What is your story, Mat?

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When I was aged 10 and bored I decided to tap away on our family clunky computer. It was an XT with a hard drive that was around 10 MB. In comparison, standard drives are around 1000 GB, or more. 1 GB = 1000 MB. (Although previous to that I was writing on paper, or on my even older computer that had no hard drive.)

 

I wrote many stories on the XT, which kept my young mind entertained. My preference is not to plan what I write and instead type and let the characters and plot drive the scenes. My first decent length story of almost 10,000 words was a squeal to the big Arnold schwarzenegger hit, “Predator”. In those days I loved gory movies . . . and things have not changed a lot since then. Many of my teen-years stories involved a lot of heads coming off and spinal columns being ripped out and shown to their victim. There were also some attempts at writing comedy (very hard to do for a teenager that was not as funny as he thought was), especially when there was so much blood and guts going on as well.

 

When I was 11 years old, I wrote a script at school and acted it out with a few from our group in class. I wish I still had that video of us. It was performed to the Monster Mash song by Bobby Pickett.

 

From then on I wrote short stories, poetry, non-fiction, and what ever other ideas popped into my head.

 

Fast forward to 2000 and I had already written hundreds of short stories that I thought were absolute gold. One I had begun with a friend, which we are now writing the same story but from two different character’s points of view. With my talent now bursting at the seems, I was ready to write a novel. In 2009 I found the start of a story I had worked on previously. This story was developed when a friend and I went away to Ballarat and stayed in a shack outside of town. I went outside for a break from writing at night and stood in the silence, which you can’t get when living in the city. I remember a soft breeze barely brushing over the leaves nearby and a rustling snaking through the brush and into the distance. That was when I went inside and began writing what was going to be titled, “Wake.” The name went through a few changes and I decided on, “Awaken”. . . for a while. The name has changed again to, “Blood of Evolution”, which fits better with the story:

 

Doctor Emerson has developed a new virus with the potential of curing almost all diseases and improving the body past anything humanity has even seen before. Initial announcements have drawn international interest, although also attempts at hostile takeovers. The hostility has grown, and now Doctor Emerson is running for his life.

 

At about 30,000 words I realised that what I was writing was actually “filler” without much substance. However, I kept going. I new that if what I was writing was not at all useful to the story, then I could always delete it. So I kept going, and I’m glad I did! It was a struggle to get to the end of my first draft, but at 70,000 words I believed I had created an amazing story. Now for the editing part.

 

I edited approximately three times. However, many of my sentences received about 10 edits every time I edited, which meant I actually edited it around 30 times. I was now ready to give it to my sister-in-law, who was studying journalism, and happy to have a read through. I realised then that everything you could do wrong with writing, I was doing. But hey, it’s a learning thing, and it will make me a better writer . . . I hope.

 

My characters all sounded the same. My paragraphs were not indented. I was using the wrong words that meant something else. I had no structure or flow. The ending was not great. It was the first time I had spent any real effort editing, so it was bound to be terrible.

 

I edited it again. I made my characters more real by writing down what each character normally says, does, wear, and the abbreviations they use when they talk. Slang, nick names they used for people, and anything else I could think of were bestowed on each character.

 

I changed the ending so it wrapped up better. I moved things around and gave the main character a proper ending. I restructured more than I thought I needed to. So, in thanks to Melissa Kemble (Clarke), I believed I was now ready.

 

I quit my full time job. I did not really like the work I did anyway, and I had a fully paid off home. No debt and a good amount of money saved in the back, I guessed that I would be published in a few years. This was now my new career.

 

While using LinkedIn I came across another writer and also publisher named Suraya Dewing. She was starting a new business with a unique website that gives writers so much. I of course joined and began chatting about writing. Suraya eventually asked if she could read my work. I gladly said yes, and sent her the first chapter.

 

So, in her home in New Zealand she began going over my work, and then stopped and replied with a few corrections. Within those corrections I found that almost all sentences were wrong. Everything I thought had been gold, which had become super-gold after editing, then platinum after Melissa had helped me with editing, was actually fairly poor. Passive writing, over-writing, too many of the same words used, too much using of “just” and “only”, too many “ly” adverbs, entire pages that waffled on for much too long. I tried to edit from what I knew, but found I could not. I started on the first page, then went back to the start to read through my new gold, but found it to be so bad that I did not know how to fix it. Maybe it could not actually be fixed?

 

I spoke to a friend, who has now unfortunately passed away from a small melanoma (they are really bad things, by the way), who was having a bad day himself: his insides hurt, he could not eat, he was likely going to die soon. And here I was telling him about my writing issues. Naturally he saw this as trivial, and so told me how it was. “Of course you can’t fix your writing, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

 

From anyone else I might have taken offence, but from Gavin, who had only ever told it how it was (although in a more gentle way when he had not been so ill), was so right it was such a realisation that I actually had one of those light bulb things above the head. He was right, I needed to learn how to edit, and edit well!

 

I bought and borrowed every book on writing I could find. It took me three months of reading these books as well as random novels to see how other authors did it, to finally be able to come back and edit that first chapter again. It took a month, and finally I decided I was writing and editing gold again. So, back to the first chapter, second, and third to Suraya. All newly edited. And back came the reply. “Hey, Mat. This is a vast improvement on when you first sent to me. So with the second chapter your dialogue needs a lot of work. It seems as if there is a lot of stuff that does not need to be there . . . and the list went on.

 

Another two to three months of reading, learning, editing, and I sent it back to Suraya. And back came a reply with a little more positivity. Now we were beginning to get into the rhythm of the back and forth sending of my work and it was getting ever so slightly easier to edit.

 

The editing actually went on for around 3 years. Yes it took me that long to learn how to edit to the point where the general public would find my work readable, as well as entertaining. And that may sound funny to you, but those two things are the hardest to achieve.

 

I wrote more novels. I edited lots more. I submitted my work online via email to literary agents. I got a few rejections or nothing at all. So I went to see literary agents and publishers personally at meetings and conferences where you pay to get a chance to pitch your work to these people. I had many great responses in New York City. I had a great time there and met some interesting people. The agents loved my work, so, I sent it off to them the way they wanted it presented. But again, either a rejection or no response at all.

 

I’m working full time again now and writing in my spare time. This is likely the way it will be for quite a long time. No one should expect to be picked up for a book deal straight away. It takes times, effort, and persistence. Every now and then you hear about people getting a book deal, or getting an agent. Maybe they put their work online and someone discovered it. But then you find out how many other people are submitting or self publishing, and you realise it is around one in every millionth person that will get their work published, and even less of people that will be able to come close to making $10,000 PA from it.

 

Occasionally you’ll hear about a person that got a book deal straight after, or soon after, they wrote their book. Other times you’ll here that a book that did really well online. So these things do happen, they just don’t happen often. And even though the odds between winning the lotto and getting published are about the same, at least if you are persisting with writing, improving your writing, building a fan-base, and connecting with other writers, your chances are improving. It’s really the only way you will make it.

 

On a more merry note: you are writing because you enjoy writing. So don’t ever stop no matter what. The joy will be in creating something amazing!