Beyond the End (The Other Side)

What lies on the Other Side?

Does this question conjure up creepy images of the afterlife? The shadowy realms that border graveyards? OK, ignore me, its my horror frame of mind at the moment as I contemplate a Brisbane ghost story.

What I really had in mind was probably something equally horrific - well at least for me. And that is what lies on the Other Side of my last work in progress.

I usually conceive the story before I start. I might fill in gaps as I go, and everything certainly comes alive, but by the time I am steaming toward the end I am picking up some appreciable pace. By the time I write to the end (I'm talking first draft here, not all the other thousand times I rewrite it) I am sometimes so pumped that I can hardly sit in the chair. I guess I'm a finisher - which probably explains the trouble I have with beginnings. Or starting something.

Once I've finished a project, I have a pretty massive creative crash. Going from that level of immersion into a new project is tough for me. I know this is the absolute opposite of many others, but facing the first, blank page of a new world is like sitting on the floor after harakiri contemplating my entrails in a state of mortal agony. OK. Might be getting a little dramatic. I guess you probably realise I am there right now. Related to this is my problem of holding onto things way longer than I really should.

Don't get me wrong, starts are exciting as well. Its fun being able to leap conceptually in any number of directions and give birth to something completely new.

So how do you face The Other Side? The period of completion after your creative project? Do you jump for joy, light up a cigarette and crack a bottle of champagne? Do you crash mentally and emotionally? Do you breath a sigh of relief and reach excitedly for the parchment?

What is the Other Side like for you?

Anti-Social-Networking

Or: why I quit facebook and don't tweet.

A couple of weeks back I deleted my facebook account. I don't miss it. I hardly ever used it, and each new "update" just made the web page more painful. Besides, I really don't like the "all your data are belong to us" attitude betrayed by the steadily less private privacy controls.

Which brings up a question: we writing types tend not to be social butterflies. We're not going to write a novel in tweets or facebook updates. Heck, most of us won't write one in blog posts (and we won't mention my collection of dust-gathering blogs...). Where that gets fun is the ever-increasing requirement of publishers that their authors do their own publicity.

That's not the question. The question is this: in a massively networked future society, what happens to the introverts who don't want to be networked every which way? While there's always been an element of "who you know" to success, it's been possible to slip past that gateway and do well anyway, whether by luck, competence, or some other factor. When it's all networked together and your network is what determines if you can be trusted with anything from a McJob (if they still exist) up, what happens to the person who doesn't have and doesn't want a network?

It's an interesting thought, isn't it? For me it comes down to the question of whether the future that seems to be approaching at speed is one where I have a place. And that's before you consider the question of control - which is a minefield all by itself.

I like instant messaging because I can control who I see and who sees me. I'm not splatting something to the entire world. If I make a blog post, I know beforehand it's going out to the whole wide world (or the portion of it that's interested in what I write, which is a rather smaller group). I like knowing which is what, and having control over how much of it random strangers can reach. Or maybe that's just illusory - but the issue of virii and hacking is a different one again.

Is this a writer thing, or is it a geek thing? (Geeks will often choose to have more control even if it means more complexity, where the general population tends to go for simplicity at the expense of control). Or is it an introvert versus extrovert - or, just possibly, a Kate-weird thing?

What do you think? What do you want out of the facebooks and the twitters and whatever replaces them?

Wrestling with an angel

No, I’m not trying out titles for the latest WWF-romance (Shut up you, if Amish-romances are all the rage, you can too have WWF romances as a sub-genre) and I’m only referring to Jacob’s fight with an angel in an allegorical sort of way.

What I’m talking about here is trying to “close” a novel. Oh, I know Dave and I have both talked about the point when everything magically comes together and you just coast to the end. You hit this point where you’re in a special frame of mind and a particular “state of grace” and you just seem to coast through the hard stuff. I’ve heard of painters and musicians describing this state, too. It’s like your subconscious has been doing all the hard work, and suddenly it all meets and is perfect.

Only sometimes it doesn’t happen that way. Sometimes – and this is usually when the novel, for whatever reason is important to you, or significant in some way – you struggle right up to the end. And I end up locked with it, in single combat, feeling like either I finish it or it will finish me.

And when this happens – Gentleman Takes A Chance; Heart and Soul; Darkship Thieves – I am always terrified I’m doing something mortally wrong. So, in addition to the novel itself, I’m wrestling with my fears and my lack of understanding of my own writing.

I am starting to believe that this effect, which seems to grow strong with each of my last five novels is the result of my refusal to compromise.

You know what I mean. To bring the novel to the paper, you compromise a little. You give here, you pull there and you say “Yes, yes, a scene with a cast of thousands and a hundred elephants would be nice, but damned if I know how to write it, so I’ll do the guy and his friend and they just TALK about the elephants and the crowds.” I’ve done this for years. Only suddenly, it’s not enough. I want the noise and surge of the crowds – metaphorically speaking – the heat of the day, the smell of unwashed bodies, the plop of the elephants’... Well, you get what I mean.

So – what should I do? Is it worth wrestling with the angel, even if you know in the end a part of you is going to be lost to this book, a part of you injured or captive in the text? Or should I let it go and learn the art of the possible? Do you ever finish books and feel like it flinched off what should be a “drag me kicking and screaming” ending? Or do you feel that the ends should just tie lose ends and sort of let you down easy?

The question, my friends, is do you want the end to come at the climax, like a clap of thunder and a clash of cymbals? Or leisurely and quietly like an apres-l’amour cigarette? Are there endings you prefer for a certain type of book? Why?

Let me know what you think. I’ll be right here, wrestling with an angel.

The Core of Characterisation -- by Rowena Cory Daniells

(Rowena is away from her computer, but she left this for us. Enjoy!)
It always comes back to characterisation, for me. Whether it is a movie or a book, I have to care about the people, otherwise why would I keep reading/watching? If a book is really memorable, I find myself thinking about the characters for days afterwards.

I’ve always loved the artwork of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and when the British TV series came out, I looked forward to watching it with some reservations. I loved it.







It wasn’t historically accurate, but this didn’t worry me because I think it distilled the passion and the excitement of being involved in an art movement. Having lived as a starving artist in Melbourne, I can relate to this.

Instead of staid, stiff Victorians, the brotherhood came alive as young men, their lives full of passion, rivalry and self doubt. Characterisation again!

The web contains lots of useful tips on writing craft, here’s an article on characterisation that covers the nuts and bolts. Top 10 Questions for Creating Believable Characters, by Ginny Wiehardt.

Richard Harland has written 145 pages on the craft of writing with a whole section on characterisation.

And here, from the Writing Room, there’s an article on How to Write Great Characters.

What made the TV series about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood come to life for me was their character flaws. They were whole people. They made mistakes, they embarrassed themselves, they cared passionately, they failed to see through things and they tried to repair mistakes – they were human.

Whenever I run a workshop on characterisation I cover all the usual things. Then I ask the attendees to come up with two words to describe their character. The words have to be conflicting. So we end up with a Cynical-Romantic, or a Faithless-Priest. Once you distill your character into two conflicting words, you have the core of their inner conflict.

And just to show how important characterisation is:








Have you seen any movies or read any books recently, where the characters lived on for you afterwards?

There's a whole world in my reader's mind

Reading is a form of enchantment.

Perfectly simple really. It is a kind of magic transmuting by means of little black glyphs a bland piece of paper into an entire world, a place so full and rich and with such images in it, that they are REAL (at least while the spell holds).

And yet... we writers are fairly inept magicians. Our attempts at turning people into newts almost inevitably end up with them getting better (even those who were rather newt-like to start with, tend to return to this state.) While this has undoubtably saved a large number of politicians, bank managers and people who were unfortunate enough sign rejection letters from a life of swimming around in small muddy brooks avoiding herons, it does bring one back to the question of just how reading enchantment is done.

And the answer is not so much by what is written by the author as by what is already in the head of the reader. The writer does not so much put the wonderful world there as to allow the reader's imagination and background to paint a picture so rich and detailed it would take a thousand volumes to describe. It can work for backgrounds, it can work actual things happening. Actually that's what put me in mind of writing this piece - I wrote a bit in my Flinders Island blog about a suicidal tree-frog ( http://flindersfreer.blogspot.com/2010/05/one-for-frog-n-toad.html )
in which I sort of hinted at the possibility of a heavy sofa being dropped on my head. I didn't actually say it was (it wasn't) but the image was conjured... by what was left _unsaid_. Matapam made a comment on what she'd imagined, and I thought that I must actually talk about this.

Tolkein was probably the grandmaster of this. Here is a piece from his "On Fairy stories" - which in its original form was a lecture Tolkein gave at St Andrews University as his Andrew Lang Lecture explaining how the reader (hearer) 'saw' that magic. "If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below' the illustrator may catch or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene, but every hearer will have his own picture, and it will be made of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word."

Look, cinematography has come a long way. There really is no need for those poorly lit scenes where you don't quite know what is happening, you just catch glimpses of it. Hell, there is more of that now than in 1950 movies. You think that's because directors are all plonkers? (well, okay... incompetant then). No. It's because they have learned to hack into what Tolkein writes about there. They've learned they can NEVER give an actual, precise image which is MORE real, MORE convincing, and nearly as 'wide' as the one you conjure in your imagination... given the cues.

And, dear writer, is the true magic-working of the writer. Not showing the pictures but shaping the reader's imagination to show the pictures. Filling in the pieces of framework, often very precisely, so that the image the reader creates in his or her imagination fits the story. Any fool can describe something precisely. And a fair number of people can come up with colorful language usage to do so... but to take the reader into that magical world, you have to frame and direct the reader's imagination to release it.

The trick is running the fine line between too much and too little. And often little cues like the choice of diction can have disproportionately large impacts.
So who does it well? And had you actually realised it was being done?

It's Your Turn

I'm a bit under the weather today, folks, so I'm going to throw open the blog. You can ask a question or post the first sentence or paragraph of a work in progress (but no more than the first paragraph, well, first two paragraphs). The floor is yours. I'll be checking back in every couple of hours to comment. Have fun and remember this piece of advice -- if you have sinus and allergy problems, Dallas is the Spring is not the place to be unless you like living on benadryl.

Edit: Here are a couple of topics I'll throw out:

• Should you be able to download the e-book of a novel for free if you've already bought the hardcover of the book? How would you prove purchase?
• What is the deciding factor for you in reading a new author?
  

Getting it Done

Laura Anne Gilman started her professional life as a book editor for a major NYC house, fitting her writing into the remaining available hours. In 2004 she switched that around, becoming a full-time writer and (in 2010) a freelance editor for Carina Press.

She wrote her first original novel, Staying Dead, when everyone said that urban fantasy was dead. She recently sold the 10th, 11th and 12th in the Cosa Nostradamus series to Luna. Contrary as always, in 2008 she wrote The Vineart War, an alternate-historical fantasy, when everyone was looking for urban fantasy, and sold it to Pocket, where it became a 2009 Nebula nominee for best novel. She thinks being contrary's a pretty good way to run a career.

Find out more at lauraannegilman.net or follow her on Twitter: @LAGilman

Getting it Done.

There’s nothing quite like reading over your WiP and realizing that the opening segment does not exactly lead off from where you left your characters heading When Last Seen in the previous book. Fortunately I was only a few degrees off, so was able to massage things into line with a minimum of cursing and self-loathing.

But I'm not here to talk about that.

I should, I suppose. I could talk about what I did and why, and explain how this is all Totally Normal, but I find myself strangely disinclined to do so. I'm worried, I think, that someone will read it and say "oh, that's not how I do it, I must be doing it wrong" [You may be thinking "oh my god she's doing it wrong, she's an idiot," but I don't worry so much about that.]

Part of this hesitation comes from discussions during the break periods of Word War, the on-line writing workspace I belong to. We have a mixed bag of folk - some multi-published, some just starting out, some in-between, and what comes up a lot is "oh, but how do YOU (a pro) do it?" and its illicit partner "oh, but it's DIFFERENT for you, you're published, I'm not." And I cringe each time a variant of those questions/responses is trotted out, because Process is internal, not external, and nobody's brain works like mine/yours/his/hers, so nobody's process should be exactly the same, either and --

and I'm going to set this apart because I think it's really important --

When a writer starts a new project, nothing that came before matters.

Pro, amateur, hobbyist or die-trying newbie, we all sit there and face the same questions: "how do I do this? How do I tell this story to the best of my abilities, and dear dog, what if nobody likes it?"

The trick isn't to be perfect. The trick is to get past not being perfect and get it done.

The only how-to advice I ever give would-be writers is the classic "AiC" -- put your Ass in the Chair and start writing.

Everything after that? You've got to discover it for yourself.

Someone who has written-to-completion before has (hopefully) learned a few coping skills, some tricks and shortcuts that get them to the desired point with less hesitation...but they picked up new doubts and confusions along the way, because it's all a learning curve, right up to when we cover the keyboard that final time. And, each and every time, we make a new (and hopefully more interesting) mistake.

Different brains, different mistakes...different solutions and different results. And that's good. That's what creates all the different writers, and all the different stories.

So if you're reading the blog or the Twitter or the essay by Famous Writer Dude and think "oh god, that's not me, I'm never going to make it" or "I never thought of that, why didn't I think of that" in a negative, despairing way -- STOP. What works for you is what works.

Or, as I have in the sidebar of my journal, where I see it every day:

You sit down. You tell a story. You do it any damn way it comes out that works consistently for you. You hope people like it. You hope people pay you for it. You do it again. And again. That's all I got. Zen and the Art of Writer Maintenance. You can cheer me on and I can cheer you on, but in the end? In the end it's down to how you get your getting done, done. So get it done.

So how do you get it done?