I am an unrepentant escapist—one of those nerdy 28 year olds who still curls up with Frodo and Gandalf at midnight. This blog is a celebration of all SFF, but is especially targeted at people like me, who are up and coming speculative fiction writers.
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Quotation
“For he is an unrepetant escapist. His plays spin fancies in a clear air. He just doesn’t like his fellow-men, and cares less for their continuously clumsy though well-meaning attempts to straighten things out.” -William Kozlenko
Well, grad school is more time-consuming than I expected. It's a little daunting to be surrounded by A-students who've been in the full-immersion class environment more recently than I. I'm used to competing with other slackers, not younger, more mathematically gifted versions of myself. I'm used to being at the top of the class, not the back. It doesn't help that everyone else attended BYU and so already seems to know everything about the campus while I'm stumbling around lost wondering what big hunk of brown brick I'm supposed to be going to. I wish there was a shuttle from one end of campus to the other. Getting from parking to my classes is pretty intense in the heat/humidity (yes, Utah does have a little of that.)
Anyway, first assignment due this weekend. We'll see if my writing/analysis ability is still any good. I've forgotten how to do simple things, like citations and mathematical proofs.
I'll try to post pics from Worldcon this weekend. It was awesome, but the kind of awesome that's hard to form into words. Mostly a sense of community. You can wander over to someone and strike up a conversation with people who share your loves, instead of looking at you with confusion and pity. And so many of my idols. E.G., I hung out at the Tor Party before the claustrophobia got to me and someone walked up and started talking to me and it was Lois Bujold. Lois Freaking Bujold just started talking to me like she's an ordinary person and not a goddess of awesome. In my own personal pantheon of Gods, anyone with a wheel-barrel full of literary awards is certainly able to pull a fiat lux out of nowhere and make it bright enough to blind my ass.
All the authors/editors had the same advice for breaking in. Write. Write some more. Write a lot more. Don't follow trends. I keep hoping if I collect enough chips of wisdom, I can cash in for a book deal, but it doesn't work like that. I understand, but I still can dream that someone somewhere will have the magic word that I need to hear.
The writing group with Louise Marley and N.K. Jemisin went well. Both of the pros had some hard things to say, but they were good hard things that I needed to hear. I'll take some of their advice and ignore the rest, but it was cool talking to them. Louise Marley grew up in one of the towns I used to cover with the newspaper I edited. Small world.
Anyway, until I post pics of me sitting in the Iron Throne, here's a poem I wrote in ten minutes, because that's all the time for writing I've had this week. I'll try to lock myself in a closet this weekend, where considerations of calculus don't tread on my creative synapses.
TEN MINUTE POEM
The pencil of Black Moods
is scribbling in my ear.
It makes thick, jagged lines
Whispering as it carves straight into
The pink lining of my cochlea.
From above, its scratches look like
Yarn after the cat’s been in the crochet drawer.
Or maybe letters formed by a two-year-old,
Who abandons things midway to go chasing after orange Jello.
Beautiful cover for Karen Mahoney's Iron Witch. It would stop me absolutely dead in the bookstores. Everything is perfect, from the curve of the arm mirroring the swirls on the background to the biggest drops of color coming from the jewels in her hand.
I thought we'd see more witch in high school stories along with the Vampire craze. I always loved Willow best of any Buffy character. It frightens me a little that Buffy the Vampire Slayer started its run 13 years ago. I'm getting old... (*weep.)
I went to LTUE and enjoyed it. I was in a cranky mood part of the time so I was more Scrooge-like than I usually am, mostly because some authors tended to drop into English teacher mode, which is "Let's define things" instead of "Let's talk about writing" (The first twenty minutes of the Dystopian panel, I'm looking at you!!!)
My joy was not assisted by questions from a certain class of writers who seem to be shouting "Look At Me! Look at ME!!!" during Q&A. IE, asking, "My book is about this, is that okay?"
My response to my fellow audience members is, "Will you stop writing your book just because I say no?" If so, you're not cut out for this life. And if you'll write it anyway, regardless of the answer, why ask the question? Why seek validation from authors who haven't actually read your work?
I practiced my pitch to the editor of a small press and got shot down, which was expected. I didn't think my story quite fit her line, and she agreed with me. Good practice. Hopefully I wasn't annoying. It really is hard to sum up a story in 15 words or less. Unfortunately, the words you say in front of a mirror aren't always the words that come out of your mouth, either. And there's the strangled, fast, sweaty tone. This was my first time ever doing it, so I'll give myself a little leeway.
My worst fears are confirmed that agents/editors are being glutted with post-apocalyptic stories like Skin Farm. I would have been able to finish and query my book much sooner if I hadn't gone back and revised my first novel, so I'm a little frustrated I may have killed a book just because of poor timing. I will make sure I try the regional presses when I query in hopes that they may be less swamped. I need to read more locally published books to see if I fit in with what they're selling. James Dashner and Brandon Mull both started in local publishing, as did Ally Condie.
My friend/fellow writing group member Stephen will be posting videos of some of the lectures and panels, so anyone who didn't get to go can still get some insight. My favorite panel was probably when author John Brown broke Hunger Games down scene-by-scene and chapter by chapter, showing us the mechanics behind why Katniss so easily grabs both our attention and our sympathy. I love working with other people to strip away the smoke and mirrors behind good books. He said he'll post his slides on his website, here. It's full of good advice for new writers.
Anyway, here are my Top 10 insights from LTUE:
10) If you want your books to do well internationally, you might want to create characters from different races/backgrounds.
9) Part of the reason urban fantasy is so popular is because of its low learning curve. It's easier for readers to get into the world because everything's the same, except for one significant change, (IE, witches are real). Not everyone has the time or desire to understand the thick, complex otherworlds of your B.A.F.S.
8) Author Paul Genesse uses the Myers-Briggs personality archetypes to help shape his characters. Too technical for me, but I've never heard that method before. Probably because I put the I in INTJ.
7) From John Brown's Hunger Games lecture. Every single book only has a small audience. Even for big-time authors like Stephen King, while millions of people pick up his books, even more people hate him/don't read him. So whenever you write a book, your audience is going to be relatively small. Ergo, you should take other people's advice with a grain of salt NOT because they're wrong but because they might be the wrong target audience. (For example, Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson weren't fond of Hunger Games because they'd seen the story before, while the teenage audience that carried it to NYT bestseller status hadn't been exposed to The Most Dangerous Game/Battle Royale. My younger brother hates Wheel of Time and G.R.R.M.)
6) New authors are frequently advised to put their characters in pain. In response to a question, "How dark is too dark?" James Dashner said that too dark is when a character's pain is meaningless. You can torture your character, but don't do it for no reason. I asked a similar question to Brandon Sanderson in his class. I asked, "How do you create a necessary sense of progress while also making your characters face miserable amounts of set-backs?" The answer was to give your characters successes with one hand and kidney punches with the other.
5) From Dave Farland's lecture: When it comes to editing, don't try to tackle everything in the first go-around. He separates his own editing process into multiple stages. I know I waste too much time with line/syllabic editing early on, so it's advice I should listen to. The problem is, I never do.
4) To quote John Brown: "Manure is Gold. Cherish your crappy ideas." In a brainstorming session, we looked at stereotypical, boring ideas and turned them into interesting ones. We were dealing with ghosts. I think my favorite two were, "Ghost Labor Unions" and "A People-Whisperer" (ie, the only ghost in a ghost society who can talk to people). Either of these could make an interesting book. I came up with the idea of a ridiculous Pro-Wrestler's ghost. Think of Hulk Hogan's ghost haunting an arena, trying to scare people. Go on. Try not to laugh.
3) There's a reason big totalitarian governments are so common in dystopian stories. Because a) they make sense from a world-building perspective, since tyrannical govts logically arise after great economic/social stresses. b) they create easy sympathy with the character, because an all-oppressive government turns them into an instant underdog. If you want your novel to have the same sort of menace but don't want to use a government, find something else that has that same atmosphere of oppression. I like this advice because it transcends genres. Threats to your heroes should always feel oppressively, well, threatening.
2) Turning old tropes on their head can be good advice, but consider your audience. Larry Correia's wife got sick of goody-goody Tolkein rip-off elves, so he created "Trailer Park Elves" for his book, Monster Hunters International. But Dan Wells once pitched a story about vampires who were a twist on the trope because they were total, absolute losers and was told that you can't sell novels about vampires who...uh, suck...to an audience that loves vampires. So the advice is be original, but know your audience too.
1) Some babies have really big lungs. Seriously, lungs must make up half an infant's weight. I can't think of any other reason so much sound can exude from something so small.
Blaarg. I've started studying for the GRE and man, it is rough. This is the first time I've ever studied for a standardized test. I usually score in the 89-93 percentile without trying, but it's been awhile since school and so I've decided to actually buckle down and try to do well. Plus, my college GPA is B+ territory, because I'm a lazy student (I learn, I just don't care enough to go to the trouble of proving to teachers that I've learned), so I could use a little boost when it comes to applying to grad school and internships.
Anyway, I thought the vocab part would be easy but I've been going through an old Kaplan study guide and discovering there are tons of words I am apparently expected to know but don't. Granted, I know most of them, but still, I wonder, why? What's the purpose of having a vocabulary so complex no one will understand you? I've never heard anyone use the word 'prolix' in my life. Or 'cavil.' Or 'orotund.' These are apparently important words, though, because my entire future might be hanging on them.
My journalism teachers taught as to write everything we could targeted at about a fourth-grade reading level. Lowest common denomination. All of my teachers acted as if it was a tragedy that we had to talk down to people, but as I advanced in my career I realized that there was a good reason for that. The ideas are more important than the words we use to tell them, and the ideas we present should be as clear to as many people as possible. That's one of the reasons I'm not so anti-cliche as many writers. If someone writes, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," we all know what that means, right? It conveys the idea. Cliches are about the only time you can be sure that the reader and the author are sharing the exact same picture in their mind. Although, of course a clever writer would change the cliche so it still communicates the same meaning, but with a hint of world-building and humor. IE, "People who live in glass bungalows shouldn't throw lead-plated ostriches." Or something. Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are masters of this.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is a high vocabulary is not an end-goal in and of itself. I think it's only useful in as far as it's...well, useful. Always go for clear communication of a new idea, instead of trying to use words that make you sound intelligent. If a reader stops and pulls out a dictionary, that's a bad sign.
Then again, I love reading Orson Scott Card because he uses big words like "corpuscular." And that's a cool word worth knowing. Some other good words I've discovered through the GRE learning process--jocose , turgid, peregrination, philogyny, mordant, moribund, volant and mendacious.
I also learned I've been using the word 'querulous' wrong all my life. I always thought it was a synonym for tremulous. Whoops. Hope that word isn't in any of the drafts I sent agents...
Well, it's Weds. somewhere, right? I got caught up in some expected yardwork today when the sprinkler system went down, so this post's a little late. But here it is...
Ah, CONduit. The Salt Lake City Con where you can attend a writing panel on How to Get published, stay for a belly-dancing performance and learn the basics of detecting paranormal activity...all in a single night. This year's theme was space pirates. There's such an ecletic mix of gamers, artists, anime fans and writers, if you go to CONduit and don't come home with at least one new friend...it's probably your deoderant.
Of course not everyone's friends are as cool as the Dread Pirate Roberts. But hey, you can't all be as awesome as me. Relax. Don't strain yourself. We wouldn't want to be setting the bar too high now, would we?
Anyway, I had a lot of fun. I even introduced myself to some new authors who's advice I have been listening to for a couple years now, and found out that Larry Corriea and John Brown are every bit as nice as they seem to be. And Provo Library doesn't carry a copy of Larry Correia's book, FOR SHAME! Some regular faces were absent (I missed Howard Taylor's jokes) and some of the local authors didn't stay long, but I still went home with a belly-full of advice and a bucket-full of motivation. I chucked out about 40 pages of text on Skin Farm yesterday (and by chucked out, I mean typed out. How much is decent enough to merit staying in the book, we'll see). Brad Torguson recognized my face from previous conventions and came to talk to me and introduce himself without prompting. I also managed to avoid all Lost spoilers, miracle of miracles. I'm still a season behind, grumble.
My question of the con was: How do you deal with form rejection? And boy, these authors had experienced a lot of it. I didn't quite ask every author there, but the ones I missed I'm sure would have had the same advice. Keep your chin up. Work hard. Throw stuff at the wall. Something's bound to stick eventually.
In some ways, there were a lot of depressing moments at the con, because some of the authors haven't had much upward career movement since last year. Barbara Hambly, our guest speaker, has had a whole ton of success over the years--our library has a shelf almost dedicated to her exclusive use. But after she'd "made it", quit her day job, worked full time as an author for decades, she ended up getting chucked out by her publishers (and this time, I do mean thrown out) and forced to find a job at the time in her life when many people start contemplating retirement. So...you can make it, and still not be safe from the terrors of the 9-to-5.
The funny thing is, the community college she's teaching at wouldn't let her teach creative writing, because she didn't have a masters in English. Ha!
Anyway, a lot of advice we got was the kind of thing you've heard before...ie, don't send your query letter on perfumed paper, or dark paper...(part of me groans at people's ignorance)...but there was some new stuff too, like that sometimes the "no submissions" policy at publishers is just a shield and if you send a manuscript to someone anyway, you might get a bite with comments. Not something I'll try unless I have a few Writer's of the Future awards under my belt, but interesting nonetheless.
Barbara Hambly--who is a really interesting woman, she talked about her ghost sightings and her student's reactions to her numorous tattoos--advised me to start with character when writing a historical novel and then work outward, since I'm finding the whole historical setting bigger than I can chew. She also told me her WoW server (not mine, alas) and that she plays on Thursdays.
Another thing: One of the distinctions between M.G. and Y.A. involves spheres of influence. In a M.G. book, the biggest influence on a main character tends to be family. Often kids saving their parents or having to make due without their parents or fighting their foster parents or wishing they had parents, etc. In Y.A., that influence has shifted over to friends. It's less about family and more about that cute boy with the locker three feet left of the girl's bathroom. Friends in trouble that need rescuing instead of parents. Anyway, I'd never thought of it that way before.
I also learned there's a new subgenre called "New Adult" which is for college-aged folks. Not quite adult, not quite young adult. I'm not sure how you'd go about marketing such a thing and whether its a viable sub-genre since college kids are pretty much adults, but it'll be interesting to see if it develops. I can see how there are some unique "college" issues that would make for great reading. I haven't seen a shelf for it in bookstores, but it's been awhile since I went walkabout in a Barnes and Noble.
James Daschner also told me not to worry that I've missed the bandwagon with post-apocalyptic. They're still hot, which is good because I hope to get queries out on Skin Farm by Christmas.
Anyway, I went to readings, a Wheel of Time panel, and other events, and saw pirates and armed knights carrying signs "WILL FIGHT DRAGONS FOR FOOD." James Daschner gave me a copy of the first few chapters of the sequel to Maze Runner (signed) which made me squeal a little. I squealed a lot when Brandon Sanderson told me the first Wheel of Time signing for Towers of Midnight will be at BYU again this year. I'm picking out my sleeping bag already, you losers. That #1 signed copy is MINE!!!
But more importantly, I came home with so many story ideas, I'm not sure what to do with them all. I'm beginning to wonder if I might not actually be a secret Y.A. author in disguise. I think of myself as gritty, but Y.A.'s gotten pretty gritty of late, and most of the characters that spring into my mind are young, if not high school aged. Probably because I am trapped into a perpetual state of immaturity. There would be some advantages--Y.A. authors are less penalized for genre-romping, so I could write historical fantasy and dystopian science fiction under the same pen-name--as well as a wider audience and bigger paychecks. Sounds good to me.
Next year's COnduit will be superhero themed. The guest is Tamora Pierce. They've already got the website up for next year. I've never read anything by her, but I like some of her book titles. I find myself scratching my head and wondering where to start. Usually I study an author's career in chronilogical order but reading 26 books by the same author is a little dauting.
UP FRIDAY: Double book review! The Lies of Locke Lamora and Paper Mage.
Ever since my laptop broke, I've been really too busy to blog, but I went to the CONduit and Larry Correia inspired me to try to do a little better. We share an anti-authoritarian streak which I find delicious.
Part of the problem is my life is very boring at the moment. I spend a lot of time perched over a keyboard or perched over a book, reading and usually loving it. For example, I just finished I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells--fabulous, in a creepy way. I cannot believe it took him so long to break into the business because he is obviously very talented. Also, Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself which is a must-read for any epic fantasy writer because of his fantastic sense of humor. More on that when I do reviews.
The bottom line is I'm recommitting myself to blogging three times a week. Monday, you'll see a traditional writing prompt. Friday will be a book review. And Weds will be...whatever I feel like. The exception will be this week because this is a holiday. You'll just have to figure out what to write yourselves.
In real life, I've been looking for a part-time job and helping my grandfather out at the business from time to time, and with the yard work. My laptop is working again, but I realized that I have to bite the bullet and buy a new one. The battery is very bad and needs replacing, but my model is so old I'm having trouble finding something compatible. I've found batteries on the web that SAY they're compatible, but in my laptop, the socket is just about in the exact middle of the battery, and in all the pictures of all the others, the socket's about two inches right of center.
Also, there's the fact that I could buy a non-crummy used laptop for only about twice what it costs me to get a new battery. So I'll scrape the money out of somewhere.
I'm also planning on going back to college for a graduate degree. Journalism isn't for me--I used to be a newspaper editor and reporter, and neither will make me happy in the long term, even if I was good at the reporting part. So I need to figure out a new career, hopefully one that gives me time for writing. At the moment, I've settled on professor because I miss the ivory tower. My favorite courses in college were all about the Political Science, so I'm going to take that second major and turn it into a masters. BYU doesn't have a poli-sci masters degree, but they do have one that combines politics with statistics and economics, which sounds right up my alley. I'll study hard and actually care about my GPA for the first time EVER in hopes of one day getting a graduate degree in political economics from an ivy league school. If I can't get a professorship right out of the door, maybe I can work for the government. But I think I'll thrive in the publish-or-perish setting.
Anyway, to apply to this program, I need a better grounding in statistics and to brush up on my economics knowledge--I took micro and macro in college, loved macro so much that the professor tried to woo me to change majors to economics because he thought I'd have a big future in it, god I wished I had listened--so my tentative plan is to apply for admission to those undergrad classes during BYU's winter semester. Maybe I'll take a couple of creative writing classes, too. I've always struggled with creative writing classes because...well...usually I'm the best in the class by a large margin. I'm sure I sound arrogant, but it's the simple truth. The other students read my stuff in awe and say, "This is soooo ready for publication," and then I send it in and reap the form rejections.
But hey, there's nothing wrong with continual positive encouragement.
Coming up on Weds!: Reports from CONduit. Including a picture of me and the Dread Pirate Roberts.
PS: Trying to break into the market? Check the up-and-coming agents listed in Agent Kristen's post about her early days. One of them, Suzie Townsend, did a breakdown about what's hot in YA. It's eight months old, but I bet a lot of her advice still applies. Especially in the don'ts...
There's an article on writing from the Tor blog worth reading.
I wonder how much money you need to make to become a "frillionaire?"
I feel that way sometimes. I have a hard time seeing things through, but my rigid journalism training pushes me up and over my writing blocks. Even though I may hate writing about that damn city council meeting, I have to do it so I make the best of it. I may despise my novel at the moment, but I'll keep plugging through until it's finished. That's why, for me, writing block almost never happens. I'll write something, acknowledge it's crappy, re-write it ten thousand times, and then maybe end up satisfied. It's actually an inhibitor in some ways, because writer's block is a warning siren. I bet I wouldn't have to revise so much if I had it more often.
I miss the newspaper world in some ways. Having a deadline always hanging over my head made it easier to write, which is why the strict structures of a writing group can be very helpful.
So yeah, I've been busy. I've been putting up fences, spending time with the family, planning trips, cannodling with Fred, celebrating birthdays, reading books and writing Skin Farm. It's about a third done, and I finally have a handle on one of the characters that was giving me a hard time.
I haven't forgotten the blog. I just haven't put the time aside to work on it. I have like thirty books in the queue for review which I'll get to. I read a lot without writing anything because I'm pretty picky about my books, and I try not to write reviews if they're mostly negative. But I think for a few of the books I review, I'm less going to advocate reading them than pointing out the lessons writers can learn from them. Even if I don't particularly like a book, I can still learn from it.
Speaking of learning, you might want to check out "Ten Rules for Writers." I especially like Margaret Atwood's advice. Number seven on her list: "You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."
I had an odd dream last night. I was biking and a friend of mine came up to me. I knew she was the servant of an old woman who lived in a house nobody but writers could see. She was a witch, but not the bad kind. A wise woman muse who offered advice to young writers. She lived there alone, except for her servant, her daughter/niece, who spent time reading, chuckling, and breaking wood for their shack's fireplace. I knew that this muse had given Robert Jordan advice in his youth, and that she had been his model for an aes sedai, because when I walked into her shack and saw her cloak on her hook, I saw not one, but many, all flickering because they contained all the ages and styles of the world, including Verin's brown vines. She had lived a long time, was very powerful, and very wise.
I would go to visit her as often as I could. Once, I accidentally led a boy to her, even though her location had to be secret. He followed me, desperate to talk to her, even though the road to her house is laced with broken glass meant to cut the unworthy. I'm not sure what happened to him. When I tried to follow him in, the muse's servant slammed the door in my face.
But one day, the servant came to me and told me I had to come, and to bring one of the people in my writing group. She warned him that the "life" of his story was in danger because it wasn't political enough. By which she meant that he wasn't exploring the tyranny of the government's effect on the 'little people' and he needed to do more with it. He needed to reflect on our own government and compare it to his, weaving its follies of history into his word. His story lacked Truth with a capital T, and so would fail.
I asked her what I needed to do. About how I was afraid I was just a wordcrafter, not a storyteller, because I can spin descriptions and make words dance in people's heads, but my stories are not as good as the writing deserves. About my concerns about whether I should continue on as I am, unemployed except for the small jobs, or try to find a job that will let me write and earn money at the same time. Her answer was mostly a shrug, that I should do what I think is best. Then she asked me to describe the stories I was working on, and I told her about the three, how I couldn't seem to settle on my next project because none of them felt right. She told me all my stories were good ones and the main thing I lacked was patience. Patience with myself, patience with others. Patience with the characters that hadn't yet found themselves in my text.
Then she stroked my cheek and said, "don't worry, if you work hard enough, you'll be able to take my place here one day."
And I woke up deliriously happy, because I knew that this is who I am and always will be, and one day, I will get to live in a wood-heated hut in the middle of the slums that no one can see, giving advice to young writers that can change lives. Coax happiness. Give thought.
***
A true dream, I think, advice to stay on the path I have chosen. People who read my writing later may be surprised to find out that I'm a Christian, because I write such blasphemous things about gods. Take the current epic fantasy I'm working on, where there are seven nations, each one's culture inspired by the seven deadly sins. Part of Christianity's domination of the western world came from the fact it absorbed pagan religions. In my world, it's the other way around, paganity won, but many of the Christian rituals are kept, because they were absorbed. This creates interesting contradictions that I'm still trying to work out (Like, why gods and goddess with such sexual natures would have priests so fully determined to censor everything).
I suppose it is my backlash against worshippers of the recidivist Goddess theory, which believes that there was once a goddess religion that taught peace and love and everyone was happy until the big bad male-centered religions came to suppress them, demonizing Eve and Pandora until all we have left of that religion are little fertility statues and memories of goddesses as bearers of evil.
I believe that there certainly was goddess-worship in the past and that it certainly was repressed, but I don't believe that it was the peace-loving, nature-worship that certain authors claim it was. So my goddesses are sexually-charged and as brutal as their male collegues. Perhaps because I am so full of emotional conflict and hatred and frustration, I sympathize more with the war bringers dieties than the mascots of peace. They are more...human.
But though I cannot explain god's interventions in certain lives, I believe sometimes he whispers peace and confidence to me through my dreams. I believe that it is not the wish-fulfillment of my subconscious, but a true message to keep on trying until I get it right.
So I have written my place of peace, of inspiration. What's yours?
WRITING PROMPT #14 Title: Place of Peace Genre: None Type: Self-exploration, Dialogue
If you could go somewhere to experience peace and confidence in yourself as a writer, somewhere to go and get ideas, where would it be? What would it look like? Who would be there? What kind of questions would you ask that person?
Some people are lucky enough to have places like this in real life. In high school, I had a bridge. And under it, I could lay back and just listen to people crossing and talking, and no one knew that I was there. I liked that. I'm a bit of a sociophobe, so being able to satisfy the human need for company without having the stress of having to act a certain way was very nice. I never had to perform for anyone, but I wasn't completely isolated either. That's my perfect place, where I can be with someone so completely that I don't have to worry about what I say or do. That I can be as bitter and vulgar as I want to be, and no one will judge me or think less of me.
Find your peaceful place, populate it with a muse, even if you'd prefer to be alone, and write to that person about a difficulty you're having with the story. Let your mind drift as you write the response your muse might make. Perhaps, by writing it out, you'll be able to find a way around your difficulties.
That's what I do. And I'm surprised how often it works.
One thing I think it's important to stress in the electronic age is that a beginning author should NOT take out his/her frustrations about editors, agents, and rejection slips in the public--and permanent--internet sphere. You never know who's reading, and you don't want to be 'that one author' who reads far too much into a form letter. Most of the authors you see complaining on certain websites end up looking like they're completely clueless. And when an agent googles my name to see what else I've written...I definitely don't want him/her seeing obscene complaints about the last agent, or the last 79 rejections I've recieved. (Just an example! I haven't really got that many rejections)
I've learned discretion the hard way, when friends of mine have stumbled on things I've written on other blogs and been hurt, and pledge that I'll never be that stupid again. Don't drink and blog is a another good piece of advice.
So, as I begin my epic journey into the novel rejection-o-sphere, I pledge the only thing you'll see from me publically is stuff about...well, probably figure skating. While I may be weeping tears into my pillow, I know how to keep my mouth shut. I might brag about any nibbles I get, but I probably won't. I will keep a running tally, though that I promise I'll publicize after I hit it big. I like my query/synopsis combination, so I expect I'll get a bunch of partial requests...only to end in a lot of "not quite right for us" because the market is so brutal. I can't allow myself to believe I'll get published my first novel out. It's because of my supersticion--if you believe bad things are gonna happen, they're less likely to happen. It's only when you get your hopes up that you get kicked in the shorts.
I'm not sure when I'll start sending things out, because my list of agents in ranking was on my broken laptop, so I only remember a couple of the ones at the top. (Which I'll, for obvious reasons, keep secret. No reason to annoy anyone not on the list...though anyone in my top twenty or so would be fabulous.)
There was one woman at the conference sitting next to me who had a 100 rejection slips before she found an agent. I was impressed, and hoping that she wasn't being represented by a Preditor. I don't know if my psyche could take that much pounding. We'll see, won't we?
In the mean time, I've found it hard to begin a new project. The prologue for my next novel's wicked awesome, though. But I can't quite get a grasp on my new characters yet, or the setting. It doesn't feel like it has the same magic as the old novel. Hopefully, I'll be able to find whatever's missing and fix it. Everything looks good in the outline, on paper, but it's just not fitting together. I tried to work on a Y.A. novel but it didn't go well, either.
I dunno. Maybe I should try and write my mystery. Cleanse my pallet. I think that it's just my head isn't properly wrapped around something yet. It's hard to go from a plot you've been kicking around for years to a plot/world you've only been kicking around for a month.
I've been busy playing catch-up on some blogs I've fallen behind on lately. Here's some old entries that I feel are of note. I think most of these are links from Nathan Bransford's round-up, so give him the credit.
The Rejectionist blog held a contest for writing the funniest form rejection. The winners are here. Let the musical zombies of awesome be heard.
A comprehensive study of the price wars by Nathan Bransford, who explains why some people feel cheap books are be a bad thing, especially for new authors and independent booksellers. Well, we'll see how it all plays out. There have been book sales before without the world ending.
Publisher's Weekly decides that they don't need to wait for December to announce the best books of 2009.
There is power in stories about separation. Because though people fear death and pain, they also fear being seperated from their loved ones and their families. I've always been amazed when I watch shows like Survivor how intense the reunions with the contestants are with their families. I mean, they've only been separated a month, and yet they sob like children lost in a mall. Part of that, I suspect, is the reality television head space, but there's more to it, I think. I've always been a person of solitude, so I doubt I'd react that way. I am more comfortable on my own than with other people. But who knows?
Think about cultures. Alien cultures in sci-fi and fantasy literature usually have great distinctions, because they are "planets of hats," with just enough definition to make them alien and strange, or very familiar. A planet full of Nazis or communists or warriors. To some extent, this is just because of the limitations of form--hard to paint every culture in broad strokes with only a few pages of description. After all--it's not as if we need to know that the fierce blue-painted warriors are also advanced connoisseurs of escargot. That gets sidelined by the plot, for good reason.
But the strange thing is, often there's no such thing as "culture creep." Planets are divided by space and nations in the fantasy world are divided by distance and travel methods, so there may be some explanation, but usually there are similarities between different peoples, even those who hate each other. Loan words in the enemy's language, similarities in government, etc.
I want you to think about whatever speculative cultures you're working on. What stops culture creep? What stops cross-pollination and acts as a wall between your peoples? Is it a desire for purity? Governmental restrictions? Are there cracks in those walls, people while relish the culture of their enemies at the risk of being labeled traitor? Nobles, especially conquering ones, often have a separate culture than their subjects. What are the walls that keep them apart? I read once a book where the theory was that people are defined not by who they are but by who they are not. I am not a popular girl. I am not athletically gifted. I am not one of those contemptible fools that surrounds me. Their sense of what they are not is stronger than their sense of what they are.
Is there any way you can play on the separation anxiety of your hero? Most stories involve journeys, both physical and internal. What walls stand between your hero and his people? What makes him an outcast? Can he break through those walls?
If you don't quite understand what I'm getting at--I certainly don't, I tend to ramble when I get philosophical--do this instead. Create a culture separated by a wall. Who built it? Why? Do the two peoples want to reunite or stay apart? Why? What will be the consequences if the wall comes down. Despite the jubilation when the Berlin Wall fell, I bet it also caused thousands of personal conflicts as people reunited and found their expectations shattered. Who does the wall falling hurt? Who does it help?
I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a character writer—world-building and plots comes difficult to me. Usually, as an author, I throw several characters together in a bag to watch them bounce around like atoms. Whatever comes out is my story. Which is why sometimes my stories seem a little disorganized. Another downside of this method is that characters pretty much dictate the story. So it’s hard to think of revisions to the plot because you’re stuck in this box: the character told me that this is how the story must be and therefore it IS that way, because the author becomes the character’s mouthpiece. And some characters can be pretty darn dictatorial. Sometimes, when I write I feel like there are real people sitting on my shoulders telling me what to say. Every author has an intense intimacy with their characters, and I don’t know whether my relationship is deeper or whether I’m more insane or whether everyone feels this way. Another downside is that you end up with the lots of story starts because you have great characters, but their stories never quite reach completion because you’re missing other elements. For example, I have the beginning to a novel where a female psychotic serial killer with multiple personality disorder in the jazz age is trying to prove that, this one time, it wasn’t her who killed the young pianist. Interesting character, but one I’m pretty sure I’m incapable, at this point in time, of pulling off as a writer. The unreliable narrator plus the historical research plus the first-person perspective are all things I haven’t played with much before, so it’s just more than I can swallow in one gulp, no matter how intriguing a premise. I wonder how many flapper era mystery series are out there. I think it’d be such a fun, noire world to write in.
Despite the drawbacks, “character-first” is the method that works best for me. To paraphrase Orson Scott Card, there are four basic elements to any story: setting, concept, plot and characters. (He calls setting mileau and concept idea but it’s the same thing, in my eyes). If I try to start with a setting, the story is usually boring. If I try to start with a concept, the story ends up being preachy. If I try to start with a plot, the characters end up as robots basically obeying the beck and call of the deux ex machina.
So, for me, it all comes down to character. But even character writers need words, plots, and interesting ideas to make their stories good. So, what do you do if you have fascinating characters and no stories to put them in? If the colorful Space Mercenary Xllista, who is allergic to spinach and loves crocheting almost as much as she loves cutting down three-armed aliens with her thrumming laser sword, is sitting in you notebook with nothing else to do?
Here are my thoughts on how to turn characters into stories:
1) How to let your characters build your worlds for you
When I say I imagine characters, that image I have doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Usually I know at least a couple of experiences I wantcharacters to have while in a story. For example, if I want Naheel the King of Thieves to learn humility, I figure a showdown with a big bad wizard at some point in time will temper his enthusiasm. I call this point a “milestone.” I have five or six milestones inside of my head that I plan to sprinkle throughout the story. I don’t know the order or the pacing, but I do know they HAVE to happen.
Because those milestones add up, when I think of a character and their growth in the story, I have two points. A)--the characters’ starting point, who they are at the beginning, and b)--who the characters need to become at the end. Usually that involves a character going from weakness to strength, overcoming some prejudice or fear. Luke Skywalker goes from farm boy who can’t defend his aunt and uncle from the evil empire to jedi warrior capable of blowing up the Death Star. Alternatively, a character can go from strength to weakness—the Starks in the A Game of Thrones lose the head of their household. Their family is scattered. Most endings are mixed: Luke Skywalker gains some mastery over his force, but loses his mentor.Or, more complicated, you have strength goes to weakness which in the end results in even more strength. Without his loss of Obi-Won, Luke wouldn’t have been forced to stand strong in himself and wouldn’t have been strong enough to stand up to the Emperor in the end of the trilogy. And this character metamorphosis is why its such an enduring story. Though Han Solo, Wookies and Light Sabres all help of course, because they are a handful of awesome.
If you haven’t yet come up with both a and b for your character, or at least a bunch of milestones, this exercise probably isn’t going to be too useful to you. Though if you don’t have both a and b, you probably either need to think about your characters more or you’re suffering from a case of “this character is god!” There is going to be no character development in your story, because your character has no weaknesses to overcome, no learning to do. He is a perfect, living god on the page.
But remember that godlike characters still have weaknesses and room for growth. Roland may be a godlike gunslinger in almost every way, shape and form, but he still grows throughout the Dark Tower series. Though if you’re a beginning writer, I’d advise staying away from impossibly mighty characters, because they’re so rarely as interesting to your readers as to you as author. Roland is one of the few characters I can think of who starts out godlike who I like. The point is, most characters we care about in spite of their godlike abilities, not because of them. Or at least, that’s how it shakes out with me as a reader.
So, the bottom line is: how can you create a world that forms the character at point A? For example, say it is important for a character to have an almost crippling fear of heights. While you could examine what mundane event led to that fear on an individual level—maybe her parents got killed rock climbing on Mars—you can also build a world where that fear is common, in fact, where not having that fear would make one a Despereux-type freak. For example, a world of underground dwellers who build caves in the rocks specifically to get away from heights. Part of their religion might be that anyone who ever stands on the surface has a chance of being soul-sucked by malevolent spirits. Alternatively, you can build the society so that the character’s weakness makes her even MORE of an outcast. For example, a girl who’s afraid of heights living amongst a bunch of winged cliff-dwellers (she’s the only one who was born ‘bare-backed’—an obscenity among their people because it Is so inherently disgusting) or people who live in homes at the top of God-trees, deities that have been imprisoned in tree form and demand the worship of the people who live in their mile-high hair. Maybe her inability to worship them because she can’t muster the courage to climb high enough is why she gets exiled and has to go wandering around to find the magical MacGuffin.
And of course, every layer of depth you can add is a good thing. What kind of profanities would winged aliens use? What kind of items would they consider most valuable? How do they get dressed in the morning? From these types of questions, you can get an interesting concept, like “what happens if the heir to the throne is a throwback without wings and ends up exiled amongst the human colony of weak scientists she once despised…only to discover that humans genetically engineered her people in the first place and are now working to stop a disease that’s been thinning the flyer’s population for the past century, a problem resulting from their attempts to play god?”
Bottom line, it’s time to brainstorm, but hopefully now you have some good points to start with.
2) How to turn characters in the plot:
For this exercise, you need more than one character. Hopefully, a lot of characters.
One of the difficulties in my book is that I have too many characters. Out of curiosity, I counted. Godsplay has 43 named characters in the book. That means, on average, I introduce a new named character every 3,250 words, or one every 13 pages. Of course, most of these are only in one or two scenes or even referenced but never seen, but that’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s a lot of plots to forward, because every character in my opinion should a) be real b) exist to forward the plot/add something to the story (such as humor). And while I need a lot of characters to forward the plot, that means I need a lot of back story, motivation, and conflicts to be resolved. The number of POV characters is much more reasonable: 8, of which 3-4 are the main POVs and the others are all throwaways with only a couple of scenes each. So I need less help coming up with plots than knowing which plots to emphasize.
But say you don’t have that problem. Say you need to come up with plots and subplots. Say you’ve got three characters: Jack and Jill (your young lovers) and Josh (your villain). You know that Jack and Jill are on a quest for a holy grail, but not the details of what happens along the way.
Now, what drives a plot? Tension. If your plot has no tension, no conflict, then you really have no plot. You have a bunch of stuff happening. There’s a difference.
If you think back to your high school English classes, you might remember that there are numerous kinds of conflicts. Man versus nature, man versus himself, etc. But my favorite and what is often the easiest to write is interpersonal conflict.
So, you have interpersonal conflict between Jack and Josh over the holy grail. But is that their only point of tension? Say Josh is also an evil warlord who is attacking Jack’s village. If Jack doesn’t succeed, everyone in his village will die. That’s the stakes. But let’s peel that onion a little more. What is Josh’s motivation? Maybe he’s attacking the town in the first place because Jack and all the other villagers bullied him as a child, mocking him and beating him up because he was an orphan with a messed up face. That ratchets the tension even higher because in some ways, Josh’s retribution is justified and Jack not only is fighting for lives, he’s fighting for his own redemption over the mindless acts of cruelty he had participated in or even instigated as a child.
Knowing this about your characters can stimulate several actions or subplots. For example, what if Jack decides to try and find Josh and apologize. And Josh laughs in his face, or accepts it but refuses to stop killing the other villagers. Or what if Jack decides to take the fight to Josh’s adopted home village in return, threatening to use his magic to completely wipe the village off the map if Josh doesn’t back down, resulting in a Cold War style standoff?
Or what if Jack stumbles on a village stoning an outcast secondary character (who we’ll call James) and this time, instead of passively standing by, Jack steps in and stops it. In the process, he might gain James’ loyalty for life, and James has an essential clue to the location of the Holy Grail. Or James turns out to be one of Josh’s spies and the villagers’ cruelty is actually justified. In the end, he betrays Jack despite his kindness.
The possibilities are endless, but none of them would be available if you didn’t know the character’s crucial motivations and the levels of conflicting tension. A rule of thumb: the more layers of tension you have between characters, the deeper the story. That doesn’t always mean better. Too many subplots can end up confusing events, or distracting from your central theme. Sometimes your innkeeper is just an innkeeper, and sometimes he’s a single father of three trying to make ends meet in the middle of the Apocalypse.
And what about Jill? Say you know she’s a divorced mother who lost track of her infant son during a war, when soldiers left her for dead but took the baby boy. How does this affect her relationships with the other characters? Is Josh actually Jill’s long-lost son (although this could make difficulties for the Jill-Jack love-interest angle)? Has Josh promised to let her know the location of her child if she finds the grail and turns it over to him? Or maybe Josh is her divorced husband, who abused her, and she’s not going on the quest for the grail because she wants to find it, but because she wants revenge and she knows the quest will draw Josh to her.
And maybe she’s in love with Jack because his vulnerability reminds her of Josh before he became an evil megalomaniac, or maybe just because he has the same brown eyes as her son did, and, in the end, her story is resolved when she accepts her love for Jack and, at the same time, that she may never know who her son is. Maybe she’s afraid Jack will turn into Josh, because Josh’s treatment of her has made her cynical of all men. And so, at the end of act 2, Jill flees Jack with the key to the grail’s location because she doesn’t think any man can be trusted with it, and so Jack has to catch her before Josh does.
Any of these relationships can add either plot twists or subplots, and gives characters rational reasons for acting irrationally, which is sometimes necessary for a plot. Because there are no books I hate more than the books where characters act stupidly for no reason whatsoever.
From the villain’s angle, maybeJosh, Jill’s divorced husband, still loves her, and he is certain that finding the holy grail will make her return his love. Perhaps the holy grail even contains a love potion, and she will be forced to love him for the rest of her days as a mindless love slave. How will his love of Jill change his actions? Maybe, in the grand climatic battle, he realizes Jack makes Jill happy and so truly relinquishes her at last
Whichever choice we pick, we still end up with a fairly standard Josh/Jill/Jack love triangle. How can we spice it up? By bringing in the other characters, of course. What about the waif James, who Jack rescued to make up for his own cruelty as a child? We’ve already established Jacks’ relationship and potential conflict with James (is he a spy? Was the villager’s stoning of him potentially justified?) but what about Jill? Does Jill protect James because he reminds her of her own son, protecting him when all logic says she should be doing otherwise? Or what if, because of her suspicion of everybody left by her life in constant abuse, she suspects James is a traitor from the beginning and Jack has to restrain her from hurting the boy? What if James is actually her lost son, and she goes from suspecting him to being ashamed of her mistrust? And what if James lies and tells her he is her son, even though he knows he isn’t, perhaps because his mother is being held by the bad guy who says he will kill her if James doesn’t find the grail? Maybe Josh is James’ father, and Josh only had sex with James’ mother in the first place because she physically resembles Jill.
Complications upon complications. And note, this sort of thing can go on in the background while the main questing happens. So, even if there’s nothing particular going on in the main plot (we’re riding horseback from one area to another, cue montage of trees and quiet brooks) the tension is still kept tight by the character’s relationships.
In my opinion, the two more important areas of study outside of English and creative writing programs for an aspiring author are acting and psychology. Acting teaches you to get inside a character’s head and forces you to (unless you have a really hands-on director) to make up a lot of motivation behind their lines, turning phrases that can be really generic into something sinister or humorous, because of the motivations you infuse into it. Hanging motivations onto a framework of plot that cannot be altered and making every line logical, even when the play isn’t always. Psychology is also important because it forces you to examine the minutia of human behavior, and so you can think to include things like displacement and avoidance into your characterizations, which make your characters more real.
But every character you add is a potential for plot twists and subplots. If you’re finding it difficult to keep tensions high, I’d advise you to try the following exercise. I either invented it myself or read about it long ago and borrowed it so deeply from someone else that it became my own.
Write the names of several characters, the ones that are most important to the plot, on a piece of paper, roughly in a circle or wheel formation. I use the back of envelopes, because when I see a blank piece of paper, I get a little intimidated. Backs of envelopes somehow aren’t frightening.
Now—draw a line between characters who have a conflict/tension. If you’re feeling fancy, break out the colored pencils and delineate each with colors, for example pink could stand for romantic tension, red for actual open conflict (such as fighting), yellow for implicit conflict (they are on opposite sides of a war but never actually interact), blue for they’re going the same direction but they have different goals, etc.
In the beginning, you should have something like the figure in the second image at the top of the article. In the end, you should have something like the figure in the first image. (Yeah, they're messed up, I'm too sleepy to change it)
This is why I have a hard time keeping my novels contained to reasonable word limits. Because even my spear-carriers have conflicts and back stories, and I feel like they all deserve their turn in the spotlight, even if it’s only for a paragraph. In the hands of a skilled writer, you have a tapestry. In the hands of an amateur, you have a mess.
The point is, each thread of conflict can be developed into a subplot or can influence the main plot. This technique is good because IF you look at your diagram and see no lines of tension between a set of characters (say, your princess and your main male’s warrior’s wizard mentor, a.k.a. Kahlan and Zed) you can literally SEE the lack in your story. You fill that lack by adding a plot even that fills the tension (Zed no longer trusts Kahlan because of Shoata’s prophecy). This makes your story richer and fuller.
This technique also tells you where you can cut characters. If a character only has one line of tension with ANYONE, that means he or she may not actually be important to the story and can be cut, or at least, all his scenes can be shortened. This isn’t always the case—especially with characters who don’t play much role in the story but play a role in the character’s background, ie, the main character’s father. However, if you can create lines of tension from minor characters to major characters, for example, Tam al’Thor’s suspicion of Moiraine, you usually end up with a story that has more meat to it.
I’ll go out on a limb and say the number one problem with stories I dislike is not enough tension. Everyone is happy, cooperative, and the only difficulties they face aren’t inter-party, but from the big dark baddies outside. This is the worse tendency of epic fantasy, in my opinion. Even people who work together for common ends in real life sometimes hate and mistrust each other. That’s why the mysterious stranger in the party is so fun to read about—because he could be a traitor in your midst, if he’s not a Strider knock-off.
These are two tips for using your wonderful characters to flesh out wonderful stories. Remember, it’s all a feed-back loop. The more you know about your character, the more you can develop the world, and as you develop your world, the more your character develops. The same thing goes for plots. It’s very rare that you can have too much knowledge about your world and your plot, so doing these exercises shouldn’t be a waste of time for you, even if you have to cut things later. I might know that my planet isn’t a perfect sphere because an asteroid took a chunk off of it, but I don’t necessarily need to share that information with my reader. Still, it’s good to know in case I ever need that suspicious-looking crater to add mystery to my plot.
So have at it!
PS: In other news, Victor Plushenko’s return to figure skating at the Moscow event of the Grand Prix was phenomenal. Coming off three and a half years of retirement, he can still cream skaters in the prime of their careers. Purely amazing. He’s one of my favorite figure skaters of all time. It’s wonderful to see him lacing up his skates again. And it was wonderful to see the hero worship in the other competitor’s eyes… truly a skater’s skater and a strong athlete. I can’t wait to see him at the Olympics.
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