The Art of Ice-Breaking

Recently I have been really battling life. I always manage to get some writing in there somewhere, but it starts to tell. At the moment it seems to be on the bus, at lunch times, squeezed in before work - you get the idea.

One of the biggest problems is breaking the ice - getting motivated and creative in two seconds flat to make the most of the fifteen or twenty minutes that I might have.

Ideally (when life co-operates) I like to write in 2 hour blocks. I find this gives me time to warm up, tune in and really get into some sort of flow. At the moment this is impossible.

The thing is you might be able to 'write' for two hours in a day - say half an hour on the bus each way (that's one hour), then another hour at lunch perhaps (in the cafe' or park). This adds up to 2 hours, but if it takes me ten minutes to reconnect and establish some sort of flow then its really only an hour and half! That's not counting the time taken to grit my teeth and drown out the two idiots at the back of bus talking much too loudly and giving their opinions on everything I really don't want to know about.

So how do you write? In snippets? In large blocks? In the emergency stairwell (yes it's been done)? If you do write in small parcels, how do you manage to reconnect with your work and get back into the flow?

Abandonment

They say writers have difficult families (the bastards. Who are 'they', anyway?). This time, alas, they're right. I've been abandoned. For a kindle.

It arrived at his work address two days ago, all sleek and seductive, and giving him that come-hither page turn flash. He hasn't taken his hands off it for more than a few minutes except for necessity (well, okay, I did get to play with it a little bit). Not only that, he used it to go online and - horrors! - buy books! Imagine it. No more sharing of books. He caresses that kindle as he turns the pages, I swear. And now he wants to buy it things. A leather jacket. Headphones. More books.

I am bereft, I tell you, utterly lost. I can hear the hardcopy books on our shelves weeping as I type.

There is only one answer to this terrible betrayal. I shall have to buy a kindle of my own!

When The Teacher Is Ready

The Pupil appears.

Which is an inversion of the usual, isn’t it? However, just as true as the other way around. At various times in my life I’ve been a teacher. Not a writing teacher, interestingly enough. I’ve taught German and English composition and French and once long ago math.

One thing I noticed is that every time I teach a subject I emerge from it with a much deeper understanding than before. In that sense my sons have been invaluable to me, because they’re the sort of kids that ask questions. Difficult questions. Sometimes true puzzlers. I’ve read twenty books to answer a question my younger son has put to me about... oh, the Middle Ages. And every time, my knowledge grows.

I think that’s part of the reason we tend to fall into how-to mode in this blog: there is something about the process or how to create this or that, which is not clear to us. It might be something we have particular issues with. I don’t conceal from anyone that plotting was my bette noir when I started writing. I had characters, or at least character voice, but I quickly found out even the greatest hero in the world can bore you to tears if all he’s doing is sitting around angsting about how his eggs were runny for breakfast. (At first I got over that by taking books I admired and outlining the plot, so I could see the bones beneath the flesh.) So I think we write about what plagues us, so that we can learn it ourselves.

The other part of it is that every writer is fascinated by how-to-write. I think because like any artistic pursuit a good part of the work takes place inside, deep, deep inside, at a subconscious level. And we don’t like that, being rational beings. Or at least I don’t like that.

No, that’s not quite true. Part of me loves that. Usually it comes at the end of a novel, when I’m sailing in under full impulse, after I’ve laid all my traps and changes, and set in al my surprises, and suddenly it all starts falling into place, including things I didn’t THINK through. (Like the fact that Thena in Darkship Thieves is named Athena Hera – and yes, Sinistra too, think bar Sinister. I had no clue why till a character made a joke about it, I just knew that was her name.) I love that feeling, but at the same time these “gifts” feel like they come from some untrustworthy goddling and at the root of my culture is the knowledge those whom the gods love they first drive mad.

So that’s the other part of it. Sometimes even things you know really well, you want to take apart and teach someone, so that you know them consciously. And tons of times the fact that I’ve analyzed what works in what I do and what doesn’t, has saved my bacon when I’m on deadline and sick as a dog. Also, once I interiorize some knowledge, I can grow again, around it. My progress started with studying plot, and then my plot was good and my characters looked puerile in comparison. So then I worked on characters, now I’m back to plot. It’s not a straight forward road, more the way a nautilus shell grows in an endless spiral I think.

Laura Resnick resposted on Facebook recently about some article saying that how to books do more harm than good. Is that true? I don’t know. I own maybe a hundred of them. Of those, maybe ten have helped me. Have the others hurt me? Only a little and in the beginning because I believed everything I read. After I gained a little knowledge, I started taking things with a grain of salt. And some of the things I learned in those books I’d never have realized any other way. Like, after reading ... oh, hundreds of thousands of books, I’d never consciously realized what Dave talks about in the post on Monday: that you can cut scenes and skip over the “boring” stuff. I thought you had to stay with the character, so that I’d literally drag my readers up a staircase step by step by – yawn – step. Until I was reading Dwight Swain’s Techniques of The Selling Writer and he talked about how to end scenes and how to begin them, and... well... a lightbulb SHOULD have gone on over my head. It was so obvious, but I needed to see it written down in plain language.

All this to say – we’re considering publishing a book with the most helpful posts in this blog. Eformat to begin with. We’ll put it at some really low price. The problem is, you see, that we have no clue which – if any – posts you guys would consider helpful to have all collected to together to consult in need. Are there any of those? Would you point us at them? And are there any subjects you want us to tackle in the future, with this great, collaborative collection in mind? Or are the mad (mad, I tell you, mad) geniuses more entertaining than instructive? (Oh, yeah, and thanks for listening to us, and for all your answers, which sometimes cause the nautilus to grow another shell as I ponder them.)

Steam Punk

One of my friends, Richard Harland, has had a lot of success with his new YA steampunk book, Worldshaker. There is something very alluring about steampunk. It takes us back to an Antique Future.

Before I ever knew the term steampunk existed, I loved Sir Arthur Connan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books. There's Dickens works which are still being made into movies. And my favourite would have to be the satirist Saki. I discovered him in my early twenties and loved his dry wit. My favourite story of his is 'Sredni Vashtar', a very dark tale indeed. And then there is 'The Open Window' which must be a classic of horror stories. Then there's Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and HG Wells, only none of these writers were deliberately writing steampunk.

For movies that are deliberately steampunk think Wild Wild West, Steamboy, The Prestige and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Those should give you enough visuals.

For a list of modern authors who could be termed steampunk see here. I would add Mervyn Peake, I think his Gormenghast trilogy is very steampunk in it's setting and characters.

The steampunk subgenre has gone from strength to strength in recent years. Here is an article on 'The Victoria Steam Exposition ... a celebration of a growing subculture called steampunk -- which unites Victorian era esthetics and futuristic inventions with modern literature and fashion.'


There is even a Steampunk Magazine. So if you are into steampunk and you can't get enough of it, this is the place to go.

So what is it about steampunk that draws people in?

Is it the quaint machinery? See some examples here.
Is it the repressed sexuality of Victorian England, combined with those corsets and garters? See some of the costumes here and here.
Is it because readers are tired of dystopic futures and want something whimsical and fun?
Are readers tired of epic fantasies set in medieval-lite worlds?

We can look back on the Victorian era, conveniently forgetting the oppression and injustices. Enough time has passed for the fusty old Aunts, who never married because they couldn't marry below their station, to die off. We can look back and enjoy a time when science was brave and exciting and the world looked like it was going to get better every year. When the world still contained mysteries and wonders. And a tennis player could be so incensed by the lack of skill at the Olympics that he could jump the net, pick a racquet and win a gold medal.

For anyone interested in writing steampunk, Richard has done a blog here on the topic.

And I'm finishing up with a delightful image, the steampunk Dalek!

Now, has the steampunk genre snuck up on you like it did for me?

Transitioning through real time and real life.

It's a bore. Really. It doesn't matter what the hell it is, in real-time it's a bore. Author's lives, novels about undergoing great quests, whatever. Hell, even war or mountain rescue or hunting your dinner. Most of it, and indeed most of life is really repetitive, slow-moving and, um, boring. Okay, one man's tedium is the next's Te Deum (because being alive and not under stress is something to be grateful for. I am, every day that I am here on the far end of nowhere in particular, thankful to the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship, as much as some of you may question their judgement)... but let's face it, real life (even fraught and miserable, or wildly exciting) is full of real time tedium, rather like real conversation is full of real banality. And like the army it's moments of extreme excitement interspersed with a lot of not much happening. In the army, that's mostly good. In a book, it isn't.
When people are paying up to read a piece of escapism (because yes, even misery books (my mother abused me, my father beat me or my punk-boyfriend ran off with my poodle, and took all the diet coke) are in fact some form of escapism. Yes, you have to be living a very banal and spoiled upper-middle class life to enjoy escape into grunge or misery... but there are people in that sad, meaningless existence that revel in the misery of others, otherwise there'd be no market for these sort of books. )... They want escapism.
And that means that they don't want the boredom of real-time, real-life. Any great quest involves sleeping, getting up, urinating, drinking something, probably eating something, and walking or riding... heck, breathing, sweating and farting unless you happened to be writing sparkly emo vampires, in other words business as usual, in between very short moments of intense excitement, mental turmoil and the stuff people paid to read about.
I think the key here is ‘real-time'. Any book is actually really 90% the exciting bits with the parts about blowing their noses and cleaning teeth and trying to get warm seriously foreshortened if not truncated completely. And yet you will hear the terms ‘realism' applied not infrequently to books that people admire. People feel they were there... no matter unlike real life the pace was. And even if no-one says ‘Like' ("like you know like it all like happened like, really fast.")
So: we're talking about writing here: how does one pull this little sleight of hand? How do some writers do it so slickly that you don't even realise it was done, and others leave you confused and re-reading (It must be deep. I had read every paragraph 3 times!)? And how, oh how, do those of us that have to write about the mundane make it entertaining (says he who tries to blog every day)?
We're onto the black magic zone of transitions here. And if you can't do these, you can't write. It's one of the more frequent and less written about problems of new writers. There are even some less-than-new writers who battle: to whit - me.
The key techniques I have been able to identify are...

1)Just leave it out. If the reader is able to leave the character bog-snorkling, and then easily work out that the story picks up with character x again after three hours of slogging through the bog later as they crawl onto the enchanted islet... well and good. No need to repeat bog-movements.

'This is awful, thought Mary, pushing deeper and deeper into the ooze. Sulphurous bubbles rose around her as she moved slowly forward forcing her way deeper into the muddy swamp. She knew there was no way back now. Just onward toward the enchanted islet out there in the mirk.
***
Mary was exhausted after forcing her way through thigh deep mud for what seemed like eternity, but couldn't have been more than an hour. She grabbed the rocks of the Enchanted islet and hauled herself out. For a while she just sat there and panted. And then looked at herself. sniffed. Here I am, off to meet a Prince and I smell like a frog-pond and look like Marshall's ex-girlfriend.

2)Change point of view. This works very well. But not in first person...

'This is awful, thought Mary, pushing deeper and deeper into the ooze. Sulphurous bubbles rose around her as she moved slowly forward forcing her way deeper into the muddy swamp. She knew there was no way back now. Just onward toward the enchanted islet out there in the mirk.
***
Watching from the high rock on the enchanted islet Prince Dairmid saw the woman pushing out into the bog. "Doesn't she know about the leeches?" he wondered, as she struggled forward. She was certainly determined. He watched her, fascinated, for ages, until she got too close.

3) use some of the tedium in (interesting) introspection with little aside to show the passage of time or distance. Beware. This can be boring too. Takes a light hand.

'This is awful, thought Mary, pushing deeper and deeper into the ooze. Sulphurous bubbles rose around her as she moved slowly forward forcing her way deeper into the muddy swamp. Suppose it pulls me down. But she knew there was no way back now. Just onward toward the enchanted islet out there in the mirk. She tried focussing he mind on her goal, or even on her mother-in-law. But the reality of step after glutinous step pulled her back to the grim reality of the bog. It sucked. So did her life.

4) seriously foreshorten by using narrative - tell don't show. Yes, there IS a place for this. 'This is awful, thought Mary, pushing deeper and deeper into the ooze. Sulphurous bubbles rose around her as she moved slowly forward forcing her way deeper into the muddy swamp. Suppose it pulls me down. But she knew there was no way back now. Just push onward toward the enchanted islet out there in the mirk. So she did. it seemed endless, but at last she grasped the rocks.

5)Finally, where there is just no escape (ie. Me writing a blog about a day of hard work, writing) either make it funny, or draw on experiences from more interesting times.

Ok - suggestions? Ideas?
A quick transition to a padded cell?

Odds and Ends and All Things In-between

It's dark outside and yet there is one bird singing its heart out -- and driving my cat crazy at the same time -- and refusing to let me sleep. Not that sleep is necessarily a good thing right now. Why, you ask? Well, I'm in the process of trying to do edits on a book that needs a couple of scenes added and several others modified and that means I have to listen to certain music. We've discussed in various posts in the past our writing processes (See Kate's Thursday post on her own process). Part of mine is listening to music, usually music chosen by the novel or short story I'm currently working on. For this particular novel, it's ABBA, specifically the soundtrack to Mama Mia. Try going back to sleep with a very loud bird singing outside AND songs sung by Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep running through your head. (And apologies to anyone out there who happen to like the way those two sing.)

So, instead of facing the prospect of killing the cat for trying to tear down the curtains and blinds to get to the bird that refuses to be quiet AND more ABBA running through my head, I crawled out of bed, made coffee and started trolling through the blogs looking for inspiration for this morning's post.

In the vein of Sarah's post this week, there's been a lot written about how to promote your book and yourself over the last week or so. Most of the posts ask the same questions Sarah touched on, so I won't recap them. However, a couple looked at the use of the internet as a social medium and how attempts at promotion can have adverse effects on your career. For a prime example of how this can work, check out Jason Pinter's Huffington Post piece about how a blog entry about his first book led to an immediate termination from his job with a large publisher. No warning. No counseling. No two week notice. Just a "pack your things and get out."

Agent Jessica Faust wrote about "The Internet and Your Career" on Wednesday. She ponders the question of whether or not we should have public and private blogs/facebook accounts/twitter accounts, etc. I happen to think she's right, at least for those of us trying to really break into the business. As she puts it, "Do you really want your future agent, for example, to see your spring break photos, your daughter’s first trip to the potty, or hear about your rather extreme political views?" That said, I don't think it is as critical once you are an established author. However, agents and editors do read blogs. They google our names to see what is out there. If they don't like what they see, they may pass on a novel, no matter how well-written it happens to be. So, the moral of the story is, in my opinion, separate your personal from your professional and think before hitting the "Enter" key.

For more on this, check out this post by agent Lucienne Diver.

Also from Bookends, comes this post about query rejections. I don't know about you, but I hate writing queries. In my opinion, they are the most difficult part of the writing process. Ms. Faust's post points out why. Agents look at queries in a very subjective manner. For them to as for pages, the query has to feel special. One comment really caught my eye. To paraphrase, the commenter noted that if you try to be too special, too different, no agent will touch your novel because there is no way to sell it. (And, yes, boys and girls, agents are in this for the money. It's their job.) Somehow, you have to find that fine line where you balance between what is familiar and "safe" and what is different enough, unique enough to stand out and still be something the publisher will buy and the public will read. After all, the market will only tolerate so many sparkly vampires and emo werewolves -- thankfully.

So, what's the answer? How do you make your novel "special" in a query letter so it will stand out to an agent?

What do you think about public v. private/professional blogs and fb accounts? Why?

Myths - Old and new

*Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome our guest, Ruth Long. As you can tell our minds have a lot in common, since we named books almost the exact same thing. On the other hand her Soul Fire (as opposed to my Soul OF Fire) has more in common with my Shakespeare series, in its view of the relation between fairies/elves and mankind. Give her a warm Mad Genius Club Welcome. SAH*

I'm in the middle of rewrites on my YA fantasy May Queen set in a fairytale realm just a short step away from our own. It's the world where our fairytales come from, where Sleeping Beauty slumbers on, where valiant knights slay dragons, where true love is just waiting to be discovered.

Only... it isn't like that at all. It's dark and dangerous, there's no knowing who to trust and how far they can be trusted, and true love might be the most dangerous thing of all.

There's something so engaging about a new twist on an old story. The familiarity of the old is coupled with a spark of surprise that breathes new life back into it.

Myths, folklore, legends breathe a depth of life into our stories, adding layers and layers of meaning that we as writers would be hard pressed to work in ourselves. The joy of using folklore is that our readers, through a life-time of experiencing that story, will do it for us.

When I was writing my novel Soul Fire, I used the folklore of England and Ireland, in particular the fairy folklore that was carried between the two. My hero, Daire (named for the oak, which is his sacred tree - the protector of the forest just as he is protector of his people) is one of the Sidhe, the fairy race of Irish folktales. These aren't the fairies the Victorians gave us. They're warriors, human sized and rarely friendly to humankind. More than that, one beautiful nugget of legend tells us, they are the angels who would not pick a side in the war in heaven and were banished to the earth as soulless wanderers, forever denied heaven for their crime of faithlessness. Taking elements such as this transforms the thought of a fairy lover into something far more dangerous and thrilling.

But how could I find a match for someone like this? In Rowan (also named for a tree - the Mountain Ash, said to make mortals immune to the charms of the fairies), I used the idea of the artist as creator, listening to a muse, fuelled by divine, creative energy. But Rowan has buried her own artistic abilities in favour of nurturing it in others and running a gallery in a small town. Rowan has been running from things most of her life, though she puts on an image of a confident and self-assured businesswoman. She has set aside her dreaming, romantic self for practicality and self-sufficiency. She is determined to survive on her own abilities.

By bringing two opposites together, we have immediate conflict. Writers and readers know this, and relish it. Throw a vengeful dark Sidhe into the mix and the tension goes up a notch. Make her Daire's treacherous former-lover and it heads through the roof.

I also asked a very simple question - since the Sidhe were so dangerous to humans, what if it worked the other way? What if the human world and human beings were just as dangerous an environment to them? It is summed up in a simple rhyme that, in the book, every Sidhe child is taught from the cradle.

Iron born and iron bred,
Trust not iron it will see you dead.

If we have our folklore about them, why shouldn't they have the same sort of stories about us?

The combination of very human conflicts with the supernatural always intrigues me. No matter how powerful a being is, they have desires and drives, motivations which can be as relatable to us as anything in contemporary fiction. It brings the human element into the supernatural story and draws the reader with it. And if you're anything like me, there's nothing better than being pulled right into the heart of a story and feeling, as well as reading, it unfold.

Myths do this. They are close to our hearts. They are stories we learned as children and precious to each of us. We all have our favourites - Beauty and the Beast, Deirdre of the Sorrows, the Steadfast Tin Soldier, Tristan and Iseult, Snow White, The Goose Girl and many many more. They address basic themes that the original tellers wanted to share, that their listeners wanted to hear and the stories resonate with us still today because those themes are universal. The stories repeat across mythologies, across races, and across generations. They change, they adapt, they are cleaned up or dumbed down, but the basic core story continues on. Becuase they address something really important in our psyche.

And the older versions have an uncanny way of making themselves heard. That darkness seems to seep around the edges of the pasted-on, biscuit tin image and as readers, I think we react to it instinctively, whether it appears in the text or not. We know it should be there. We half-remember it, even though it isn't there. As part of my research I've been reading a number of books on anthropology. One thing shines through so clearly. There are many other stories, many of which have been forgotten. And yet their ghosts remain. They linger in the background of the legends we have. They insinuate themselves into stories which might otherwise be entirely factual. The human mind is designed to spot patterns. How many of us have, on a glance, noticed a face in woodgrain, or caught a glimpse of "something" in the shadows? The mind works that way on stories too.

I love to catch a sense of a greater story, of depth and ages beyond the story I am currently reading. The sense of "I know this" even if I've never read it before. The inevitable is so powerful. A thrill of recognition, the excitement of seeing if you are right or if you just imagined it. That's not the same as predictability - we don't want that. But a sense that the story must work out that way because something older and more vast than an author is guiding it. Because it HAS to.

Because that's what stories do.

It's part of what gives the reader that sense of satisfaction at the end of a book. All is right and we are content. Or, turning it on its head, all is wrong and we are left uncomfortable and brooding.

Myths and legends - whether overtly part of the tale, or skillfully woven through an otherwise non-paranormal tale - give us that sense of history, background and weight that can bring the story on to another level. Our stories grow beyond what words are put onto paper, and the telling of a tale (as would have happened long ago) becomes a shared experience, where author and reader bring their own interpretation, knowlege and expectations to the process.

It's a moment of magic.

--
http://www.rflong.com/