Who Are You Writing For?

I came across a fantastic quote a few years ago - 'Write first for yourself and then for the rest of the world'. Another way to put this is 'Write first with the door open and then with the door closed'.

For me this means that for the first draft of the story, or the book, you should allow yourself to be free creatively - to flow with the story and write the story you want to see, with the characters that you want to write about. Here you don't have to worry so much about passives, or if the descriptions are all that crash hot, as long as you are experiencing the story. This gives you a narrative drive and a kind of freshness, even if it is raw.

Then, when you open the door up, you are opening it up to critique and feedback from your critique group, editor etc. Here you start to think about what a cold reader really takes away from that prose. The descriptions need to be crafted until they are good enough to evoke that same feeling that you experienced inside the reader. The passives, which were good enough to give you the inside feel of the action, have to be replaced with more direct storytelling - this is the old Show Don't Tell chestnut.

But beyond this, when you are just sitting there alone, either working on the first draft or beavering away on the nth draft of the Great Novel, do you have a sense that you are writing for someone? Is your sweat and toil being directed at a particular reader? Or is it a pure artistic sort of fugue, where you are communicating with some abstract part of the Universe?

Many writers are very deliberate about constructing their stories. They think about the target audience, even the the main gender they want to appeal to. They might study the stats describing the book-buying public with meticulous care and try and be crafty about what they scribe. Mmmn . . . that's definitely not me. But maybe these strategic writers actually have a sort of person in mind throughout the process of their work. I'm not sure.

Who are you writing for?

Utopia-Dystopia: One man's Utopia is another's Hell

Thomas More's Utopia is arguably the first science fiction ever written, because the piece is effectively people living in a perfect world. Plato's Republic doesn't count because it's a treatise on how to create Plato's vision of a perfect world.

The fact that I find both these perfect worlds horrifying is actually not that uncommon: no matter who builds a perfect world, we imperfect humans will always go and mess it up. On top of that, my idea of perfection is not going to be someone else's - quite possibly anyone else's.

So naturally, any kind of utopia is actually going to read as a dystopia to most people.

On the flip side, dystopias have a long history in literary, sometimes as moral lessons of the 'if this continues' type, satires, and of course the mess the heroes have to try to fix.

Okay, this ramble does actually have a point. Just let me find it again. Oh. Yes. Literary utopias are usually a resounding failure because either they're assuming humans... aren't, or because they just can't work with human nature. Or - more usually - both. (Funnily enough this applies to political utopias too. Whodathunkit?)

How often have you read about the idyllic lifestyle of this or that people and thought there was no way that kind of society could work because people just aren't like that? If you're anything like me, it's more than a few - but if we sat down and compared notes, there's a good chance that you'd like some of the ones I hate, and vice versa.

So, let's take a look at what makes a Utopia/Dystopia.

Start with the theoretical one size fits all, which in practice quickly turns into one size doesn't fit anyone very well and doesn't fit some people at all. If you're one of the ones that it more or less fits all right, you can probably live with the place, but if it fits too badly or doesn't fit at all the place quickly becomes sheer hell (this, incidentally, is one of the reasons I loathe pantyhose. I'm in the 'sheer hell' group). Not even clones will flourish in a monoculture - there will be enough experiential difference to ensure that some are misfits.

Now add human nature, which isn't changing any time soon. We're social critters, with all that implies: namely hierarchical and with deeply ingrained enforcement behaviors. Whether they're instinctive or not isn't relevant, because they're so strongly wired that they might as well be instinctive. No matter how you raise your kids, how carefully you keep them from the whole notion of competition and leaders and such, within seconds of meeting a new person they're sizing that person up and figuring out where they 'fit'.

When you watch someone - anyone - meeting a new person, a lot of what goes on in the first few seconds is working out whether that person is above, equal, or below in the social hierarchy. If the two have different ideas of who belongs where, there'll be quite a bit of work on the part of whoever thinks they should be superior (i.e. both of them) to establish superiority in a way the other recognizes. The winner will stand a little taller, the loser slump a bit - and as often as not neither one is consciously aware of what just happened.

That covers the leaders and followers (shepherds and sheep). There's two other very general 'types' you'll find in any large enough group. They're rarer than shepherds and sheep (this is why you need a larger group), and both of them will get attacked by shepherds and sheep if they reveal themselves. Predators (wolves) are kind of obvious. They pretend to be sheep so they can profit from other people. And no, this does not mean profit per se is evil. Using other people is - if you get all the benefit and don't pay any of the costs, you're a predator. If it's a crime with a victim (and yes, this includes running a company into the ground to get everything you can from it then walking away and leaving a bankrupt company and thousands of ruined lives), it's a predator thing. So is mooching off someone all your life - although that could be argued as a more parasitic behavior.

Then there are the goats - the independent-minded explorers and questioners who won't go with the herd unless they've decided independently the herd is the right place for them. No-one likes them: they often identify predators first, they make the sheep uncomfortable, and they question the shepherds. This is why you get a lot of misfits in certain areas - they identify each other and band together for their own protection. (As a side note: the USA is a nation settled and founded by goats. Over 200 years after the war of independence, that still shows - and is why the other 'colony' nations have the most in common with the USA. It's also why a heck of a lot of the inventions that materially changed people's lives originate in the former colonies. Penicillin: USA and Australia, cars: USA, planes: USA, drought-resistant damn near anything, Australia (Yes, I've left a lot off. It's not meant to be exhaustive)).

There is no such thing as a society where even all the sheep are happy. The best thing you as an author can do is build something that mostly takes into account human nature and has a whole bunch of incentives that tend to guide human nature towards improving things for their fellow-humans rather than destruction or power games (trying this in real life tends to end badly. We're perverse critters).

Some of the best fictional societies are - of course - Pratchett's, which take all of the variety and perversity of human nature into account. Sarah covers some interesting ground with Eden and Earth in DarkShip Thieves, and what Dave does to all the cultural myths about who is superior, the noble/innocent savage, the simple religious folk, the - oh, the heck with it, what Dave does to practically every cultural myth ever in Slow Train to Arcturus has to be read to be believed (if you haven't already read it, go and buy it. It's worth it.)

Who else has good fictional societies? Conversely, whose alleged utopias horrify you?

Looking For The Six Fingered Man

So, what if your character is really insane? In my last post I tackled the fact that “then the character went mad.” This “clever plot twist” annoys me so much that it’s garanteed to send the book against the wall.

So, what if your character is insane? Can’t a character be insane? Is there some rule against insanity in characters?

No, my darlings, no. I am not going to exclude people like writers from being characters in books. Oh, don’t quirk eyebrow at me. We are, most of us, certifiable. We spend countless hours playing games in our minds, for a nominal payment that – for 99.9% of us is well below minimum wage. We fret and fume to make things better, even though we know most of our sales are dependent on things we don’t control: cover, shelf placement, printing.

Face it, we completely understand insane, and we completely understand obsession. Or at least, we’d better, or we have no business working in this field.

So, that’s a form of mental illness. The obsessed character. The obsessed character, to the point that his goal obscures all his thoughts, distorts his life, turns everything inside out can not only be eminently writeable but an interesting character. Most of the time, if you’re playing it for laughs, your obsessive will be the hero. Or you can not play it for laughs and make him a truly tragic hero. Or a villain. Or you can give your hero and/or your villain a minor obsession, which is either played for laughs or straight up.

But, you say, isn’t that “And then he went insane?” No. Of course not. PROVIDED you give the character a motive and one we can understand/empathize with. Take Inigo Montoya (please. He’s looking for the six fingered man in my head.) He wants to avenge his father’s death. His father was killed in front of him when he was quite young. Is he insane? Oh yes. Certifiable. But we UNDERSTAND him. Hamlet’s motive is not so much different. After all, he could have lived with the fact his father was probably killed, bided his time and taken over from his uncle. But his father’s death and his mother’s re-marriage obsessed him to the point of mental illness.

What other types of mental illness can you have and still make sense? ANY of them. Provided we still understand the character’s motives, even in the depth of his insanity. Provided it still feels “logical” to us. Provided we can empathize. Obsession is probably the most common and easiest form of insanity to write. But paranoia can work just as well. It could be argued Vimes in Pratchett’s novels is paranoid and a lot of Heinlein characters suffer from a mild form of it.

I’m not sure I could write a schizophrenic, but I’m sure someone else could and do it brilliantly. Who is your favorite insane character? What kind of insane character would you like to write/read?

Renew your Creativity

East Coast of Tasmania (Available from Desktop Pictures).

Jeff Vandermeer has done a post on Revitalising your Creativity in your Private Booklife. This is particularly applicable for me right now. I’ve been working all day marking assignments, then I’ve come home and worked late into the night on the edits of my KRK books. Over the weekend I had a 2am session and a 1am session to get the work done.

This is not good for me as a writer or as a mother/wife/person. If I were my own mother, I would say, It is time to take a step back, Rowena, and reassess your commitments.

Thank goodness, I’m headed off on a holiday for 8 days. My (long suffering) husband and I are going on a driving tour of Tasmania. That’s the little island at the bottom of Australia. It has a population of around 500,000 and almost a million people visit it every year. So that means if you meet 3 people, 2 of them are tourists. I can’t imagine how this works.

I’m hoping that the time in Tassie will allow me to finish the book I’ve been trying to write since January. I’ve only got another 140 pages to go. LOL. I’m also hoping it will give me a chance to think clearly about my work load, commitments and what I really want out of life.

I love writing, I enjoy editing, I can do promotion. Since my publisher thrust me in front of a microphone 10 years ago, I’ve learnt how to speak off the top of my head while on a panel and I can run a fun, informative workshop on writing.

Jeff Vandermeer’s done a post on the value of acknowledging constraints when it comes to Book Promotion. He makes some valid points. One of my good writing friends, Richard Harland is about to set off on a tour of the US and the UK to promote his steampunk book, Worldshaker.

He’s a real performer and loves to do readings. I shudder at the thought of readings. For me, books are meant to be read in the privacy of our heads. If they were meant to be read aloud, they’d be performance poetry or a play. I have to admire anyone who can make them entertaining, like Richard.

Amanda has very kindly agreed to put up my Tuesday post next week. I’ll be back on the Thursday, hopefully refreshed and renewed, ready to be creative!

Meanwhile, what do you do, when you need a break from life?

tears

"Don't cry for me,
onion-cleaner..."

Yes... tears on my keyboard (rather than my pillow). "It's not a good movie unless you have a good cry." (but same person will be bitter if there is not a kissy happily-ever-after ending.) Here is my basic contention - truly great books need to upset you emotionally, or at least stir you emotionally. And sometimes as an author I feel like one of those people who pull heartstrings to make the character - and reader puppets dance. The fault with this metaphor is that I dance with them, only moreso. Yes. I have ended up crying on my keyboard. Signy killing her dog in A MANKIND WITCH, (which I found almost impossible to edit, because I couldn't see the screen), the despair and courage of Vlad's sister down in the dungeons beneath Elizabeth Bartoldy's castle... somewhere in most of the books I have written (OK not Karres so much). I find I am so involved with my characters it hard to be dispassionate (which is possibly why I rationalise that it would be a bad thing.) I rage against the wrongness of it, I am torn by the pain. It is very, very hard when you are being god-in-author form not just to leave out/edit away these tragedies (as you can only do in books) because you'd haave to be... odd not to want to fix them. But I think that... would be a mistake. Because without the tragedy that resolution (which is very different from 'it didn't happen') cannot happen. Mind you, I think there is sometimes a desire in readers (and maybe editors?) to be entertained without that. Sort like a book being a hooker that gives pleasure without any of the other strings. I dunno. I can't write that.

So: if we need to do it... leaves us with how does the writer achieve that heart-string dance? I am really not sure how to do this for other people (I am not even sure if I do, or if I am right that it is a good thing. Angst is plainly considered good, but sentiment? Out of fashion, methinks.)
There are obviously evocative words. Powerful themes, love, loyalty, pain... And then there is taking your reader with you into those...
I've always found this is the antithesis of transitions. You MUST show.
But what works for you? Do you want to be emotionally involved? Do you fall for the hero/heroine? Do you want the disaster/misery/ heart-tear fixed?
How do you make yourself (or your reader) care that much?

Family Secrets

First of all, a big thanks to Pam Uphoff for being our guest blogger yesterday. Great post, Pam, and it started me thinking. One of my "escapes" when I can't focus on the writing or -- groan -- when I have hit that point in editing when I know if I have to read one more word of this book I wrote months ago, I'm going to go screaming into the night, is to do a quick on-line genealogy hunt for my ancestors. Sounds simple, right? After all, in this day and age of computers and the internet, you can find just about anything.

Well, the problem is, as I search, I discover I come from a family of liars. Or at least the champions of stretching the truth. Growing up, I was told my great-grandfather left Pennsylvania for Colorado because he was Amish and had a great singing voice and he had to get away so he could sing. Well, no. That wasn't it at all. My great-grandfather was a newspaper man. He went to Colorado and opened his own paper and ran it for years before moving to Kansas and doing the same there. My great uncle, his eldest son, was the youngest linotype operator in the country at the time -- not the dashing World War I spy we'd always been told. But his brother, the "responsible" member of the family, was a businessman, head of the chamber of commerce, etc. What wasn't talked about was his secret. It's a very deep and dark secret and one I may be tossed out of the family for revealing.

I don't know if I dare say it -- My Uncle Herb was -- horror of horrors -- a writer.

Which brings me back to this past weekend. Uncle Herb's daughter and granddaughter were here visiting from Kansas. Clarice, Herb's daughter, is the family genealogist. We were talking and I got curious and did a quick search on the internet and discovered that the family secret is no longer, well, secret. It's there for the world to see if it looks. Listed in the Catalog of Copyright Entries by the Library of Congress are two entries for plays written by "Port Weatherly" and the revelation that Port is -- gasp -- Uncle Herb. It says so right there.

Oh the shame, the horror...the family secret is out. It was bad enough we had journalists in the family. But at least they ran the paper and edited the content. They didn't actually WRITE it. Well, they did, but it was so long ago we can forget it. Besides, those papers aren't really online so people can find them. But this is listed in OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS. What to do, what to do?

I wish I could say I was being completely facetious about this, but I'm not. Like many writers, many of my family simply don't understand the need we have to write. They don't understand that writing is something more than a hobby. It is a job and, for some of us, a need. If we don't write, we go a bit crazy because it is our outlet for frustration, fears, anger, etc. I'm one of the lucky ones -- sort of. My son knows about my writing and is in full support of it. My mother, on the other hand, is different. We have sort of a "don't ask, don't tell" understanding. She tries to act supportive, but the disapproval and the lack of understanding is there. So long ago we reached the unspoken agreement of just not talking about it.

What about the rest of you? Does writing seem to run in your family? Does your family support you as a writer or not? Do you talk to your family about writing? Curious minds want to know.

Quilts

*Ladies and gentlemen, aliens and dragons, please extend a warm Mad Genius Club welcome to the were-slushreader, Pam Uphoff.*

Quilts

We hit the Houston International Quilt Festival a few months ago. It was, as always, terrific.

Quilting is a pretty good metaphor for writing as well. All those little scraps in coordinating _and_ contrasting colors, carefully pieced together to show the larger picture, then padded and stitched over for depth and continuity. Not to mention keeping all that padding in place.

http://www.quilts.com/fqf09/enVivo/

Check out the winner's page. The pictures don't do them justice.

Of course modern quilters go out and buy shiny, brand new cloth and cut it up, just like most of what I write is made up on the spot, at need.

But some of it's been kicking around for years.

Have you ever looked over all those little scraps in your head? You know what I mean. The idea that won't leave you alone until you jotted it down, and then you can get back to what you were supposed to be writing. I've brought together some amazing contrasts, but once you've pieced them together in a pattern, it works.

Especially in a "What's the worst thing I can do to this character" way.

What odd scraps do you have laying around? Can you sew them together and come up with a story?