Judging Your Own Work

Now this is something I find almost impossible to do.

Every single time I sit down to write I make the journey from 'My God this sucks' to 'this is starting to hang together' to 'I'm liking this!' and back to 'this is total crap.' Somewhere through that process I actually get a buzz - usually when I forget to think critically at all.

I've won prizes and been shortlisted for genre awards. Other writer friends say I write well. Every now and then I will get a shock when a dedicated critiquer who does nothing but criticize me and my work introduces me as a 'fine writer.'

It seems that I have no capacity for objectivity. When I look at the work that I have done I see the prose through a microscope (showing ugliness usually) and the story from a lightyear away - focused on the shape of the whole thing and its various subplots.

Getting critique is one way to get feedback. Reviews on published work are another. I'm not sure which one is crueler, probably the reviews since they are public and liable to effect sales.

I got a mixed review on The Calvanni from one of the Asif reviewers when it came out in 2006 (the other one loved it). She went on about unnecessary complexity etc When I met her some months later at a convention she said. 'You know I really liked the book.' Well why the Hell couldn't you have said that in print!

On a day-to-day basis, how are you supposed to get any sort of handle on your work?

I guess writing is a never-ending series of judgements you make - is the sentence too long, is there enough description, should the clown really kill the president, how big are his shoes etc. Yet when the high of actually being in the flow fades, all I am left with is a sense of unease.

How do you go about judging your own work as you progress? Is it actually impossible?

Reentering the Work

Life has a way of interfering with the execution of art (I am using the word in the broad sense of all artistic activity). Blame the cut-throat nature of the artistic world, or perhaps the fact that the gap between poor artists and rich artists is much larger than for any other section of society. Either way, this nasty thing called needing to earn a living and the other mundane things like taking out the trash and cooking dinner (and driving around the kids!) take out a big slice of time.


These nasty things really put a dent in the working flow. Like most writers I find it pretty hard to tune back into the work. Ideally I would like to write for a minimum two hour block each day. That's about how long it takes me to tune into the story, the characters, chip through the usual layer of ice and start to get the words flowing again.

Life is a little like torture at the moment. I just get started, just break through into the story and I have to stop and help with the groceries, or run for the bus, feed the llamas etc. The worse thing is when you are forced away from the work for a number days.

Getting back in can be a real challenge.

My way back in is always through the story itself - in the flow of the plot - and through the characters. If the break has really been a long one, I might have to first review the plot and do some thinking about the characters then start re-drafting from a few chapters back, or even from the beginning to get back into the feel of the piece and understand at a gut level where I had been coming from.

How do you navigate your way back into your story when life gets in the way? Or can you pick up the threads easily?

Impale them All

(God knows his own)

While it's a reasonable bet that Vlad Dracula never actually used that particular phrase, it's a pretty good description of what could be called "pointer" fantasy violence. It's the rather more pointed version of the kick the puppy moment which less skilled writers use to show that the villain must be bad, because see? He kicked that poor, helpless puppy.

And yes, Vlad did impale a lot of people, and more than a few of them were alive when the stake treatment started. He also added a fair few refinements to the basic stake up the khyber routine to make his... ahem... point. (To be fair, it's more than feasible the added extras like rounding the end off and a heavy coating of grease were things he learned in the Ottoman Empire - they were rather enthusiastic proponents of impalement as a way of dealing with problems, themselves.) He also lined the roads with stakes as a way of informing people that they'd better behave themselves - something that seems to have been quite effective.

The thing is, it doesn't matter how much violence there actually is in a book, if it's not properly directed. If you're lopping off heads left, right and center, when you need to raise the stakes (so to speak), you don't actually have many places to go. Gushing arteries and painting the town in someone's blood tend to have that effect.

When I was writing Impaler, I aimed to keep all the on-screen violence (and most of the off-screen, for that matter) tightly focused. If it didn't matter, it didn't rate a mention. I don't think there's a single random act of violence, although there are a number of impalements (kind of hard to avoid them in a book about Vlad), several battles, and assorted instances of torture, bad temper, and - again, somewhat inevitable - impaling and generally despoiling enemy corpses (Yes, the equally inevitable graveyard humor surfaces. It wouldn't be true to the time or the people if it didn't).

How did I keep it from overloading the book and dripping off the pages, you ask (well, actually, no you don't, and yes, I know you're trying to sneak out the back door. Go on then, I'm not stopping you)? I used several techniques - none of them as blatant as the kick the puppy or pet the kitten cues that make me want to smack the author. Hard.

First there was context. You know, Vlad gets pissed, and he directs his - quite filthy - temper at an appropriate target. Appropriate in this case meaning someone he'd have had executed with just cause sooner or later, because even though in that place and time it was normal to beat several kinds of hell out of the servants when you had a hissy-fit, today's readers wouldn't accept it. Or he's got a recalcitrant spy to deal with (trust me, you don't want to know what's going through my mind when I'm writing torture scenes. Let's just say the writer-voodoo is strong in those times. Curiously enough, the target of that particular bit of writer-voodoo is no longer a co-worker). Or it's the middle of a battle and he's fighting as much to stop the other guys killing him as he is for any other reason.

Then there's one of my favorite tools, balancing and offsetting something that would normally be utterly horrific by describing it in a way that's got more dry humor than anything else. If you've ever sat with nurses or cops talking shop, you know the tone. I've naturally got a sarcastic streak wider than I am (which takes quite a bit of effort, what with the beached whale look), so this is a very easy technique for me to use - so easy I need to be careful not to overdo it. In Impaler, that wasn't helped by Vlad's voice being even more strongly sardonic than I am.

Yeah. I finally met someone who could out-snark me, and he's one of my characters. Only a writer.

Anyway, that kind of technique, along with focusing on a specific goal or impact, shifting up Vlad's perspective so he's not always in the middle of the violence (even though he'd much rather be in the thick of it than waiting to find out whether he won or not), and shifting to the next goal instead of the loving writer-closeup of the horror all served to keep the impact of the violence at the level I need it to be - which allowed me to ratchet up the tension a good ways for the climactic sequence.

You'll have to read the book to find out what I did - but I'm pleased with the end result. It still drags me in and doesn't let go until the final sentence. And if I can do that to myself, I have a slight hope of being able to do it to other people.

The Practicing Writer

You all know the old gag - a doctor (or dentist, or some similar profession) is asked "Are you a practicing doctor?" and replies, "Of course I am! How would I get to Carnegie Hall if I wasn't?" (Yes, I am shamelessly stealing inspiration from Sarah. She's got plenty: she won't miss this little bit).

There is, as always, truth in jest. In this case, if you don't practice what you're doing, you don't get better at it. And life being the stone-hearted bitch she is, if you aren't improving, you're getting worse. Standing still ain't an option.

So, here are a few things that I've used successfully for practice purposes, in practice pieces.

• No adverbs or adjectives. For as long as you can keep it going, write something with no adjectives, no adverbs, or no adjectives or adverbs. As an exercise in focusing on strong nouns and verbs this is very effective.
• Thesauropod switching. Take a common word, then consult a thesaurus (or thesaurus.com) . Try to use every listed synonym correctly in a short piece. This exercise really drives home that synonyms aren't things you can swap out at whim.
  
• The Bathos Swamp. Take a scene that should be highly emotional - it doesn't matter what the emotion is, so long as it's intense. Write it using the blandest language you can manage without adverbial/adjectival slush. Now rewrite in the most overblown language you can think of. Try not to laugh hysterically at the result.
  
• The Plot Derailment. This one is good for when you've written yourself into a corner and you can't figure out what to do next. The main character drops dead with heart failure. What do the other characters do next? Alternatively, the villain has a change of heart, gives away all his/her possessions, and joins an ascetic religious order. Now what?
• Slashing Fun. You're bored with your work in progress - here's a bizarre cure. Take the two least likely candidates for a relationship, and write a sizzling hot slash scene with them. For bonus points, add kink (A very obscure file name and possibly a password if you share your computer with kids are a good idea here. For that matter, I don't recommend doing this on the lunch break of your paid job. Just saying.)
• Scenery Salad. Take an image, and write a description of it in the fewest possible words. The idea should be not to literally describe, but to evoke the image so that someone who saw the picture after reading what you wrote would recognize it. For bonus points, do not use any "sight" words - keep the description entirely to the other senses.

What writing exercises do you use in your practice pieces?

It's the Economy, Stupid!

No, this is not a diversion into current politics. You don't want that: I can get rather... um... feral on that topic.

It's about economy of words. Good writing is economic. Words are not wasted.They matter. Even 'the' and 'a'. This is especially true of the start of novels and the whole of shorter works, but really good writers carry the principle through an entire novel. It's hard to find waste wordage in any Pratchett novel, for instance.

So what is waste wordage, and what is economic word use? Waste wordage doesn't advance the story, illustrate the characters, or do anything much beyond padding the word count. Economic wordage serves multiple levels of function, often without being obvious about it.

Of course, it's never really that simple. Think back to Amanda's post last Sunday, and the assorted 3 paragraph (or less) offerings that were sent in. Most of them managed to perform one task: usually cuing in the protagonist's anger. A few got a couple of things going: setting and protagonist motive. I tried to multi-purpose my offering - I was aiming to establish a sense of the character's nature, their motive, setting, hook, voice, and set up questions about what was going on, all in two paragraphs. I don't think I got all of those, but I came close enough that I'm satisfied with what I did.

The way this can be done is through secondary associations with word meanings - synonyms might mean the same thing, but they can have positive or negative connotations, they can associate with imagery, they can have entire layers of subtext that a reader might not consciously notice but which set mood and expectations. Take for instance "tired" and "weary". The general meaning is the same, but "weary" feels heavier, weighed down by some immense load. "Sadness", or "sorrow" - "sorrow" is more evocative of grieving, where "sadness" is blander. One might feel sadness, but sorrow, despite meaning the same thing, evokes more regret and possibly even tears.

You can run this exercise with any set of words a half-decent thesaurus produces. Each synonym has its own feel and its own level of specific meaning. The best craft and art of the writer is to find and use the words that are most evocative of the atmosphere they wish to create.

Of course, words don't exist in vacuum (except in my house, where Bugger shreds any paper he can get at, so mangled words often find their way into the vacuum). They need sentences to give them context and aim readers where the writer wants them to look.

Okay, so I wasn't exactly accurate about the politics: if you take a look at what the media produces, you'll find a lot of persuasive writing there, masquerading as fact. The cue lies in the descriptors. Words that have negative connotations get used to describe something the writer dislikes. That's useful for us to learn, not just so we can try to tease out what's really going on from the writer's slant, but so that we can use those techniques ourselves.

We have a few other advantages, too. A little knowledge of Latin and Greek word roots helps a great deal: 'Mal' or 'Mor' are very common in the names of evil characters for good reason: even made up words derived from those word bases sound sinister. Why? 'Mal' means 'bad', and 'Mor' is the base for 'death'. Someone named 'Voldemort' probably isn't going to be nice. Name a country 'Malistar' and your readers will look for bad things to come from there without you saying anything else. Some other goodies: 'Saur' - lizard. 'Tyran' - tyrant, which in modern terms implies cruelty and a whole raft of associated horrors. 'Lachryma' - tears/grief.

Now for the examples: I'm going to offer up two sample sentences, with one made up word for a character's name and each meaning the same thing. You'll see the difference.

"Elysia stood at the balcony, her gaze intent on the battered young warriors marching through the outer bailey."

"Mordana stood at the Imperial Balcony, glaring down at the defeated soldiers straggling through the Great Courtyard."

(Yeah, okay, neither of them is much good. That's not the point).

The basic meaning of both sentences is the same - there's a woman on a castle or palace balcony watching the guys who are coming back from some war or other. By using specific titles, it's a good guess that the woman in the second sentence is royalty. Her side lost, and she's not happy about it. And her name suggests she's not a nice lady.

The first woman, you'd be surprised if she wasn't the heroine or the love interest of the hero, probably sweet and gentle, and the implication is that she's looking to see if her husband or boyfriend survived - and that she doesn't really care if they won or lost, so long as her man made it. A few more cues in there would set up a lost love and kick off a plot.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a first paragraph (not too long, either, thank you) that implies plot, setting, voice, and the nature of the POV character. Anything else you can get in there is a bonus. Oh, and you're not allowed to tell anything. Once you've posted it, everyone can say what they get out of it, then you can add in what you meant to get across.

Starting at the End (Please Explain)

Hi, everyone. I recently read a book that I would class as a sort of tongue-in-cheek Urban Fantasy. The classification on the spine was Fantasy (more to do with market positioning probably), but given the strong element of detective genre plus occult and magic ( and various levels of Hell) I'd definitely put it in the Urban Fantasy camp. The reason for the long introduction is that where the book sits in the genre spectrum might be relevant to my question.

OK. The book starts with a pivotal scene from the end of the story, which is put right up front as a sort of prologue. Now this sort of thing is not my cup of tea. It's like when I am watching a TV series or movie, I get hooked into the first scene and then the image fades out and the big capital letters come onto the bottom of the screen.

ONE WEEK EARLIER

That is the point where I generally start throwing things. I hate this sort of story structure. For me it negates the tension and narrative drive.

My question is, why do people structure stories like this? Is this an attempt to hook the reader? Is it to try and increase tension?

Even more importantly does it work for you?

I guess I am fairly plot driven. I like mystery and to watch the story unfold. I might even see the conclusion coming, but I don't KNOW that until I get there. Maybe some people get hooked by other elements and don't care that that know where things will end up.

Does this sort of early reveal work for you? What is your take on what this approach is trying to achieve?

Nobody understands my brilliance!

They're just jealous!

We've all heard it - and yes, to my shame, I've been known to say it. It's the perpetual lament of the unpublished writer. "If only those horrible [insert villains of choice] weren't blocking my master-works I would be FAMOUS!"

Okay, I admit I haven't gone that far. Not yet, anyway. When I start with the evil cackling and "if only they'd listened" then you may lock me in one of those nice rooms with the padded walls. Just leave me a computer with always-on internet and I promise I won't harm myself.

The thing is, as always, there's an element of truth in these complaints. Editors can and do block pieces for any number of reasons (most of them fairly sensible like "no, girl on guy on midget on sheep is not a large enough market segment, especially with the red leather" or "it looks like English, most of the words appear to be English, but they do not form anything resembling intelligible sentences in English") What's far more common if you're a relative or complete unknown is that you've fallen for one of the classic blunders! Never get involved in a land war in Asia!

Um. Sorry. (Inigo Montoya, I did NOT kill your father, shut up and let me write).

Inexperienced (and experienced) writers can sometimes commit horrible crimes against Story, because they don't know not to, because they're too tired to think straight and that deadline is tomorrow, but mostly because when you're caught up in that wonderful world inside your head, it's way too easy to forget that the person who has to read your stuff isn't there with you.

You know you've done that one when your first readers (you DO have first readers, right? Honest ones, who'll tell you when Baby is ugly and even on occasion the wrong species?) respond to you story with something along the lines of "huh? Where did you get from "here" to over -------> "there"?" That usually means you've left something critical out. I suffer from this, particularly when I'm tired. The more tired I get, the less supporting detail I write, leading ultimately to floating speech balloons in empty space. This is, I assure you, not a good thing.

Another common mistake is to throw in everything and the kitchen sink. AND your little dog, too!

Oh. Sorry.

This is a very common short story problem - and me being the overachiever I am, I have a novel on the shelf (okay, actually on my hard drive) that suffers from this. There's probably six or seven novel plots crammed into the 160k words of uber-stripped-down prose, all of them tangled together in a mess of subplots that will bite if you look at them wrong. Yes, my short stories have a tendency to do this too. Just because it's a neat idea or he/she is a fun character doesn't mean they have to be in THIS story. As a general rule, the more you've got in there, the more confusing it gets for the poor reader. For a short story, one or maybe two points of view, one decision point (i.e. decision that changes the direction of the POV character's life in some way), and no subplots is about right. For a novel, one major plot, one secondary plot, and a few supporting sub-plots. The key here is supporting - they have to actually work with the major plot or they distract from it. If you've got the proverbial cast of thousands, you've got fewer words per book to devote to your majors, and you end up with thousand-page atrocities that move your story forward ten miles and maybe a week. Most editors will treat these as if they have some horribly contagious disease - UNLESS (and this is very important to remember) you are already a proven good seller.

Then we have the terrible demon of PC. Yes, political correctness. No, I'm not going to rant about anyone's politics. I'm just going to point out that there are certain things you can't do in stories now or they won't be published. Period. No ifs, buts or maybes.

You can't have one character who is obviously Asian/Black/Insert ethnicity of choice in a story and have that character be the villain. If there are two of that ethnicity, one of them can be evil so long as one is good, but you can't do something like a heroic Sherlock Holmes fighting the dastardly Fu Manchu. Unless of course, you're already a bestseller, in which case none of the rules apply. It's not fair: neither is life.

You can't have every character of Insert ethnicity of choice be bad. You might get away with all of them being good, if you choose the correct ethnicity, but bear in mind that slush readers may not share your ideas of a) what constitutes 'good', and b) which ethnic groups should be favored or not favored.

You can't write an evil matriarchy, and you'll have a hell of a time getting a good patriarchy through, unless of course your name is something like Stephen King or Terry Pratchett or... But you get the point.

It's not that the mysterious all-powerful "they" hate your stuff. "They" are human too. They have hot buttons and prejudices, and like any other human, they're more comfortable with things that are familiar to them (which is why Stephen King could probably sell his grocery list for a small fortune and it would be a bestseller - although I really do not want to know why he has items like 'stakes' and 'holy water' on it (yes, I am joking)) and that more or less fit into the way they believe the world works. Whether you agree with them or not doesn't matter: if you don't want to end up boring everyone you meet with how horrible "they" are and if they'd only look at your books with an open mind they'd know how great you are, you need to know what will get your book an express trip to the recycling bin.

Any other examples of common things that will get a story bounced? I admit freely that I've made every one of the mistakes listed above, and seen them all in other writers work, but you don't have to use your examples.

Setting the Scene (Get me in the mood baby, ooh yeah!)

Sarah's offered quite a lot about remembering that there's someone on the other end of the book, and way to keep that person reading. I'm going to look at one specific part of that: the scene-setting and cuing in it offers.

How many times have you read something where the author switched track on you, and the book turned into something you weren't expecting when you started it? And how often has it irritated rather than delighted you? Yeah. I thought so. See, we're so attuned to what a story should be, we can pick up - subconsciously at least - what a story is about from very little.

Take for instance the opening to Pratchett's The Color of Magic - In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly. That one sentence is enough to cue readers in to several things: we're not in Kansas anymore, and it's not going to be reality as normal. Oh, and it's almost for sure fantasy. Comic fantasy.

It might not register at the conscious level, but we're primed for laughter.

Of course, this is Pratchett, and even Pratchett of nearly thirty years ago stands head, shoulders and quite a bit more over every other author alive today (although in my not at all humble opinion both Dave and Sarah are climbing that particular mountain at speed).

So how do we lesser lights set the scene? There's a few things to consider.

First up, and possibly most important, each genre and subgenre has its own distinctive 'feel' and tropes. Standard practice in a cozy is utterly verboten in splatterpunk horror, and so forth. The mood we set has much the same effect as a movie soundtrack - more or less invisible (or it should be) but puts the reader's emotions where we want them. Yes, it's manipulative. We're playing with people's minds because they want us to. If they don't like us hitting their emotional buttons, they don't have to buy our books. Next question? Good.

Okay. I got bitten by this not long ago, in a crit group looking at the opening of my current work in progress. The piece is typically Kate-weird, meaning it doesn't quite fit into any nice, neat slots. It's more or less space opera, but it's also got elements of erotica, in that quite a bit of the plot is carried by and depends on sex. Specifically, somewhat kinky sexual practices that aren't so much as hinted at in the start of the book. The advice I got, not suprisingly, was that I need to have the sex up front so that it's not picked up by someone who reads the opening and thinks it's okay for young teens. Or, for that matter, so editor X doesn't start reading thinking "light-hearted space opera, a bit of a romp", get to the sex, and have his, her, or its brain explode.

Attractive as the notion of making peoples' heads explode might be, it's really not a good idea to do that to people you want to give you money, so... I need to put sex up front, preferably in a way that foreshadows the kind of sex that happens later on (especially since said sex is emphatically not garden variety vanilla). What I start with now says "lightweight space opera, with humor".

As to how you do it, it's all in the power of words. English has a phenomenal number of synonyms, most of them with very different emotional/atmospheric connotations. Let's take, for the sake of example, sex. We all know what's involved. Call it making love, and it becomes a much more intimate act. Or take desire, longing, yen, urge, obsession, need - they all mean more or less the same thing, but the flavor varies. A lounge, a sofa, a Chesterfield... Curtains, drapes. And I haven't even gotten out of the common words.

For science fiction, probably the most common trick is faux tech-ese and using technical terms instead of the normal "earthbound" words. Epic fantasy and sword and sorcery often go the other way, using archaic forms of common words - sparingly. Urban fantasy generally maintains a conversational, smartass tone and uses a lot of not-quite-slang, enough to make it sound cool (or whatever the designated word for that is these days) without being so cutting edge it dates the book between the time it's written and the time it's published (For an example that dates a book, read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then tell me you don't see late 70s written all over it). Horror of course pulls all the stops out: cognitive dissonance, bleak or grim descriptors, and every possible trick in the writer's vocabulary to make the whole thing bode. An excellent guide to the process is Stephen King's Danse Macabre, containing the famous quote about terror, horror, and gross-out. A good thumbnail distinction here is that terror is being in an iffy situation and realizing your buddy is missing. Horror is finding your buddy in a closet - and he's not alive. Gross-out is when the alien or monster comes out of his chest, usually featuring loving description of the effects. The word 'glistening' gets used a lot, even when there shouldn't be enough light for anything to glisten. As a general rule, if you're wanting to scare your readers, aim for terror. Drop to horror only if you can't manage terror. And gross-out is the last resort. (Yes, Stephen King said approximately that, and yes, he will go for the gross-out if he can't make terror or horror happen).

Let's have a few samples of story openings that do a good job of setting the scene. Short or long, yours or someone else's (if it's someone else's, please acknowledge the author). No more than a couple of lines - most of the good ones don't need more than that.

Here's one or two of mine, just to kick things off:

There are times when being a Quality Assurance Mage sucks. The silvery gray spell-ball on my desk told me today was one of them. Fantasy, rather whimsical, may or may not be urban. From my short story A Spell of Quality in Misspelled. This sale was an invitation, so I didn't need to have the higher standards that anything going through regular slush has to have.

The great looms stood silent, strands of Scylla-silk glimmering in semi-darkness above the completed weaves. Air heavy with the acrid tension of electrical discharge sparked and crackled with each of my cautious steps. Science fiction, fairly dark. The use of words like "heavy" and "silent" suggests that this isn't going to be a particularly fluffy piece (accurately, as it happens). This is the opening of my short story Choice of the Oracles in Fate Fantastic - another sale by invitation.

Another convention, another con hotel. After a while, they blur together into an indistinguishable mass of faux-elegance and bizarrely costumed fans. This is the opening of ConVent a novel which - alas - remains homeless. The setting is pretty obvious, and the tone suggests urban fantasy. Anyone who's ever seen photos of a busy science fiction convention can see the scene. So, for that matter can a heck of a lot of people who haven't been to one - because I've played on the stereotypes of science fiction fans with this opening.

What are some of your examples?

The Reading List

This riffs a little on Rowena's post yesterday. Like most writers, I'm a scribbler completely surrounded by books.

My family has so many books -- on bookshelves, on tables, on counters, on top of the microwaves, on piles on dressers, and recently on stacks on the floor -- that if a concussion bomb exploded in the neighborhood, we'd not only be unimpressed -- we'd never notice.

The shock would be absorbed by all those piles of books, and we'd be left untouched -- and probably reading.

My Mother in Law, before I had kids, told me once this happened my reading would stop. I will agree I became more discriminating (if nothing else, because it's near impossible concentrating on a so-so book while toddler shoe is kicking against ankle.) OTOH the reading continued. It's an addiction, you see? I read while walking. I read while cooking. I read while cleaning (cleaners on books, may all divinities of the printed word forgive me!) I read while ironing (yes, this is incredibly entertaining.)

If I could find a way to read while writing and while sleeping, my life would be complete. I hear in heaven you get an extra pair of eyes so you can read while doing everything else. Okay, I made that up. But it's my heaven, so keep your nose out of it.

This post will concentrate mostly on one sort of books -- books on writing. Opinions on these varies. Most writers buy every one on the market, even when they don't read them. It's like they expect, by osmosis, for the magical qualities of the books to rubb off on them. Hasn't happened yet. (Sigh.) Other writers are terribly afraid it will destroy that mystical/magical quality called style or voice. Or whatever the heck it is they're calling it these days.

First let me dispose of the latter. My husband and older son and I all read the same how-to books. Mostly because I drop books on their desks and glare at them till they read them. Yeah, I know. Horrible, horrible woman. Anyway, if you read any book which has all of us (Strip Mauled by Esther Friesner, say) you'll see we're all completely different. Heck, I couldn't do their styles if I tried.

Refusing to read How-to books to preserve your style is roughly the equivalent of refusing to read even one cake recipe so as not to spoil the natural taste of your cooking. Once you figure out the rules (Oh! Cakes take eggs! [or as my older son said, after the first time he tried to make a cake, and we weren't home: No one told me you had to break the egg and put only the inside in!] or Oh, proportion of sugar and flour is this!) then you can improvise, add chocolate chips, figs or syrup of ipecac. But you have to know the basics FIRST. And better men and women than you -- or I -- have distilled those into writing precepts so you don't need to go out with your little pan and find gold in the mud. Use the dang books. Would you program without ever having learned how to? Yeah, writing is art but it is craft too. Learn the craft first.

Of course the market is flooded with how-to write books. And possibly how to write how to write books. And most of them are -- like most of everything -- worthless.

Now, your experiences will vary. Mine have. All I can do is tell you the books that have helped me. They've helped my husband and my son as well. Doesn't mean they'll help you, but they might be worth a try.

Basic Writing:

Dwight Swain. Start with Techniques of the Selling Writer. If your characters are shaky, read his book on characters, too. If you can afford recordings of his lectures, buy them. Just do it. If you're not published, do it. Yes, you'll probably know most of what he has to say, but do it, anyway. What you don't know might well be what gets you over the final hump into publication.

To improve your chances of surviving the slush pile, try The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman.

Not only do readers only read five pages of most books, you'll be lucky of they read that far. And by this I don't mean ONLY the readers of slush -- if such still exist -- at publishers' or agents' offices. I mean the reader, in the bookstore or at Amazon, or reading your free chapter on line, or the sample at their kindle, will probably only read the first five pages before he makes a decision. If you've lost him by the end of the first page, you lost the sale.

For revising and fixing, try Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne and King (they improved my STYLE more than anyone else.)

Now for me, with my busy lifestyle (teenagers no longer kick my ankles, but they do ask questions, whine and want to have Meaningful Conversations at the worst possible times) the main determinant of whether I stay with a book is how immediate the fiction is. You want my attention, be louder than the screeching teen problem. Grab me. Pull me into your world. Make sure I can see, smell and taste. Do that and I'll read to the end. At least if anything happens. :) If all your character does is sit there covering her ears against teen rage, then thank you. I already have that at home.

For this issue I have two -- one strange -- suggestions.

The first I read recently. It's called Immediate Fiction. I read half of it. Why half you ask? Well, he was making lots of sense until he kick dropped me by stopping and sneering that if you write genre fiction of course you don't need any of this, since that's just schlock. If you have a stronger stomach than I, though, you might find it useful.

The second one -- because it has EXAMPLES -- I'm not recommending to anyone who is going to run screaming into the night and I'm DEFINITELY not recommending if you're a minor. I found it useful however. ALL of its specific information is outdated, but on the sheer level of teaching you how to write so the reader feels the story through the senses, this is the best. (As for why I read it -- broke. New baby. No insurance. Still couldn't write it. Not a prude. Sex is just not a spectator sport for me.) How to write Erotica, by Valerie Kelly. (And you probably can skim the examples!)

Now, if you're writing genre, you should read hat genre, you know that. But what you read might be the exceptions -- i.e. the quirky stuff -- or you might be like me and not easily glean the rules from what you read. So, if that's the case you should read SOME books that will level-set you as to what editors expect today.

For mystery, read Writing The Modern Mystery by Barbara Norville. Actually read it anyway, it helps with clues, etc for SF/F as well.

In the same vein, and to help with pacing if you have issues with that, read Writing The Thriller, by Trish MacDonald Skillman. It helped my pacing greatly.

If you write science fiction and fantasy, I'm sure this is greatly outdated, but it will keep you from calling a rabbit a schmerp -- How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. (A similar book by Damon Knight might be valuable, but it blocked me for years. You have been warned.)

And then, when your editor asks for a big book, she's not asking you for a dictionary-sized tome. To figure out what she's looking for, read Al Zuckerman's Writing A Blockbuster Novel. Read it twice. Three times. Every two months. It helps you keep in mind what the gatekeepers want.

Additional: If writing anything historical, do a search now and then for "Daily life" amid used booksellers. I MUCH prefer the Greenwood press books, but the Writers' Digest ones are also useful to tell you what the general public thinks they know about the time period. You need to either play into it or dispell it, but you need to know what it is first. Your research, needless to say, shouldn't stop there.

For mystery start with idiot's Guide to Criminal Investigation. Then read anything you can on the subject. Go to lectures. Yes, people will look at you funny if you have a folder named "Murder research" on your computer. It's survivable. Writing without having a clue what's going on isn't.

For plotting -- ah, my bette noir -- I use Story Craft software. To be honest, this is most useful for a very vague sort of preliminary outline, after which the story takes over and does whatever. However, it is useful -- TO ME -- as an armature to build upon. Take it with a grain of salt. It doesn't, for instance, have an option for multiple POVs. Also, keep in mind you're talking to someone SO plot impaired that she just recently figured out how to use plot to underline a theme. It might have happened subconsciously before, but it has just recently hit me between the eyes.

So, what books helped or hindered you? Is there a single-best-method, as far as you're concerned? Are there a lot of things I've forgotten? Perhaps a problem I didn't address? Sound off.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Print

　
This is partly publishing business and partly life, and it occurred to me that you guys might want to know what sometimes happens as a novel winds its way between writing and publication. And how it changes.

So, a little chronology and history on what happened to my novel Darkship Thieves, which comes out from Baen on Jan.5

1 - April 1996 - After one of the worst times in my attempts to break in, a time when great effort led only to a flurry of rejections, and after retreating into Austen fandom for six months, I realized I couldn’t take anymore just writing things that would never sell. So I rejoined my weekly writers’ group and sat down to write a story for it. Only the story ran to twenty thousand words, giving me exactly two markets: Analog and Asimov’s, neither of which I’d cracked at the time.

The novelette started with a guy – yes, you read that correctly, guy – in the hospital, trying to figure out how to rescue someone else, ina profoundly unpleasant future Earth. All noblesse oblige and stuff.

2 - rest of 1996 - wrote the novel, since I couldn’t sell it as a short. Over the time writing it, I realized it was the first time I was consciously wondering if I was giving the reader enough clues, etc. Up till then, though I’d been writing for nine years, I’d written mostly for me. Honestly, I consider this one of the big hah hah moments in my writing career.

3- Just before Christmas 96, send out a bunch of queries to agents. One answered. We’ll call her Ms. B Lister. She said she liked my idea, could she see the opening. Of course she could. I think I beat all records at getting those first chapters mailed.

4 - Ms. B Lister liked it – to my shock, by then – and wanted the rest. I sent her the rest. I didn’t hear again till April, when she told me my story was hampered by two enormous coincidences being used to propel the plot, and also she didn’t like that my guy woke up with amnesia. Right. So I went back and rewrote it over a week. This caused the incident of the Shrodinger fish (Younger boy was supposed to feed the class fish. I went into deep re-write seclusion. NOTHING else happened. The fish were okay, but until we got there, they could have been dead or alive. And I didn’t even know fish could look happy to see you!)

5 - It is October 97 before Ms. B Lister got back to me. She was slow. OTOH though she had a couple other suggestions, she liked the novel, she wanted to sign me on, and she was sure it would sell. Around this time, first twinge of doubt, since she told me sometimes things didn’t sell for inexplicable reasons. Take, for instance, something she represented, a fantasy about the young Lenin. Yes, you read that correctly. She couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t sold.

6 - at a less frantic pace do rewrite, send it back in and we’re now in 98 and I’m selling a few short stories. My friend Rebecca Lickiss (look her up if you’ve never read her) is planning to attend the Oregon Writers’ Workshop that spring. I won’t say she bullied me into going – she might have. I honestly don’t know who thought about it first, but we both applied, were accepted and ended up going. The instructor for the novel weekend (as opposed to general course) was Ginjer Buchanan and we were supposed to bring a proposal for a completed novel. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that after finishing the rewrite and between waiting for agent’s reply, I wrote Hall of Judgement, the first novel of the Red Baron. So I outlined that, and tried to make it a selling outline and all that.

7 - Went to workshop. By means I’m not allowed to divulge, they ensured everyone wrote a new novel outline the day before Ginjer arrived. It had to be an idea we’d never even thought of. I’m stuck in a little house by the sea, far from the internet on which I’d already come to depend as a fast research tool (even if I verify things on books/primary sources if available, afterwards.) How in heck could I do this? Mostly I wrote historical sf or space opera, both of which required research. Okay, okay, tel you what. I just wrote this short story about Shakespeare being a robot, and I did a massive amount of research – besides having been a Shakespeare buff for years. I’d do a novel involving Shakespeare. It’s not like it would sell – I mean, in twenty four hours or less? Right.

8 - I’d make it fantasy – no time to really think through time-travel or anything else. So... elves. And having recently watched Shakespeare in Love (Yes, they did threaten to throw me out of the theater for mumbling. How did you know?) I decided to solve the fair boy/dark lady thing by making an elf a gender changer. (Look, it was late at night, okay?) Plot kind of came from that.

9 - Meeting with Ginjer who liked the Red Baron novel but was afraid people would think he had been a Nazi (She might have been right. Yeah, I know, but she MIGHT have been. Trust me.) However, she’d also seen Shakespeare in Love and she LOVED the other one. The fatal question was asked "How soon can you have this to me?"

10 - Next six months consumed getting novel to Ginjer who bought it in three days. During this Ms. B Lister did everything but physically whine and snivel, because – I guess – this is not the path she saw for my career. By November I’d had enough. I went to my first convention – World Fantasy – and came to an agreement with another agent. We’ll call him Mr. Hot Shot.

11 - Mr. Hot Shot, perhaps reasonably, told me to forget that space opera and write more in the hot, hot, hot Shakespeare series. We sold two more books in 99.

12 - I finally gave the space opera to Mr. Hot Shot to read. Worldcon 2000, he told me he’d read it and it was pretty good but he had some revision notes. I was used to this, no prob. However when we met, he had no revision notes and had decided it was NOT good enough to submit. This solidified other suspicions I had that he actually did NOT read my stuff but got his receptionist – six months out of college – to read it, and he only read her notes. Um... Okay then. It would have been okay if he’d told me up front, but he didn’t. I gave him one more shot.

13 - November 2000 I send Mr. Hot Shot an outline for what was to become Heart Of Light. Unfortunately, since I’d signed with him, he’d developed a "One Right Way To Write A Successful Book" theory. This had already caused problems with the second Shakespeare book, but now he told me I’d written the wrong book and wanted me to put in all this formula stuff. (That book too underwent a massive revision before publication, but formula it was not.) I called a friend and started negotiations with her agent.

14 - First Shakespeare Book comes out a month after 9/11. I think it tanked so bad it cratered. Hard cover, unknown author. Nothing on the spine, not even "fiction" which works fine with push but without push... ah well. There were people hurting a lot worse at that time, but to me it felt like my career had also just died. I had two books in pipeline, still, and I thought I could make it, though.

15 - Of course series entered death spiral. Meanwhile I had new agent. I’d rewritten the space opera yet again, realizing that for a man to have that level of aggression he came across as psychotic. Well, a woman did too, but it wasn’t THAT bad. You weren’t afraid of her. So, Athena was born. New Agent liked her, but she seemed at best lackadaisical at sending it out. (Actually at sending anything of mine out.) Mind you, we got along FINE other than that.

16 - World Fantasy 2003 it looked like my writing career was completely dead. A month later, I got a chance to write a project for Baen with Eric Flint (which needs to be rewritten and will now be called The Shakespeare Gambit.) Now, you know, going from "dead" to "someone wants me" was exhilarating. I told Jim yes over phone. (At any rate he was a man whom it was very hard to say "no" to.) I told Ms. New Agent. She didn’t seem happy, but went along with it. Contract arrived. She didn’t like this and that and the other, which was amazing since Baen contracts are ONE or two pages, and written in English. She finally told me it was her or Baen. Well... I’d had her for two years. And she had yet to sell anything for me. Yeah, it was a REALLY hard choice.

17 - Having muddled through and managed to fire Ms. New Agent – hard that, truly ;) – I started working on project with Eric and trying to sell a house. Somewhere in the middle of this, and I’m sorry, I don’t even remember the year, there was the famous phone call of "Sarah, do you have anything to sell me?" I had the space opera on Jim’s desk, so I thought he must be asking for something else. Well, he wanted the book in a month and I’d just started a book because of a dream I’d had. Also at that point, I was brow beaten into thinking I was a fantasy author. So I sold him Draw One In The Dark and he bought it in twenty minutes (beating out my three day record.) From here on, chronology gets fuzzy, since I’ve been busy as heck and often lost track of time.

18 - Somewhere along the line I hired La Agent. La Agent took me on for two reasons – the Magical British Empire and the Musketeer Mysteries. At the time I had an offer from "Mr. Way Up THERE" agent, but he wanted me to do a book a year or maybe every two years, and get a job teaching in college the rest of the time. Look, might be great for someone but not me. So, I took La Agent. She quickly sold the Magical British Empire and the Musketeer Mysteries. I didn’t even try the space opera, now convinced there was something fundamentally wrong with it. Oh, yeah, Sarah’s Diner – my conference in Baen’s Bar – was born soon thereafter.

19 - I was now writing and on the hook for three or four books a year. So the logical thing happened: I wanted a challenge. (G). While recovering from crud, I was reading my old stuff. I agreed with Jim my latest incarnation of the space opera was no-go. You see, I’d workshopped it so much, and tried to explain EVERYTHING that the first three chapters were molasses. But I remembered that the book USED to be decent. So I went to first version, and there was a light there. Purely for fun, since I knew NO ONE would buy space opera from me, I sat down and wrote a first chapter, with Athena but putting the old "life" back in and Heinleining the details, in the way I knew now, with almost ten novels below my belt. The response of the dinerites shocked me. They practically threw their greasy cloaks in the air. They did threaten my life if I didn’t give them more.

20 - I posted another few chapters in diner. At this time, it was not unusual to get emails saying "I read 80 pages of Darkship Thieves. WHERE is the rest? Mail me the rest, please!" Right. You know who you are.

21 - Toni informed me that though she was looking for fantasy, she was buying DST. So I stopped posting it, and started making with the finishing.

22 - And that, children and babies, is the glorious story of Darkship Thieves. Which opens thusly:
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....

Okay, now... what about the above surprised you? I confess this book has had a harder road to publication than most, but others are often convoluted. Did you know things could take that many turns? Does it make you see any of your own stuff – or even stuff you’ve read – in a different light? Talk to me! I’ve been ill, it’s almost New Years and I need distraction!

Oh, yeah – and may the new year bring you everything you need and some of what you wish for!
　
Edited 12/31/09 -- Welcome Instapundit readers. Look around for a look at the mad, mad world of publishing and writers. Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.
　

Embrace your Inner Weird

Or ... when writing characters, be honest, even if it hurts.

Ok, we writers, like all creative people, are a bit weird, always watching, listening and trying to make sense of the world and why people do things.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that everyone else is just pretending to be normal, so they can pass.

Think of the gardening shows, where presenters run their hands through mulch and wax lyrical about the joys of compost.

Think of all those clips on U-Tube of peoples' cats and dogs doing cute things. You realise those people are following their animals around with a digital camera just waiting for them to do something. That's weird.

Think of the dentist who loved Star Trek so much he built his dental surgery like the bridge of the USS Enterprise and made all his nurses wear the 1960s uniform.

Think of the collectors who search for things like match boxes, old dress patterns and radios. Some of them even build sheds, or add rooms to house their collections.

Think of the times you did things that embarrassed you and you put your foot in it. Think of the times you did the right thing by accident, more than by design. Think of the less than wonderful moments when you fought down a craven impuslse to cry, this is all too much. Then you got up and kept going because you had to.

Now look at your characters? Are they too 'straight'? Do they need more quirks, more failings, more doubts?

Who did you like Mickey Mouse or the irrascable, Donald Duck? In Australia we prefered Donald, he had faults. We could identify with him.

So, embrace your Inner Weird. There's a little bit of 'weird' in everyone.

Are there characters in books or films that stayed with you because they were flawed? Are you a Mickey Mouse or a Donald Duck person?

In order to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative

...it helps if you've been there. Since there are no tours to Tasmarin, or Elizabethan England - particularly the versions with elves, demons and magic - not even a Slow Train to Arcturus, we've got to make it feel like we've taken that journey.

That means artistic verisimilitude, better known in writing circles as the telling detail or Heinleining. Sarah's posted about this a few times, particularly how the one right detail can bring a huge amount of extra "baggage" with it, filling in great big chunks of world-building without anyone knowing you're doing it. It's knowing what the right detail is that's the interesting part.

I've spent a good chunk of the last couple of years focusing on getting the details in and making my writing feel real, because I have a sad tendency to drift towards the curse of talking heads in empty rooms. The way I did this - which I'm offering for discussion, analysis, whatever - was before I started a scene, I'd think about what information needed to go in, where this was happening (what it looked like, smelled like, warm cold or neutral temperature), what was happening to whom and what they thought and felt about it. Then I wrote it. And often micro-edited as I worked to get the right details in.

Then the latest brightshinyhappynew novel dropped in (the epic fantasy with vampires - who are not sparkly) and made me write enough of it to build a clear link to the world and the characters. And I realized to my considerable shock that the Heinleining was happening more or less without conscious input from me. I wasn't working to make the environment real and solid, it was just happening.

So, just to show the evolution, I'm going to splat a bunch of openings in - from the earliest to the most recent, one or two paragraphs apiece. The earliest was written about 2 years ago, give or take. The first two are finished, then there's 60k, 50k, 10k (I chose to write that much then outline it for a proposal) and 20k. Now that I've got the outline done for the steampunk, I'm going back to the space opera to finish it. ConSensual, alas, will need to wait until ConVent finds a home.

And ConVent, naturally enough, starts this set of openings.

Another convention, another con hotel. After a while, they blur together into an indistinguishable mass of faux-elegance and bizarrely costumed fans. I usually go in what you could call Olde Worlde Vampire - three piece suit, John Lennon glasses, cane with a pewter wolf-head topper. Take Gary Oldman in that appalling Dracula movie, and you have the basic idea, except I wear black and my hair is darker. And short.

About 6 months later, I wrote the opening of Impaler. This one is a little different because it starts with Vlad explaining himself, so the grounding is in personal rather than in physical details.

Always before battle begins I am possessed by the need for solitude and prayer. It is a curious thing, for I have never fought as merely another knight. I first ruled men at the tender age of eighteen, when the old Ottoman Sultan Murad and his son Mehmed still thought I could be a Turk puppet.

The next opening, for ConSensual, I wrote early this year. This one is about 60k of probably 90-100k done, but until ConVent finds a home or the characters wake up and start nagging, it'll probably stay where it is.

Nothing says you've left normal reality like walking into a hotel lobby and seeing a Clone Trooper chatting with a Sith Lord. The sign on the back of the Clone Trooper's armor, 'Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies. Tonight. Room 1226', was really just corroborating evidence.

The next of the partials, Long Haul, is at about 50k and was started around mid-year.

Jack McClatchkey strode through the airlock before the iris finished opening, stepping over the partially retracted lens. He didn't so much as hesitate at what the clean-room -- which served Galway Mining Station as a customs inspection station and extra storage the thirty days of the month there wasn't a ship docked here -- held. It was one of the many things he'd learned from his dad before the old man bought it rigging emergency repairs in an uncharted branch off the wormhole lines. You never let anyone official see you sweat unless you wanted them to think you were scared.

The steampunk, tentatively titled Light Through a Harsh Lens, has about 10k written and a 5k outline - I'm considering sending this as a proposal. This was started mid-yearish. This I think is about when I started to really get the hang of the Heinleining skill.

Soft light from a tinted glass tube lit the Apprentice Day Board. Cleaner and less harsh on the eyes than gaslight, it was one of the many benefits even the newest apprentices of the Society of Artificers enjoyed.

And finally, the brightshinyhappynew! epic fantasy with vampires, Blood Oath, where it all seemed to just click into place. I've written about 20k of this one.

"Where is my son?" Lord Karras s'Daria Ashleon glared around the Great Hall with narrowed eyes, his lips drawn back into a snarl that showed his fangs.

Having reached the point where this happens as I write it, I'm wondering what the next step is going to be. One thing I've worked out is that everyone learns the skills in a different order, and can have several different ones all snap into place more or less at the same time. Maybe it'll be "how to get submissions out" - I'm very bad at that part.

What are some examples of books that show an author building their skills? Sarah's mentioned the differences between the various Heinlein books, and with PTerry's Discworld books there's a clear evolution from Color of Magic through Unseen Academicals. So who else, and what is it that's growing?

Craft of Writing

I've been writing on and off since I was in my early twenties, trying to make sense of the craft of writing. Yet, I still get excited when my mind makes one of those leaps of understanding.

I think of the craft of writing a great puzzle that fascinates me and I'm constantly trying to unravel it. With every book I read and every movie I see, I’m studying narrative drive and characterisation, looking for flaws in logic and world building and cheering, when I see something that makes me sit up and go, WOW.

That means I love finding interesting articles on the writing craft.
Here's an article on Scene Structure, by Jacqueline Litchenberg. And here's an article on story structure, by Joe Narrise.

When did you last have a light bulb moment about the craft of writing?

Characters & Superstitions

Fleshing out a characters can be a lot of fun. One popular choice, particularly with horror/suspense writers, is to give the character a particular fear that plays into the story. For example they might have a fear of flying and the big confrontation with the glowing aliens from Mars has to happen on the outside of a racing spacecraft over Manhattan. Or they are afraid of the dark, but to confront the villain they have to go down THOSE stairs into the pitch black basement. This often works well, but can also seem a little contrived if the latter scenes are not woven in convincingly.

But there are plenty of other options. One that is a bit of fun is to incorporate a superstition. This got me thinking about superstitions in general and thought it might be fun for people to post their own superstitions or those of friends and relatives. Having something from real life like that adds a real element to fiction.

In terms of my family, the one I remember most distinctly is one of my grandmother's (that's Eileen up on the left). She used to cover all the mirrors in the house during a thunderstorm. She also used to live in fear of birds flying into windows - it would mean that someone in the family was going to die.

There is the old salt over the left shoulder ritual to hit the Devil in the eye if you spill the salt, but that's never been too convincing for me. What's the Devil care about sodium chloride anyway?

For myself - I have one that I have never been able to shake that was passed onto me by my mother. If your ears are ringing, it means someone is talking about you. If it's your left ear it's something bad - if it's your right ear it's something good. You might say I live in fear of left-sided ear infections. This is totally crazy, and yet I can't shake it. It has a spooky king of logic. If my tinnitus worsens I could be in for permanent paranoia.

What superstitions do you have? Or interesting rituals - the more bizarre the better!

The Plausible Impossible

Eons ago - or maybe it just feels like that - I watched a rerun of the Disney episode The Plausible Impossible (it was a rerun because the original was made quite a few years before I made my appearance in the world). For reasons I don't think I'm capable of explaining, I found myself thinking about it as part of what writers do.

My memory of the episode was a series of examples of how something that we know is impossible could be made to seem plausible rather than just silly. To switch from Disney to Warner Brothers, think of all those times poor Wile E Coyote ran off the edge of a cliff, hovered there briefly, then started to fall. That actually makes kind of sense to our subconscious, because we all know how hard it is to stop when you're running full tilt, and we've all felt that moment between when the swing stops going up and gravity takes charge again, even if not all of us were dumb enough to swing as high as we could and then let go right then to see how far we could 'fly' (I used to let go with the swing nearly horizontal, but I have this weird relationship with danger).

What does this have to do with writing, you ask? Okay, you don't ask but I'm going to tell you anyway. In science fiction and fantasy, we have to build a framework that makes the impossible seem plausible. Take magic, for instance. We all - I hope - know that real magic of the sparks flying from the fingers variety and the zap of death isn't possible. When we write a world with magic, we have to do it so that someone who can shoot lightning bolts from their fingers without becoming the latest victim of spontaneous combustion is plausible. I'm not going into how, because there's any number of ways from asbestos-lined underwear up. The point is that we can't just have someone wander around zapping people. We have to give a reason and it has to make sense.

It has to make more sense than real life, which is distressingly random and senseless. Pratchett calls this whole concept narrativium - we want things to make sense, and if there isn't a story there, we'll make one. Thanks to that, if a writer serves up a book without a story or where things don't make sense, that book is going to be useful only as emergency replacement paper in the bathroom. In short, we have to make sure whatever we do is plausible no matter how unlikely it might be.

The impossibility can be embedded in the background assumptions, like whatever macguffin is used to explain or side-step faster than light travel in a lot of science fiction, or it can be up front grinning at you and trying to zap you to death. Either way, it's got to fit in your framework, or like the space-faring dinosaurs Sarah mentioned in the comments of her thread yesterday, you're just going to scratch your head, shrug, and walk away (Or you'll be like me and gleefully shred).

Sarah's shifter books are an excellent example of the art: the ability to shift is never explained, but it takes energy and the shifters need to eat, preferably meat, afterwards, and while they're shifted the animal form dominates their thoughts - it takes a lot more effort for her characters to think while they're not in human form. All of this makes sense at a gut level. We all know you don't get anything without paying for it somehow, and we know if something is work you need to eat and/or rest to recover from it.

So who else does a good job of making the impossible plausible? Shakespearean 'rats' and mad-Irish bats included, of course.

You know you're a writer, when ...

photo courtesy alexkerhead

Something happened the other day that made me think about writing and how integral it is to our lives.

You know you're a writer:

When you recall your childhood and adolescent by the books you were reading and the authors you discovered.

When life altering events happen and you catch yourself thinking, I must remember how this feels so I can capture it for my book.

When you read and can't switch off your internal editor unless it is a really good book.

When you go back and re-read that really good book to work out why you couldn't switch off your internal editor.

When you catch yourself rewriting the endings of books and movies.

When you toss a book aside because you think you can do better.

When you keep writing, even though the industry is crazy and perfectly good books get rejected.

When your children leave a note for you, not on the kitchen table but on your keyboard, because they know your life revolves around your computer and your latest manuscript.


That last one is what made me think how integral writing is to my life and how this affects my family. When my 6 children were younger and still at school, things would happen and the events would turn up later in one of my children's books with the names changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent. Now, when the kids tell me things, they say 'And you can use that in one of your books.'

When did you know you were a writer?

The Empty Room Versus The Filigreed Flourishes

Sarah talked yesterday about a tendency to genericise, to reduce the details of our imagined worlds to the bare bones and let readers put their own filigree and flourishes into the story.

There is a certain amount of validity to this, since the world inside our heads is always much richer than anything on paper. But at the same time, if we strip down too far, we run the risk of talking heads in empty rooms (guilty, yeronner).

Heinlein was a master of putting in just enough to make the scene spring to life - and choosing the perfect detail to do it, usually something that implied a whole bunch more and built the world in our heads for us. Pratchett does the same in his fantasies, building on the more or less common heritage of fairytales to layer the details in a way that the more you know about history in general, mythology and the just plain weird, the richer his books become. As a quickie example, in Making Money, the parrot's squawk of "Twelve and a half percent!" has at least four layers of meaning that I've identified. There are probably more.

Who do you think gets it just right? If you feel like some examples where the author's gone too spare and left you with the talking heads, or too lush and given you way too much description instead of plot, feel free to mention those as well.

Care and Feeding of Plots

The last few posts have sent me cycling back to thinking about plots (as opposed to plotting, which involves ultra-secret societies and if I told you I'd have to... Oh, sorry. Wrong kind of plot): where they come from, how they grow, and of course, the question that makes every writer cringe, "Where do you get your ideas?"

Me, I get ideas and plots everywhere. The problem is keeping the beggars from metastasizing, not finding them. It helps that I read widely, all over the spectrum. One of my recent idea-fodder scores is Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku - who is a theoretical physicist and one of the founders of string theory. In this book, a whole range of science fictional staples including force-fields, teleportation, FTL travel and the like get the "Okay, so how would we do this?" treatment.

It turns out that everything needed to make a force field has been manufactured in some form. Some of the components are still very much experimental manufacture, while others are mature, but they all exist. As such, it's feasible that somewhere within 100 years you could be able go to the store and buy yourself a force field.

Levitation (yes, I want my flying car, damn it!) is in the same range.

Now, watch those neurons fizz at the thought of flying cars equipped with force fields to prevent collisions. Add a hot guy, preferably partially clothed, and we're in... ahem.

Leaving aside fond lewd imaginings, I take a whole bunch of ideas like this, mix and match to get some idea what my world looks like and what it's like to live there, and figure out the overarching motivations of all the major players in that world as they relate to my setting. I don't usually go for complex, intertwining skullduggery for the simple reason that my plots have a tendency to do that to me anyway while I'm working out what's going on.

Often all these ideas (did you know that the founders of the USA wanted to set a fixed-value currency that could never inflate or deflate? Imagine a world where someone did that...) don't go anywhere (Oh, and did you know that relativity is implicit in Thomas Young's equations related to light - and if he hadn't died at 55 it's possible the Theory of Relativity could have been proposed before 1850? Nuclear steampunk!), at least not at first. So I keep reading all sorts of stuff, fiction and non-fiction, and strange and occasionally wonderful things emerge.

After all, the seed of a plot is an idea, and good plots usually have several ideas lurking in the background fraternizing and mixing things up - and breeding - strong characters to drive them (often the disguised spawn of yet another idea), and lots of fertilization to make them grow. Yes, this does mean I throw a whole lot of crap at it and hope something works.

How do you feed your plots? What are your idea seeds, how widely do you cross-breed and how much control do you try to exert over them as they grow?

Romancing the Cliche

I've done a lot of browsing lately over at TV Tropes, and it's interesting to see how many different ways all sorts of incredibly common tropes get used. Possibly the biggest eye-opener is how much really good fiction uses the exact same worn out old cliches everything else does, proving that it's not the package, it's what you do with it.

In the same vein, Diana Wynne Jones The Tough Guide to Fantasyland takes apart the fantasy cliches everyone has seen - but an awful lot of those self-same cliches can be found in the great books. Terry Pratchett - you can stop rolling your eyes, they gather far too much dust that way - has sold ridiculous numbers of books that use (and usually skewer) any number of the cliches. Interesting Times has a wonderful collection of them, including the barbarian horde, the inscrutable oriental, the innocent abroad ('innocent' in this case should be taken with a grain of salt, since we're taking about Rincewind) and much, much more. What Jingo does to political machinations, the ugly cross-dressing male, and any excuse for a war has to be seen to be believed.

What stories have you enjoyed that used one of the old standards in a fresh and interesting way? And on the flip side, what are some examples of recycling the cliches and beating out whatever life they still have?

p.s. Tolkein does not count. He pretty much pioneered the multi-racial group of mismatched questers battling existential evil.

Your place or mine?

I have etchings. And the sound of a mountain stream out there in the moonlit darkness. Let me take you away...

Okay, still harping away on beginnings (because we all have to start somewhere... even with a cliche sometimes. I have a short that begins. " She awoke with a terrible start. Rubbing her eyes and looking at him again, she had to admit maybe he wasn't that terrible, just a bit homely, and not comfortably old, fat and rich. Not quite what she'd have chosen if she'd been sober the night before. A girl had to begin somewhere... ")

To get back to the point, an author has the difficult task of taking the reader away into the world they create. Sometimes the reader really wants to go. Will fall right in with a cheesy invitation to see etchings, especially if they've loved the author's other books. However the suspension of disbelief, the entry into world we build for them, is usually much harder than that. The start, which will lead us away from the mundane (and safe) is a tricky thing. Yep mostly the reader wants to go... but not if you might be an axe murderer (or the wrong kind of book). I always put it this way: The first few pages of a book have severely overworked words, because they have do so much. They have to pick you up, carry you away to a different place, they have to make you care about the protagonist's fate (want to see them come a cropper is fine too), they have reassure the reader that actually the charming invitation to come to their place is not so you can be dismembered and served with fava beans (which strikes me as odd. What are the bits going to do with those beans?) and also advance the plot.

In summary:

1)hook

2) setting

3) Show type of book (really, readers do not actually like surprises. They wanted an Aga-saga and you gave them horror with Aga-saga start, you'll have to be brilliant to get them to forgive you. They wanted fantasy - and you gave them sf - better hope you had them adoring the book before they figured it out. Yes. I am guilty. I hope readers forgave me. I was young and mislead by an evil companion, me.)

4) Invest emotion in protagonist (love or hate, but care)

5)Move the plot forward.

If you're a best-selling author that readers know will deliver you have some space to do these. If not... the sooner the better. We've talked about hook and somewhat about character.

Let's talk about setting and type of book. Now because these beginning words are multipurpose and overworked (poor things) these too can be part of the hook, part of the magic, part of the character dispay that gets you to care.

"I am a watchdog. My name is Snuff. I live with my master Jack outside of London now. I like Soho very much at night with its smelly fogs and dark streets. It is silent then and we go for long walks. Jack is under a curse from long ago...."

If anyone has any doubts what kind of book this is or what sort of setting they're being drawn into... I can recommend some pills :-)

Or to do it even quicker - "Once the palace of a thousand chambers had overwhelmed Imoshen...."

or this

"The dragon flew above the rage of the elements. Above the tumultuous maelstrom of ocean swirling into the void. Above the sheet lightnings and vortexes of dark energies released as the tower fell, with the vast granite masonry shattering into swirling dust. A fierce delight filled his dragonish heart as he looked down on it."

Ok - let's see some starts that show setting and type. I'll try and offer constructive criticism. And you can see if I get it right. (And sweetlings, the reader is always right. If i don't get it, it's back to the drawing board. Or rather, keyboard. This applies to me, Stephen King or Joe-the-newbie. The reader is write... uh right.)

And which three books did I quote?