Similes - What is writing like? by Aliya Whiteley

Aliya Whiteley, author of
'Light Reading' and 'Three
Things About Me'
discusses similes
for writing

Writing is like…

The world is filled with similes, but the act of writing gets more than its fair share of them. Writing is like having a baby, or spilling your heart on to the page. It’s like living with a house filled with strangers or doing a jigsaw puzzle without the front of the box to guide you.

I love these similes, but I’m not sure anyone has ever come up with a great comparison between writing and doing anything else. It’s a unique activity. You sit still and you think, and you think, and you sit. You tap on a keyboard, and you might go out to a library or a café once in a while, but mainly you write, every day, whenever you get the chance, and in the end a story is created.

That’s not so punchy as saying writing is like tap dancing naked in the rain, though, is it?

Here are three of my own writing similes. Let’s kick off with vegetables. Writing is like a vegetable. Here’s why:

Writing is like...

1. ...planting potatoes. You have to wait for the basic idea to start sprouting before you can stick it underground and let it work its way up to the surface. And when it gets to the surface and starts flowering you should put more earth around the base for a better yield. So that when you finally dig it up and start writing that novel, there are so many ideas under the surface that it's potato salad all round. Metaphorically speaking.

2. ....a broad bean. You don't want to overcook that baby or it's going to end up leathery.

3. ...making coleslaw. Make sure you shred the prose cabbage so finely that by the time you add the mayonnaise of the finishing touches the whole novel slips down nice and easy. Bleurgh. I hate coleslaw.

4. ...preparing a celeriac. Face it. At first it's going to look ugly, and you're going to have to put time and effort into sawing off all the knobbly bits. There'll be dirt and you might even slice your finger a little bit, but the pain is good. It means you're getting somewhere. Then you braise that celeriac with red onion and button mushrooms and serve it with a lovely piece of fresh salmon on the top. I mean, you serve up the finished novel. Obviously.

5. ...kohlrabi. The initial idea keeps turning up in your mental veggie box and you have no idea what you're going to do with it. So you chop it and dice it and mash it and squelch it and pound it and serve it up a million different ways until eventually one of the Masterchef judges/publishers says - actually, this is okay. Yeah. I can eat this. And then you rejoice for thirty seconds before picking up your knife, reaching for a fresh kohlrabi, and trying all over again.

Or perhaps writing is just like having a baby for these reasons:

- gestation is definitely involved.

- to get the thing out there you need to give a really big push. or two. or six hundred. And, golly, that really hurts.

- you feel warmly towards your little WIP sometimes, and other times you wish it would just hurry up and be done with you.

- eating a lot of cake is mandatory.

- when it's over with you're left with something you want to show off to friends, family, and the entire of Facebook and Twitter.

- although it's probably not as perfect as you'd hoped, and since "publication" date you seem to be having trouble sleeping.

- public appearances are fraught with difficulty, you've definitely put on weight, and how come you suddenly have to put up with so much shit?

But writing is definitely not like having a baby because: 

- you can forget about writing, have a day off, and go and sit in the garden instead.

- once you've finished your little WIP you can dispose of it if you so choose.

- and you definitely don't have to put it through university or pay for its wedding to another little WIP.

- writing hurts. it really does. but, trust me on this, it doesn't hurt as much as having a baby.

- although while having the baby you can get lots of lovely drugs for free. When you're writing a novel, you have to pay for them yourself.
But I think writing is really just like yoghurt-making: 

- There are many different ways to make yoghurt. People argue about the best way to make yoghurt, but really, there is no best way. There's just your own way. You can make yoghurt in the sunshine, or standing in the kitchen. You can use machines to help you make yoghurt, or you can do it the old-fashioned way, with your two hands. (And a bowl and a spoon, but that part of the analogy obviously doesn't fit so well, so we'll gloss over that.) Another person's way of making yoghurt will never work as well for you. You have to perfect your own yoghurt-making. 

- Yoghurt can be all things to all people. Sometimes people want exciting, adventurous yoghurt. Sometimes people want soothing, soft yoghurt. Sometimes people even want Greek Yoghurt, which explains why Captain Corelli's Mandolin was such a success. 

- Commercial yoghurt is looked down upon by yoghurt purists. Yoghurt with chunkier fruit pieces is usually considered to be harder to get through, but more rewarding when you reach the end of the pot. 

- Celebrities should be stopped from making yoghurt. They foist their horrible yoghurt upon the rest of us. That, or they lie, and get a professional yoghurt maker to secretly make their yoghurt for them. This is despicable. Everyone please stop buying these celebrity yoghurts before all the old-school yoghurt-makers go out of business. 

- In modern times, yoghurts come with accoutrements, such as little corner helpings of crunchy flakes. Or yoghurt comes in over-processed tubes, to be sucked down and instantly discarded. We are dressing up our yoghurts, but surely traditional yoghurt is the best? However, it is good to be open to changes in the yoghurt industry. Eventually yoghurt-makers will no longer need packaging and will simply squirt their yoghurts directly into the consumers' mouths. This is to be desired. Apron sales will also go up. 

- Yoghurt buyers are very susceptible to yoghurt packaging. Women yoghurt buyers like pink pots. Men yoghurt buyers like manly pots in bigger sizes. It used to be true that nobody over the age of twelve wanted to be caught eating a child yoghurt in a ridiculous brightly-coloured little pot in public, but nowadays it's much more acceptable to say you like child yoghurt. Getting in touch with your inner toddler, or some such rubbish. Still, child yoghurts are lots of fun, aren't they? That Harry Potter yoghurt was excellent. 

But, however you take your yoghurt, it will always be a very cultured thing to do. 

Aliya's book of literary fantasy short stories is out on 3oth April published by 
www.doghornpublishing.com

You’re running away from something terrible. You think you’ve escaped it, this thing, but it turns out it’s waiting for you in all the places you hide: your house, your garden, a self-help group, a seraglio, the island of Zanzibar, a museum in Turin, a hot air balloon in Canada, even in the ladies’ room of your favourite nightclub. You’ve carried it into these places with you. It’s inside you. And now it’s time for it to come out.
This first collection of acclaimed short stories by Aliya Whiteley takes the reader to the strangest, deepest corners of life experience. Grotesque, unsettling, and often very funny, Witchcraft in the Harem deals with birth and betrayal, love and loss, and all the terrible thoughts we want to escape, and find still waiting for us at the journey’s end.

Acclaim for the Book
‘The experience of reading this collection is like being waterboarded by an angel. Shocking, heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, this is some of the best writing I’ve ever seen. If you like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, you will love Witchcraft in the Harem.’ —World Fantasy Award-winner Lavie Tidhar

Aliya's Blog

What do you think writing is like?

Novelists - how to use MS Word as a powerful editing tool

US author Maria Grace mentioned on facebook about using MS Word as an editing tool. I was intrigued so I asked her to come on the blog and tell us all about it. Over to Maria!

Thanks so much for hosting me Deborah. I’m so excited to get to talk a little about the bones of the writing process. I don’t get to do that very often.

When it comes to writing, I have no qualms about saying that line editing is my least favorite stage of the writing process. It is fiddly, nit-picky and just not a whole lot of fun. This of course means that I want to find the quickest, most efficient way of doing it in as few passes as possible and with tools that I already have.

So I did what all good writers do in such circumstances, I started researching. I read hundreds of articles on the art of line editing—making beautiful sentences that really work. I read about all sorts of expensive software to help the process. Then I read about features in MS word and realized I could get Word to do a lot of those fancy tricks with only a few steps. I found it so helpful, I would love to share my process with you. 

When I get in line editing mode, it is more than anything else, a search and destroy function. I search out problems in the prose and rewrite them. Rewriting is the easy part, finding the spots that need work is the challenge. Using the notes I complied from the reams of writing articles I have read, I created lists of words that signal problems. I organized those lists into three groups: words that signal sloppy or wordy constructions, words that signal point of view problems, and gesturing words that tend to get overused. I use Word’s built in functions to find all the words on one list, correct those issues, then go on to the second and third list. 

The function I use is the ‘replace all function.’ You can set it up to find specific words and replace them with a highlighted version of the same word. This will flag all the problems words, and if you add a touch of color coding to it, even signal what the likely problem is. Then, as you go in to do the actual editing, you can spot exactly what you need to do to fix it all. 

The basic process is simple. 

(Scroll down the blog for the pictures which are at the end of the instructions - sorry, blogger is just not co-operating to let me insert them in the text today - Deborah)

1. Go into word and set the highlight function to a specific color. I start with yellow.(picture 1). I use 7-8 colors on each pass, each one for a different purpose. More on that bit later.

2. Then select ‘Replace’ from the far right menu on the ‘home’ tab in word. If you’re using an older version it is in the dropdown menu. (picture 2). For our first example, we’re going to search for present participles which end in –ing. So type ‘ing’ in the ‘Find what’ field and tick the ‘match suffix’ box in the right hand column.

3. In the ‘replace with’ box, type ‘ing’ just like you did in the ‘find what’ box. Then go to the very bottom and click the left hand button that says ‘more’. (picture 3) Select ‘highlight’. Your box will look like this: (picture 4). Click ‘replace all’, the third box under the ‘replace with’ field.

4. Your file will now look something like this: ( picture 5) All the suffix instances of ‘ing’ are highlighted and you can quickly identify all the present participle phrases that need to be axed. Keep in mind that there are legitimate uses of ‘ing’ words that you want to keep, so you will need to read to determine what you need to do. BUT, this makes finding those trouble spots quick and easy.

5. To take this to the next level, I will go to town and find multiple problem cases at once and handle a whole batch of corrections in a single editing pass. To do this, keep the ‘replace’ window open and go back to step one and select another highlight color. Just click on it, no problem.

6. Then fill in a new word into the ‘find what box’. For me the next search is for instances of ‘was’ and ‘were’—search and destroy passive voice. So I type in ‘was’ into the ‘find what’ and ‘replace with’ fields. Uncheck the ‘match suffix’ box and check the ‘find whole word only’ option in the left hand column. This will keep word from flagging instances of ‘w-a-s’ that occur in the middle of a word like ‘awash’.

7. Click ‘replace all’ and you will have a lovely multicolored version of your document.

8. Redo these steps for each problem word you want to catch. Change colors as described in step 5 whenever you need to. When you’re finished, your document will likely look like this:  picture 7.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

Picture 5

Picture 6

Picture 7

You might think this a bit excessive, but the day I discovered I had used has/have/had twenty one times on a single page and had my characters sighing thirteen times on another page convinced me of the usefulness of this technique. 

Naturally, the next question is what to highlight and why. I have a handy little list I use for each of my three passes. You may have different problem areas, but this will give you a sense of the kinds of things to look for. 

Pass 1: Sloppy and wordy construction 

Color Yellow: -ing 
Why: Present participle phrases. Click here (http://edittorrent.blogspot.com/search/label/series-%20ongoing%20rants%20on%20PPPs) for an explanation on why those need to go. 

Color Turquoise: was, were 
Why: passive words to replace with active 

Color Pink: had, has, have 
Why: passive, dull constructions 

Color Lime Green: it, there, here 
Why: vague pronouns, should be replaced with something more dynamic 

Color Red: that, but 
Why: overused and lazy conjunctions 

Color Light Grey: every preposition known to man (here’s a short list: www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/prepositions-list.htm) 
Why??? What do I have against prepositions? Overuse. Nearly half of the prepositional phrases in my writing can be replaced with one or two better, clearer words. 

Color Bright Blue: together, start, plan, almost, just, then, own, thing, began, reach, rather, instead, even, back 
Why: tend to be unnecessary and wordy 

Color Purple: very, good, great, really, suddenly, finally, about, only, totally, eventually, almost, exactly, fairly, so, such 
Why: weak adjectives and adverbs that should be removed or replaced. 

After my document looks like a class of kindergarteners attacked it with an entire box of crayolas, I go through and rewrite according to all the problems that turned up. Often, when sentences have several problem words, I can fix all of them with one simple rewrite, so it is worth it to have all the problems flagged at once. The last time I did this, I edited out 10,000 words from an 88,000 word document. I did not remove any ‘meat’ just slimmed down and streamlined by writing. 

After I do the ‘sloppy writing’ pass, then I will do another round of highlights to ferret out potential point of view issues by searching for filtering words. I pick up a lot of subtle problems this way. Click here(http://www.publishingcrawl.com/2012/05/21/filter-words/) and here (http://writeitsideways.com/are-these-filter-words-weakening-your-fiction/) for some great articles on the subject and lists of words to look for. If anyone is interested in my lists, mention it in the comments section and I can post them in the comments or on my own site. 

The third pass I use is all about gesturing words and speech tags. Using the same basic strategy, I colorize those to be check and make sure that my characters aren’t nodding, sighing and smiling all the time. This can also be useful if you have a character with a ‘tell’ or a specific move, like an eye twitch. You can quickly identify all the twitches and make sure that no one else is doing them. 

A lot of consistency issues can be checked out this way, too. For example, if a character goes by a nickname with some people, you can highlight it and make sure that nickname turns up in the right places and not in the wrong ones. So many possibilities with this approach! 

I even use this technique to help me proofread for punctuation. But that is another post. 

Oh, one last thing, for the geekier among us, Word does have a ‘macro’ feature which allows you to program stuff like this into a single mouse-click. I’m working on that right now… 

Thanks so much for having me today, Deborah!

Many thanks to Maria for sharing these really useful tips, ideas we can all usefully use in our editing process.

About Maria Grace -Though Maria Grace has been writing fiction since she was ten years old, those early efforts happily reside in a file drawer and are unlikely to see the light of day again, for which many are grateful. 

She has one husband, two graduate degrees and two black belts, three sons, four undergraduate majors, five nieces, six cats, seven Regency-era fiction projects and notes for eight more writing projects in progress. To round out the list, she cooks for nine in order to accommodate the growing boys and usually makes ten meals at a time so she only cooks twice a month.

email: author.MariaGrace@gmail.com. 
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AuthorMariaGrace Web: Random Bits of Fascination www.AuthorMariaGrace.com
Twitter @WriteMariaGrace 

Pinterest : http://pinterest.com/mariagrace423/ 

What is a young woman to do? One handsome young man has all the goodness, while the other the appearance of it. How is she to separate the gentleman from the cad? 

When Darcy joins his friend, Bingley on a trip to Meryton, the last thing on his mind is finding a wife. Meeting Elizabeth Bennet changes all that, but a rival for his affections appears from a most unlikely quarter. He must overcome his naturally reticent disposition if he is to have a chance of winning her favor. Elizabeth’s thoughts turn to love and marriage after her sister Mary’s engagement. In a few short weeks, she goes from knowing no eligible young men, to being courted by two. Both are handsome gentleman, but one conceals secrets and the other conceals his regard. Will she determine which is which before she commits to the wrong one? 

Historical Fiction Book Fair - Welcome to Mr Crespi's bookshop

Welcome Book Browsers at the Historical Novelists Book Fair. 

Oh, good afternoon mistress, it's you. How delightful to see you again. Which book will you choose I wonder? You can see I have quite a few on my lovely shelves, but might I suggest these? You can see I have marked one of them at the top right with a slip of paper so I can find it easily. The other lies open at the bottom of the shelf, for as you can see I have just finished copying it especially for you. That was quite a labour of love I can tell you. 

 Painting by Giuseppe Crespi, 1665 -1737

What? You prefer a new-fangled typed version? Well I'm only too happy to oblige, but for that you will have to contact my apprentice Joseph Amazon. He is only a click away in the dusty warehouse. Last time I saw him he was trying to sort out a mountain of unsold books. I hope he manages to sell a few sometime, otherwise I fear the moths will eat the bindings and spidery cobwebs will glue them forever to the shelves. 

If you are still a little uncertain about your choice, can I suggest you use the magic lantern device below  which might tempt you with its live action tale of two sisters on the run in the gilded mansions and poor hovels of old London. This book has been a very popular choice amonst young ladies visiting my shop, second only to 'The Gentlewoman's Guide to Snaring a Man.' In fact many have said that they found it so thrilling they had to be revived with a nip of smelling salts by their worried husbands. 

A spellbinding historical novel of beauty and greed and surprising redemption.

England, 1660. Ella Appleby believes she is destined for better things than slaving as a housemaid and dodging the blows of her drunken father. When her employer dies suddenly, she seizes her chance--taking his valuables and fleeing the countryside with her sister for the golden prospects of London. But London may not be the promised land she expects. Work is hard to find, until Ella takes up with a dashing and dubious gentleman with ties to the London underworld. Meanwhile, her old employer's twin brother is in hot pursuit of the sisters.

Set in a London of atmospheric coffee houses, gilded mansions, and shady pawnshops hidden from rich men's view, Deborah Swift's The Gilded Lily is a dazzling novel of historical adventure.

You like it? That's splendid. By strange coincidence the book is on special offer at the moment, so hurry on over to the warehouse where Master Amazon will be pleased to deliver a copy of The Gilded Lily direct to your address. Now that's what I call service.

Many thanks for stopping by my humble bookstore and I hope to have the pleasure of serving you again in the near future. What's that? Oh yes, I'll send The Gentlewoman's Guide to Snaring a Man along with it. A plain brown wrapper? Certainly madam.

The other participating emporia are listed here