GAAAH!

Okay, I feel better now. I do apologize for groaning in your ear first thing on a Sunday morning. But I'm getting too old to be digging pits in the back yard -- especially when there are no metaphoric bodies to go into them. Add in a round of paining walls, after the requisite taping, redoing a website -- almost done -- and trying to find time to write and, well, you now know why I'm groaning.

I am also groaning because that wonderful idea I had for a blog post just flew out of my head, replaced instead by one of my characters demanding to know why I haven't been writing HER story. Hasn't she been patient? She's let me write short stories and another novel and almost finish a second and get started on plotting a third. All the while, she's languished in the back of my mind, waiting oh so patiently for her turn. Can't she come out and play?

Whine, whine, whine...and I'm not sure if it's the character or me or both of us whining.

The problem with this character is that, while she's loud enough, she doesn't exactly resonate with me. I've doodled with a story involving her but, well, it just doesn't work. So she's been pushed to the back burner while other stories, stories that do interest me and are fun -- when they aren't driving me crazy -- are written.

Now, I know there are folks out there who will say I ought to go on and write the story...and, fortunately, it is only a short story. At least that's the feel of it. These are the same folks who say you don't need to like a story or enjoy it to be able to write it. Maybe that's true for them, but not for me. If I don't like the story, I find all sorts of things to do to avoid writing. And not just painting and digging pits in my back yard. As much as I grouse about them, I enjoy that sort of physical labor. No, I'm talking about doing such things as washing baseboards, or rearranging the pantry by alphabetizing the contents.

So, what's the point of all this except to let me whine? It's simple. Every writer, editor, agent, or anyone who thinks of themselves as a reader has a set of rules a writer should follow. Some of these rules are essential. You need characters a reader can care about -- whether they connect with the character or are so appalled by him. But they have to care and want to know what happens next. Hannibal Lecter is a perfect example. Here is a character that is so totally evil that it is hard to like him. But, as a reader, you're fascinated by him and what to know more. What made him the way he is? What is he going to do next? Will he get the justice he so richly deserves?

You need a story that has a beginning, middle and end -- even if the end is simply the launching point for another story. Okay, okay, I know there are pieces of "literature" out there that don't fit this but, well, I'm not talking literature. Sorry. More than that, your story has to be written in such a way that your reader keeps turning the page. The first step is to get them to turn the very first page. So hook them immediately. Give them a reason to keep reading. Remember, if you are submitting a short story for publication, you get only a very few paragraphs to hook the editor. A book might get you a couple of pages. But they don't want to read a quarter to a third of the way through a submission before getting to the hook. Honestly, no matter how good the writing, without the hook, they won't read that far.

Most of all, you need a compelling voice for the story. You have to be able to bring your reader into the story, whether you are writing in first person or third. This is the old show-don't-tell adage. And it is harder than it sounds. After all, it's easy to write, "I walked into the room and saw him. Furious, I moved to him and, without warning, slapped him as hard as I could." Those few sentences tell you what happened. They even tell you that the narrator was mad. But there is so much more that could be done with them.

So, dear readers, here's your assignment. Take the above example and expand it. Show us what is happening there. Limit yourselves to three paragraphs. I'll come back later today and add my own take on the scene.

Also, what do you see as the rules that have to be followed in writing a good story?

Okay, I'm off for more coffee and another round of painting. Later!

LISTEN, she said!

(Thursday -- Sarah apologizes to everyone for not responding to your posts, but an electrical storm fried her modem yesterday and has caused her no end of headaches. She promises to respond as soon as she has the new modem installed -- Amanda)

Listen, she said. This is urgent. If there is one thing you must remember, when writing a book, it’s the voice. It can make the whole thing hang together or not. The best story with an hesitant, meandering voice – a voice afraid of itself – will come across unremarkable. The oldest, most hackneyed story, blared forth in a strong voice, will make people sit up and pay attention. Lots of attention.
So, what’s the difference? Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve covered this before. But it’s my current obsession.
I confess I’d never even thought of voice as something one must have. You have to understand, I grew up reading... everything. We didn’t have a tv till I was eight, and then the tv we had had about four hours unremarkable daily programming. I used to try to catch the noon program, which was often Merry Melodies. And on Saturdays there were Westerns. But the rest of the time, really – dance competition, singing program, news, boring lecture – the books were far more attractive.
You didn’t need much of a hook to grab me. Not putting me off was enough. I read fiction. Mystery, Science Fiction, Fantasy and, in despair, my cousin Natalia’s "blue collection" (not what you think, dears. Blue because the covers were blue) of truly trashy romance books. (I’m probably doing this line an injustice, but the plot that seemed to be most common was girl meets matador, girl falls in love with matador. He falls in love with her. Intrigues or whatever intervene. She realizes he loves her and JUST before they reconcile, he dies. She mourns him forever. Happy ending Portuguese style.) If truly, truly out of other stuff, I read school books. Mine, my brothers’, my cousins’, my parents’ from when they were younger. For instance, I first fell in love with history reading my mother’s old school book. And if all else failed, I read want adds. Truly, no voice needed. Being on paper and printed was enough.
Then I grew up, got married, had kids. My time became very limited. I don’t remember when I began to realize about half the books I started ended up somewhere, face down, forgotten, not missed. The books needed to have something special to hold me.
I still didn’t think of it as voice. And sometimes it wasn’t. It’s very easy, for instance, for mysteries to lose me when the plot makes no sense.
As a writer, my first fear was language. This is because English is my third language. I spent my first ten years of writing in fear that all the editors were laughing at my wish to be published in English. When I let go of that – thanks to Dean Wesley Smith who told me I had worked the language enough, pick something else. Only more politely – I turned to plot, because I knew I was weak there. Characters – those seem to come naturally and without much thought. I worked plot like crazy. And pacing. Because in addition to odd ideas of "happy endings" Portuguese story-telling rhythms are naturally slower. I didn’t want to tell Portuguese stories. It’s not what I read.
It wasn’t until Constellation a few years ago, when I was listening to Dave Weber that I realized the importance of voice. Dave pointed out you can make all sorts of mistakes, provided you have a strong and confident voice. I realized this was true. Look, for instance, at the opening of most Heinleins. He tells the story so confidently, you never doubt he SAW it, and it is happening or happened. Which is the first part of giving a d*mn about it, of course. And a lot of the people I mentor are GOOD writers. But their voice hesitates, meanders. They don’t speak from authority. They let you see that they’re lying.
Since then I have been very conscious of voice. To an extent, I always was, in that until I HEAR the story in my head I can’t write it. But now I also get tied up in knots. "Is this a good voice? A voice of authority?"
The truth is I don’t know. Sometimes you can feel it, like an almost electrical charge. Most of the time you don’t know till someone else reads it. Or till you come back months later. Which is not always possible.
I bought a book on voice, but it is lame. The author’s idea seems to be that if you eliminate all conjunction, all buts and ands, you have voice. I defy anyone to find fault in authors with a more flowery/convoluted use of language, including Bradbury and on occasion Pterry. No, they have voice. This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
So, am I chasing a chimera? Is there such a thing as voice? And if there is, is it worth pursuing through the labyrinths of story telling? Or am I like those whom the (storytelling) gods love?


And in case you all have forgotten, Dave is still telling a great story over at:

http://savethedragons.nu/

First, You Breathe in His Nostrils

So we’ve been talking about characters – the good, the bad and the ugly – but there is one thing that ties right back to my long disquisition on voice.

Just like I said your plot is a means to test the character (and I’ll be happy to explain that later, or the others can, I’m sure), the voice is a means to make the character live. You must have the reader present THERE, or it’s all for nothing.

I’m going on about this, because it’s all too easy to slip into what I call “sheet of glass” writing if you’re tired or sick, and then you need to have some idea what’s wrong and how to fix it.

I’m going to be insufferable and give examples from my own writing – well, one of them a collaboration with my friend, Kate Paulk who will be joining us soon.

Kate and I were working on this story (in the Valdemar Antho above) while we were both on deadline for other projects and so tired we might as well have painted eyes on our eyelids and slept through it. So the first version of the opening we came up with was this:

*Heart, Home and Hearth

The air smelled of snow to come. Ree snuggled closer to Jem in the burrow they had claimed for the night and wished he knew what to do. Summer learning to live wild, putting more and more distance between them and the walls of Jacona -- and the Emperor's soldiers -- had been hard on Jem.

The younger boy was all human, unlike Ree. He didn't have fur to protect him, didn't have the sharper senses of the rat and cat that had merged with Ree in the Changecircle last winter. Since they'd escaped Jacona and the hunt for hobgoblins like Ree, Jem had grown thinner until his bones showed under his skin even though between Ree's animal instincts and Jem getting wicked good with a slingshot they had plenty to eat most days.

But that was summer. Fall meant less to eat, and Jem's clothes weren't much better than rags. When it started to get colder at night, they'd tried scraping a deer hide clean and Jem wrapping himself in that, but it stank too much and got stiff and cracked. Neither of them wanted to leave the forest to try to steal clothes from the farms and towns they'd seen from the forest edges. *

It’s not bad, but we felt like you could hear the telegraph cables twang along the way. So we worked on it. This is the same opening in its final version:

*Heart, Home and Hearth
Sarah A. Hoyt
Kate Paulk

The air had a sharp bite and you could smell snow even deep in the narrow earthen borrow, under the roots of a great oak tree, where Ree and Jem had taken refuge.

Winter is coming, Ree thought. There’s no escaping it. He felt Jem shake with cough in his sleep, and snuggled closer, trying to keep the younger boy warm. Summer had been all right for living wild and putting more and more ground between themselves and Jacona -- and the Emperor's soldiers.

Even though Jem was all human and didn’t have the sharper senses of the rat and cat that had merged with Ree during the Changecircle last winter, he had got wicked good with a slingshot. With Ree’s animal instincts to lead the hunt, they’d rarely missed a meal. But the last few weeks, it had gotten so cold, and it seemed like all animals were either hybernating or had gone South for the winter. And you could see Jem’s bones through his skin. Hells you could see them through the rags that passed for his clothes. And he was cold all the time, and for the last three days he’d been coughing all the time, and wheezing when they walked too fast.*

Do you see a difference? Is there a difference? Am I imagining things?

Again, the same, with my own writing, the novel DarkShip Thieves coming out in January. This is the original run at the opening:
* Daddy’s Girl

I never wanted to go to Space. I never had the slightest interest in spaceships. The colonization of other worlds left me cold. I never even hankered to visit Circum-Terra or to see the energy trees up close, by the faint glow of almost-ripe energy pods.

There were people who dreamed of all of this. They cornered me at parties and social occasions -- adenoidal boys, skinny and overeager, with greasy hair and lumpy suits; and sad girls, awkward in dresses, their faces white and pasty and virgin of make up.

They talked of space-materials -- ceramite and dimatough -- strong enough to withstand travel through the void and light enough to consume very little fuel. They spoke of thrusters, acceleration, g-force, gravitation, sustainable space colonies.

Their eyes grew doleful, and their voices vibrated with tears when they spoke of how the human race had abandoned its birthright to outer space after the turmoils two hundred years ago.

In the late twenty second century, they’d tell me, their faces earnest, the mules had built an intergalactic spaceship and they’d made plans for colonizing the solar system in fifty years.*

This is the version that WILL be published:

*One
I never wanted to go to space. Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. Never had any interest in discovering the truth about the darkships. You always get what you don’t ask for.

Which was why I woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in my father’s space cruiser.

Before full consciousness, I knew there was an intruder in my cabin. Not rationally. There was no rationality to it. The air smelled as it always did on shipboard, as it had for the week I’d spent here – stale, with the odd tang given by the recycling.

The engines, below me, hummed steadily. We had just detached from Circum Terra – a maneuver that involved some effort, to avoid accidentally ramming the station or the ship. Shortly we’d be Earth bound, though slowing down and reentry let alone landing, for a ship this size, would take close to a week.

My head felt a little light, my stomach a little queasy, from the artificial grav. Yes, I know. Scientists say that’s impossible. They say artificial gravity is just like true gravity to the senses. You don’t feel a thing. They are wrong. Artificial grav always made me feel a little out of balance, like a couple of shots of whiskey on an empty stomach.

Even before waking fully, I’d tallied all this. There was nothing out of the ordinary. And yet there was a stranger in my cabin.*

So, again am I imagining things, or does the second one work better? And if it does, can we discuss why? Why the character comes more alive in the second version than in the first of both of these?

Can You Hear Me Now?

First of all I want to apologize about my repeated absences from this blog. After the horrible feather allergies at Opus, I seem to have been destabilized enough to catch anything that came by and – obligingly – my younger son brought home a horrible bug. In a sort of poetic justice, he got walking pneumonia out of it, while I just got very ill and unable to string two words together, which has me even later on my late deadlines.

Now the kid is better and I’m just getting back into working shape and it’s time to resume my ramble on voice.

If we all remember – I barely do :) – when last we saw our heros, we were discussing – or at least I hope we were – how good voice can cover a multitude of sins. A convincing voice will make you believe the character exists and thereby glide all sorts of inconveniently awkward world building behind its all-pervasive authority. A really good voice is the sort of thing that if you say "The sky is green and the moon made of cheese" the reader will believe it, even if they’re looking out the window and seeing it otherwise.

So how do you acquire this mysterious elixir of "a good voice."

Well... easier said than done. For one, if you’re a normal writer – yes, unlike me, but even I have this when I’m not writing as someone completely different – you can’t hear your own best voice. You’ll be writing, and it’s easy – this is one of the clues you’re doing it right, actually. You’re not fighting it – and it’s flowing, but you keep thinking "Heavens, this is blah. There’s no art to it." Then you give it to your beta readers and they go "Oh, wow. It sang. It danced. It did dishes." This usually means you’ve hit your natural voice and that because it’s natural to you you can’t "perceive" it.

So what am I talking about on the "writing as someone completely different" above? Well, while my natural voice might sing, dance and do dishes, it has some issues. One of them is that it tends to be a little dry and over-intellectual. Look, it’s how I was brought up. My inner self is eighty years old and wears half-moon glasses. My other issue is that unless I’m writing far future or foreign my voice can seem "odd" to native speakers. Nothing bad, mind you, but enough to have someone put a book down.

Fortunately I’m not a normal writer – and you’re all warned, right now, that if you reach for the phone to call the men in white coats on this one, I shall be MOST seriously displeased – and seem to suffer from a form of self-induced multiple personality disorder. I’ve been heard to say that my books start with a character who wants his/her story told. This is true. What I don’t normally reveal is that this is no half-formed wraith, but a definite voice. Oh, not in my ears – at least not yet – but in my mind. It’s a voice with a personality and his/her own word choices and attitude. I will usually get one or two paragraphs, sometimes if I’m lucky a whole page. I have only once, so far, got three chapters and only once – differently – a whole book.

If anyone else is afflicted with this – I honestly don’t know if this is normal – the first rule is to trust that voice. Write down however much you’re given and trust it as you build the rest of the novel, then trust it as you resume writing. This is harder than it seems. I always have an almost unbearable temptation to go back and edit those "given" sentences and make them more grammatical or more whatever. This is always a mistake.

Also, when writing after that, it is important to try to keep the voice consistent with those first sentences. Weirdly, if the book is going well, after a while it’s not an effort.

So, what if the voice isn’t there? Well... I also experience this. Note above "most of my books" but not all of them start with the character and the voice. Sometimes I have a great idea. Or worse, an idea that sold, but the voice won’t come.

Again, my advice will sound at best silly and at worst useless, but it’s what I do – cold comfort though it is, I advise you to seek the voice. Try it out. Give it some time, then try it out again. Think the book, immerse yourself in it. Think of the character, the character’s situation, what the character wants. Then try again. My record is two hundred and some first pages, but the voice did eventually come. Sometimes – again at the risk of being silly – it helps if you use a different medium to write those first two pages. Like, take a notepad and pen and try it long hand. Something about the shift jugs your subconscious lose.

But above all remember the important thing about voice is confidence. Your confidence in the voice translates to the page which in turn translates into reader confidence in what you are saying. So work on it, but don’t over think it and don’t doubt it.

Curiously, for those three people who aren’t tired of hearing about my art-class experiences, this translates to art. My art teacher says confidence and a distinctive, self-consistent style will carry the day over accurate technique and careful execution.

So, go forth, be confident, and have the courage to trust your words. PARTICULARLY when you’re telling made up stories.