Breathless

I recently reread Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghost military SF Series. This is a rightly highly praised collection that has sold extremely well.

A couple of things struck me when I was trying to deconstruct the books to see why I liked them so much. Here are my thoughts in no particular order.

1. The pages crackle with high energy. The reader is taken on a breathless ride. Something is always happening.
2. The line-by-line is remarkably simple and clear. The writing never gets in the way of the story. The author never tries to show how clever he is at the expense of the reader.
3. The plots are essentially very straightforward. The action is not lost in complexities of chance or motivation.
4. There is an interesting cast of characters who spark off each other. You care about the protagonists.
5. There is no deeper message than the essential truths of people acting under pressure. The author does not try to force you to buy into his personal conspiracy theories.
6. Each book has a different theme - trench warfare, haunted house, siege, insurgency etc. This refreshes the interaction between the characters and their responses to situations. You are not reading the same book a dozen times.

OK, I am sure I have missed some points. Can you suggest other characteristics of a great action story? How much do you agree with my analysis, or not?

John

Squeezing into the Gaps

We've all seen the lists of writing tips - things to do to develop as a writer - e.g. read widely, experience life, research etc. . .

Chief on the list is often to write every day. This has always been a tall order for me, balancing work and family and running two businesses on the side. In the periods where I have managed it there has certainly been a beautiful flow in my expression and effortless connection to the work, but this has (for me) unfortunately come at the cost of connection to the people in my life.

On the other side of the coin, there are periods in life when it is legitimately impossible to write anything. For sanity and the sake of not taking the skin off my back via self-flagellation, this was an import thing for me to acknowledge. It might be work, family bereavement, illness. . . a host of things. I guess I believe that if you were stamped at birth with the hidden sigil that marks you as a writer, after the dust settles you will always gravitate back to the written word when you are capable of doing so.

But for that middle zone, when you are trying to live a life and squeeze writing into the cracks and gaps, how do you manage it?

One of the best pieces of advice that I had was 'do it first'. I guess that generally works well for me as more of a morning person, but the general gist is to try and get some runs on the board with the writing (sorry Cricket term there) before the other 'urgent' things in life take over - like paying the bills and eating.

One of the useful things I have discovered is that my laptop works fine on the bus. This gives me up to an hour a day during the week, and it all goes surprisingly well (when the battery does not run out). I remember one story about a British Thriller writer who managed to have a whole career and publish a dozen novels while doing his writing commuting on the train (1 hour each way) to his office job as an accountant in London. I guess a predisposition for travel sickness might knock that one on the head.

Carry a notepad: I used to do this religiously, and ended up with about twenty of these stuffed full of ideas for stories. Many were penned in the middle of industrial plants while wearing full PPE -- ear muffs, steel-capped boots, hardhats etc. A writer friend of mine also filled up notepads with ideas - that and writing in the emergency stairwell during his half-an-hour lunch with pen and paper were all he could manage between work and a sick wife for well over a year. He went on to win awards and break through into mainstream publishing as a novelist.

Unplug the TV set: Well, here is where I don't take my own advice. I am a bit of a movie and video addict - although I limit myself pretty well - and I don't watch live-to-air. I record and watch the programs at night before bed as a wind down when I would not be physically capable of even sitting at a computer terminal.

Use Auto-pilot: Use the mundane tasks of the day as brainstorming time - doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, ironing, painting, handyman stuff etc

By the Pets a Toy: OK. I don't have pets, but all this talk about cats disrupting things has got me thinking. I guess you could include spouses in the general idea - get them a hobby? I went to a workshop with Zoran Zivcovik here in Brisbane a few years ago (this is where the anthologies Devil in Brisbane and Fantastical Journeys to Brisbane emerged from), and he told a story about his cat, who every morning sat on his keyboard and would not move without a dedicated 10 minutes of petting. After that he had to learn how to type one-handed, as the cat required him to continue stroking with one hand while he worked.

How do you squeeze your writing into the gaps?

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.

Shell Games and the Talking Snake

When I was little, going through the local “festas” (think mobile fair and amusement park, usually set up for a saint’s day outside a church. In Summer there was one every weekend in the immediate vicinity) I remember seeing tables set up and men – it was always men – speaking fast to a group.

My mother taught me early not to trust these men, who played shell games “little red one” (vermelhinha in Portuguese) or sold patent medicines (for some reason the only bit of patter from the patent medicine seller was his holding up a suitcase and saying “Inside this suitcase, I have a snake that can even speak!”

In Portugal, in the early sixties, in my area – just outside the second largest city – con men usually came to the business the traditional way – they inherited it, having been trained by their fathers. Locals stayed away from them because they knew the family. Only the yokels arrived from the mountains would fall for their line.

So... what does this have to do with writing? Other than the fact that writers’ lie by definition? And get paid for their lies? And that we pass our craft, mutatis mutandi to our “children” though these are usually not blood children?

Believe it or not I wasn’t bringing this up to excoriate myself for getting paid for telling lies. Okay, so it bothered me the first time (me “Do they know every word in this is made up, and they’re paying me thousands of dollars?” My long-suffering husband: “They count on it. They hate plagiarism.”) but that kind of con is the sort where both parties consent. I tell you a story, you suspend disbelief. If at some point the disbelief starts choking, you send me – or my book – about my business.

However, the lie I had in mind here, was another kind. What happens when the narrator is totally, completely unreliable? Or worse, because more unpredictable, partially unreliable? They tell you the absolute truth... with reservations.

I don’t need to bring up The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for which many still curse Dame Christie’s memory. Practically every regency romance, for instance, was cursed with a heroine that was perfectly truthful, except about her own looks.

It’s not an easy thing to write – craft wise – because you need to give clues to the reader along the way. For instance, I once wrote a couple where the – voice – character thinks himself unattractive and had the joy of seeing everyone in my writer group think the girl was a gold-digger. This despite the fact that I thought I had signaled the character was nuts – and had no mirrors, or didn’t know how to use them – all along, by having people fall at his feet. Because it was first person, the reader interiorized the voice character’s self evaluation.

On a smaller scale, both Dave and I had unreliable narrators in our current/upcoming books. I was stuck with the lovely Athena in Darkship Thieves, a girl who is in such profound denial about everything that she couldn’t find her way if it were marked in neon. And Dave’s Dragon’s Ring characters are different kinds of unreliable. Weirdly, the rogue is the one who presents most honestly to the reader. The innocent... well... growth is required. I think both of us did creditable jobs of turning the corners, but perhaps I’m flattering myself. (As usual.) OTOH no one has written me an annoyed letter in response to the earcs, so perhaps I’m okay. ;)

So... Once you realize a narrator is unreliable – does he lose you? If not, why not? Is it because everyone loves a rogue? Or because the deception is understandable? Or even because the character him/herself was deluded? Do unreliable narrators add to the spice, or not?

Animals and Us

After seeing Dave's post about how he's trying to raise money to bring his animals with him to Australia, it made me realise how integral animals are to our lives. You can tell a lot about a person by their pet. For instance there are dog people and there are cat people, and then there's Dave.

No, seriously, authors seem to have a soft spot for animals, judging by the number that appear in fantasy and SF books. Here is an Amazon link to fantasy and SF books which feature animals as characters or significant others for characters. And I think it is only the tip of the iceberg.

We're always world building, creating animals for our fantasy worlds or re-engineering animals to populate our SF worlds. But even more than that, we often give the animals a voice, so that they become characters who move the plot forward.

After doing a very unscientific survey I came to the conclusion that there seem to be a lot of cats featured in fantasy and SF books. There are five anthologies alone, which feature stories about cats (Catfantastic 1- 5). Next we have horses and dogs. And then there are a whole swag of books that feature dragons.

Mythology features talking animals, hybrid animals and people-hybrid animals. The idea that people can take the form of animals appears in cultures across the world.

Children's stories abound with talking animals. When writing for children, if you want to avoid the questions of race and ethnicity, a writer can use animal characters to make a point.

Animal characters are great for parodying human vices, such as Wind in the Willows or Animal Farm.

I have fond memories of reading The Dragon and the George by Gordon R Dickson. I must have read it thirty years ago but as far as I can recall a mild mannered university professor gets trapped in the body of a dragon and has to find his way back.

Are there books which you recall because the animal characters were so memorable?

SAVE THE DRAGONS (AND MY FURKIDS)

Well from time-to-time on this site we've talked about e-publishing as an alternative channel to the present set up. So: because this is very important to me, and because this is typical monkey fashion - talk ain't enough, we need to start doing... go and have a look http://www.savethedragons.nu/

Which is a Miller and Lee style e-publishing venture.

SAVE THE DRAGONS is my own first venture into alternate publishing via a desperate need to fund my beasties stay in quarantine on their way to join us in Australia. (They are a responsibility I take seriously. But the cost is astronomical, and even with us selling up here we just can't afford it. They were always part of our moving equation, but the exchange rate, low house prices and the huge cost of keeping them in quarantine is just crippling.) But, well, I love my animals and being me I must at least try. We don't know if we can raise - even with what we have - enough for the project (about R150 000 - for quarantine for 7 and flights for 7... and then a month in Australia). The move pretty much means starting again from nothing, and we may have to do this in stages if we can. But I'm not known for giving up easily. I'm not much good at straight begging so I am selling what I can for them. Please go and have a look, and if you have suggestions for how we could enhance this or do better I'd be grateful.

I'd be grateful too if you mentioned it on your blogs.

Of course I'd be delighted if you decided to buy into it.

What I Wished I'd Known Before Writing My First Novel

I came across this topic Friday while reading some of the writing blogs I follow. What started as a single blog post seems to have become sort of a mini-MEME. It started over at the Creative Penn. Joanna Penn blogged about what she wishes she'd known before writing her first book. Then Alexis Grant, at Aspiring Author, picked up the theme and blogged about what she wished she'd known. Her post has a slightly different spin than Ms. Penn's because Ms. Grant is writing her memoirs instead of a novel. The next to take up the issue was J. Timothy King at be the story.

As I followed the links, I started me thinking -- Kate, quit snickering. I KNOW it's dangerous when I think. But what can I say? It happens sometimes. -- Anyway, I started thinking about what I wished I'd known before writing my first novel.

As a point of clarification, I don't mean any of those so-called books I've written that have been forever banished under my bed or in the far corner of my closet. Nor does it mean any of those that became the fodder for bonfires before Sarah started threatening to hurt me if I didn't quit playing with fire. I'm still not sure if she meant burning those pages I most certainly would not want someone finding and reading if anything ever happened to me or just telling her I'd done so. Hmmm. Maybe it's the latter and I can finish burning the rest of those pages....

Oh, sorry, back to the point. What I wished I'd known before writing my first novel, in this case, Nocturnal Origins:

1. How important it is to have a core group of readers who will tell you the truth about your baby and be supportive at the same time. Critique groups are wonderful, as are first readers. But so often they tend to simply say the book is good or bad without specifics. I've been fortunate enough to have several people, writers all, who have taken the time to mentor me and help me through the process, pointing out where I needed to change or fix something, without ever making me feel like I was an idiot for wanting to be a writer.
2. It can be as hard, sometimes even harder, to find an agent than it is a publisher. The corallary to this is that you don't have to have an agent to find a pubisher. It just takes more research and hard work.
3. Research is not limited to what you need to make your novel believable. It also extends to where you are going to try to sell the book, marketing trends, etc. In other words, a writer has to be much more than a writer.
4. Don't expect to hear from everyone you send a query/pages to. This is especially true with agents. More and more of them now say in their guidelines that they only respond if they are interested. I should probably understand that but, well, I don't. In this day and age of email, it doesn't take much to send a form rejection if you don't like something or if you feel it isn't right for your agency.
5. How hard it is to turn loose of your baby and send it off. It's like sending your child off to that first day of school. You've lived with the novel for weeks or months -- or more -- and now you're sending it off into the world without you.
6. You have to have a thick skin. No matter how much you prepare yourself for that first rejection -- or the tenth or the one hundredth -- it's never easy to hear that someone doesn't love your novel as much as you do. If you take the rejection too close to heart, it becomes harder and harder to write. Me, well, I think all those rejections make a nice conversation peice, especially when applied to the walls like wall paper ;-p
7. Patience truly is a virtue in this business. It takes time to research for a book. Time to write it. Time to edit it and, most of all, time to hear back after you've sent it off.

So, to steal from Ms. Penn, as a writer, what do you wish you'd known before starting your first writing project?