that has been recurring for years. But I won’t as it might give you nightmares.



Hell Wood



New Book Announcement! Savita Kalhan

I am delighted to announce that my next novel for teens and young adults will be published in spring 2013 by Frances Lincoln Children’s Books. It is called AMNESIA, and it’s about a fourteen year old boy who wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory. He doesn’t even recognise his mother.

The inspiration for this book came from some unusual places. A friend had recommended The Man who Mistook His Wife for A Hat by Oliver Sacks, to me, which I was reading late one evening. The TV was on in the background. I often read like this, and, yes, you might think that I can’t possibly concentrate on both at the same time, but actually I seem to manage quite well. I grew up the eldest of seven kids and learnt to read with constant noise in the background, so it’s an old habit that I can’t seem to break. I went upstairs at some point and heard my teenager talking in his sleep – he only does this around midnight and only for a few moments.

By the next day I had the germ of an idea for a book.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde wrote, Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us... Losing your memory is like losing yourself, your identity. You are completely reliant on others to help you fill in your past.

By the afternoon I had written the opening of AMNESIA.

Ideas and inspirations for stories often spring from the strangest places. Where do you get your ideas from?

Different But Similar - Savita Kalhan

Different But Similar

Sara’s post last week, The Same But Different, really made me think. I’ve written guest posts for bloggers where I’ve been asked for my top ten favourite films, but I’ve never actively linked them with what I write in terms of themes or the heart beat at their core. Yes, my stories are all different, but does the same heart beat at the core of each of them? Very possibly is the answer. Sara, brought to my attention Julia Cameron’s Vein of Gold in which one of her writing exercises explores the idea of mining themes in your favourite films for your writing. When I look at some of my favourite films, films I’ve watched more than a couple of times and would watch again, I don’t have to dig too deep to see that I might already be doing that.

Amongst my favourite films are these: 

 

Aliens

The Godfather

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The Night of the Hunter

The three words I wrote in my comment on Sara’s post last week were: loyalty, betrayal and survival. Thinking about them now, I would also add hope. These are all central themes which figure pretty high in my list of films. They are also at the core of my writing. Publishers and readers like to brand writers, fit them into niches and genres, and shelve their work under particular headings. I’m often asked, “What kind of stuff do you write?” I usually respond with, “Contemporary teen/YA fiction, dark and edgy.” I guess that’s my brand. It doesn’t mean that I might not write, or am not allowed to write, a romance, a fantasy, or a comedy. It just means that if I do, it’s likely to delve into some of the themes that are at the core of my writing.

At its core, the central themes of my novel, The Long Weekend, are loyalty and survival and hope, and as for my current works in progress, yes, they share the same central themes, the same heart beat. That’s my brand.

What are your favourite films or the films which share a heart beat with your writing?

Edge Authors TV Broadcasting Now!

The Edge are proud to announce that our brand new Edge Authors TV YouTube Channel is now live. 

Showing currently are nine Edge book trailers, a report from Sara Grant's tour of Germany, young readers discussing Hidden and The Long Weekend, plus the first instalment of videos from the recent Edge panel at the SCBWI Conference in November. 


The channel will be updated over the months to come with news, trailers, events videos and anything else we think might be of interest.


We hope you enjoy what's available so far. Let us know what you think and any ideas or requests for future Edge videos you may have. In the meantime, here's a taste of what's currently available. Thanks for watching!

Being Gay in Teen and YA fiction -- Savita Kalhan

Over the last few weeks I keep coming across the story of the two American writers, Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manja Brown, who were asked by their agent to either remove gay characters from their YA books or to ‘straighten’ them. The story first appeared on the Publishers Weekly Genreville blog, but the authors, although happy to discuss what they were told to do by the agent, refused to name them. The name of the agent ultimately came to light, but they subsequently refuted the story put forward by the two authors.

There seems to be several sides to this story. Was it a case of two over-sensitive writers being unwilling to change/rewrite a book that wasn’t up to scratch? Or was it the agency who felt that gay characters in YA just don’t sell books? From a publishers point of view, a book with gay central characters is going to have a very limited market compared to one with heterosexual characters. From their perspective, that’s not homophobia, that’s just a question of numbers.

The whole issue is still out there. Soon enough, discussions about what really went on, or might have gone on, or what it was all really about hit Twitter with: #YesGayYA. Many of the commentators felt that the real issue here was the censorship practised by the gate-keepers. We’re talking about the States here, not the UK.

As far as I can tell, and from personal experience, gate-keepers here are very much kept in mind when teen books are published in the UK. The reason why I had to remove a few ‘hells’ and other minor expletives from my book, which is aimed at teens, was because it was felt that librarians wouldn’t approve. I don’t think the same is necessarily true of YA fiction with a slightly older readership. 

In Malorie Blackman’s Boys Don’t Cry, the younger brother of the central character is both black and gay. Malorie has said that she has had a positive response to this.

Have other writers had a similar experience to Malorie, or have there been problems? And is the divide between what’s deemed acceptable in teen lit and in YA lit becoming wider?

Or is it that better-known writers are afforded more latitude??

Bad Guys and Gals - Savita Kalhan

Bad guys and bad gals litter fiction, all fiction, all genres, for all ages, and all time, from the Bible to Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, from Hansel and Gretel to Oliver Twist and Harry Potter, from the Devil and the Ice Queen, to all the wicked witches, Bill Sikes and Lord Voldermort. Usually the age-old theme of good versus evil forms a backdrop or background from which the rest of the story takes its inspiration.

In contemporary realism, the bad guy or gal in teen and young adult fiction takes the form of the bully, the racist, the perpetrator and the oppressor. But the basic essence of this kind of fiction is still good versus evil, right versus wrong.

In all of these kinds of stories I’ve read, the bad guys or bad gals never win at the end of the story.  Yes, there are loveable rogues, who dabble in some bad stuff, but they’re not intrinsically evil or even that nasty. But was there a truly evil character who does win at the end? I put the question to twitter, to all the book bloggers who spend endless hours reading and reviewing teen and YA fiction. Not one of them could come up with an answer for me.

It’s not that surprising though, is it?

I remember when I wrote The Long Weekend the ending was originally without the ‘Six Years Later’. I wrote that last chapter a few months later because my agent suggested a much more hopeful ending than the one I had. I pointed out that I didn’t let the bad guy win, but I understood her point. The Long Weekend is a very dark read – and it’s meant for teens. Hope cannot be ambivalent; it’s got to be a bit more in your face. Hence the ‘Six Years Later’ where, I hope, I got it right.

You can never let the bad guy win in fiction. Agents don’t want it, publishers don’t want it. The truth of it is that most kids, teens  and young adults don’t want it either. Neither do I. No one does. It’s a bad ending.

If anyone thinks of an evil character in a teen book who wins please let me know...although I’m not sure that I’d really want to read it!

Roller-Coaster Reads - Savita Kalhan

 

The first thing I ever wrote was an epic fantasy trilogy, set in a world that I created. There were battles on a grand scale, there were monsters of darkness, creatures of light, characters who were good but flawed, characters who were evil but understandably so, and there were three ordinary teenagers who were plucked from the mundanities of village life and hurled into the maelstrom of an adult world caught on the brink of war.

It was not contemporary realistic ‘edgy’ fiction, but there was definitely an edge to my epic fantasy trilogy, lots of edges.

I lived in the Middle East when I wrote it. I was teaching English there and my life and the world around me was pretty safe, very cosseted, very much home or compound based with little interaction with the world outside my front door. I returned to London in the late nineties and when I finally picked up my pen again a very different type of writing emerged. The only constant was that it was now firmly rooted in the in the present and much more immediate, so immediate it was practically on my doorstep. It almost felt as though I had stepped through a portal and emerged in a world where life was no longer at arm’s length, it was right there in your face. My writing became contemporary and real.

I was reading British newspapers again and worst amongst them was the ‘Local Fright’. What struck me was the terrible crimes that were still being committed to kids. Then a flyer went round the local schools warning parents and kids to be aware – the driver of a large flashy car had tried to snatch kids after school.

That was when the monsters I had been writing about became real, more real and terrifying than any monster in a horror story.

There were not many books for teens and young adults that even began to approach the subject matter of my book, The Long Weekend. But I wrote the book with the voice of my main character, Sam, without giving that much thought, without really considering the possibility that child abduction and child abuse was too hot a topic for publishers to be interested in – or take a risk with. By the time I had finished writing it, I knew it was very close to the edge, but I was also keenly aware of the fact that it was a teen book. And although I did not shy away from the horror of the abduction and what follows, I saw no need to be graphic. People have said to me that the fact that certain scenes are left to the imagination have made the book far more terrifying.

The Long Weekend is at heart a roller-coaster thriller that hurtles you so close to the edge that you feel you might almost tip over it. It is a book that teens, young adults and adults have picked up and not been able to put down. They’ve told me it’s an absorbing, scary, but ultimately satisfying read. It’s opened up debates in schools and homes about the whole topic of child abuse, and, as one reviewer said, “it’s better than any school talk on stranger-danger”.

So whether it’s fantasy writing, or contemporary modern fiction, there is an undeniable edge to my work, and the only thing that pulls me back from going over that edge is the fact that I don’t think my readers would ever forgive me for dragging them over the precipice with me!

Readers - What was the last roller-coaster book you read that sent you hurtling towards the edge?

Writers – How close to the edge does your work go and what, if anything, holds you back?