Coming Up Blank

The wonderful thing about writing is that you can always make something out of nothing. It really is the original perpetual motion machine!

If you have a bad day, or a crap interaction, it immediately becomes fodder for your work. Inane conversations on the bus become a lesson in realistic dialogue. Annoying health problems or injuries suddenly manifest in your character and increase the depth of characterisation.

Today I was really stuck for something to blog about, then I realised I could blog about the fact I could not blog about something:)

All writers seem to approach their work from a different angle, and be inspired by different things. So what to do when you come up blank?

Some writers are inspired by natural settings, by the feeling of the landscape itself. I know for myself, some very weird characters and magical ideas can emerge from a quiet natural landscape, especially during storms and at twilight. At the very least it injects some reality into descriptions of scenery and setting.

Others are driven by the ideas themselves (this is very true for me). I can get inspired by interesting non-fiction, good books, films, and other weird ideas or what-ifs that occur to me in my more wistful moments.

Another thing that often gets me going is to plot out maps and put together drawings of the cities where the story takes place. Others might paint characters (I am total crap at drawing) or spend time imagining the settings of the story to get enthused. You can look for movies, books, pieces of music or art that inspire you for the piece you are writing.

I know many writers who write to music. Many take it even further than this - one writer friend of mine has collections of music for different types of scene. If there is an action scene coming up he puts all his 'action' CDs into the player.

Of course to be creative, you also need enough sleep (a challenge for me I can tell you) and to be in good frame of mind. The quality of your food, the amount of rest you get. Health is often neglected by writers, but has a huge impact energy levels. What do you do for stress reduction? That's important as well. How about exercise? Small amounts of low impact activity have been well demonstrated to have large positive effects. Walk the dog.

What do you do when you look for inspiration? Or do you subscribe to the notorious Idea of the Month Club?

Intersection of the Soul's Darkness

Sarah and I have been having an intermittent blogversation about writers, writing, and madness, which got started with my post Dancing in the Shadows of Madness. The next two posts in the series are The Shadows Within, and Voices in the Dark. This installment of the blogversation should be pretty much independent, but I hope a few people decide to read the earlier posts anyway.

I personally - not that I'm at all opinionated - think that the kind of creativity capable of generating novels that feel 'real', like the kind of creativity capable of creating great and intense art, music, theater, or for that matter new insights in science, is actually the same thing as madness, just better controlled. Or perhaps better focused.

To conceptualize something that doesn't actually exist vividly enough that you can bring it into a form of existence and make it temporarily real for other people takes a mind that works very differently from the norm. It took me a while to work this out: like most people I thought I was pretty much normal. Yeah, right. And just what is this 'normal' anyway?

It wasn't until I was well into my teens that I realized 'normal' doesn't seek isolated corners to build imaginary cities out of whatever came to hand and devise tales of how the tiny residents lived. 'Normal' doesn't write obsessively (no, nothing from that time of my life is publishable. I was in full angsty-teen by then, and I had no idea about certain techniques like... er... point of view. Not only did I head-hop in the same paragraph, I did it in the same sentence), nor does it read anything and everything it can get its hands on.

Perhaps more to the point, 'normal' doesn't think about everything, much less question most of it, even the most basic assumptions about how things should be. People who knew me then got to dread the question, "Why?". Sure, it was usually asked in a nasal whine - at least partly the legacy of six months of non-stop tonsillitis when I was four, during which I learned to speak nasally because my throat hurt so damn much - but I still wanted to know why things were how they where.

Why? is probably the most useful question in a writer's repertoire, closely followed by, "What then?". Between those two, you get conflict, which drives plot.

To dig out of that little diversion, it's not mentally healthy to question the fundamentals of your society. People build intricate mental models of how the world works so they don't have to think about the things they need to do - because if you stop to think about the mechanics of, say, driving, you're going to get yourself into all sorts of trouble. Upending those models causes chaos, and makes it more difficult to function in the world that generated them.

When the models in question are things like "how my society works", well... It's not hard to see where breaking that one leads. I should add that you don't have to like something to have a mental model of it. It's just that breaking it means you're back to dealing with things from observation and thought, which isn't easy.

Insanity can be considered as the mental state of broken/non-functional models. Sometimes it's chemical: there's a malfunction in how the intricate biomechanisms running the brain work (see Speaker's Lab Rat's Guide to the Brain for a whole lot of information about that). Sometimes it's situational: some circumstance overloads the models and forces them to break down. Usually people recover from the second one, but the first is something you live with, sometimes - like me - with lots of pharmaceutical assistance.

Not everyone can deal with that level of dissonance. I suspect that those who can are what gets labeled creative - they've learned to channel the dissonance into socially acceptable forms and to pretend normality well enough to more or less 'pass' (some better than others. I've become rather better at passing in the last few years. That or ceasing to care what other people think of me is delightfully liberating and no-one is daring to tell me I'm not socially acceptable).

At any rate, the kind of mind that can simultaneously live in ancient Rome with magic, this world, and eldritch battlefields facing all the demons of Hell, is not the kind of mind that gets the stamp of approval from whoever it is that decides what 'sane' is.

Having been given the option of mental hospital (I refused), I know what it's like to have everything break. I wonder sometimes if there's a better way to handle those who can't focus the weird into something acceptable, so long as they're not going to endanger others (if the voices are telling you that you need to kill someone, you do need to be on the wrong side of locked doors for everyone else's safety - unless you kill them in effigy, the way I do in my writing when someone has irritated me enough). I'm not sure that there's a nice easy dividing line, either. Hell, I know there isn't. Depending on how things are doing, I range from 'can pass' to 'needs suicide watch' (that hasn't happened in a long time thank God), and I'm far from alone in that.

The question that disturbs me, though, when I look at how savagely conformist the trends are at the moment (just ask Sarah about the state of schools in the USA), is whether we're killing the creative types before they can learn to channel their differences. Not much can give me nightmares, but the thought of a world without writers, artists, and the like does.

Going Deeper

As some of you know, I’ve lately been reading romances.

Now, in a woman who’d come no nearer romance than Austen and Shakespeare until her late thirties, this must be understood in the way of a daring expedition into unknown and somewhat strange territory.

Picture me, in fact, in helmet and safari suit, led by a troupe of – possibly pink-attired – natives, penetrating impenetrable jungles.

Only as far as that goes, I would be a terrible explorer. Rather than penetrating deep (it’s so wrong to use this expression with romance, I know) into the contemporary swamps, I mostly stay around the edges of regencies – i.e. near the native villages of historical, which I have visited before.

Part of the reason for this is the reason I no longer read mysteries in the way I now read romance. Growing up I considered Science Fiction and Fantasy “real” reading, while mystery was what I read when otherwise out of “real” books, and/or, later on, as “popcorn.” Popcorn books are read without studying them and without any necessity to feel like I’m competing with them.

As it’s probably obvious part of what chased me out of mystery is that I started writing it. But the other part is what makes contemporary mystery – and a lot of science fiction and fantasy – odious to me.

I’m perfectly willing – no, look, I’m used to – skipping the political screeds in the middle of books. That’s fine. They’re particularly funny in older mysteries which assure me that such and such event/policy will destroy all life as we know it by... well, earlier than now. So, cool.

But while I’ve my entire life worked on the principle that everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion, I do take offense to people being entitled to their own facts and both in mystery and SF and for that matter contemporary romance, I run across an awful lot of stuff where I go “Well, now. I’ve never met a woman who worked THAT way.” Or “Yeah, you know, I refuse to entertain the idea I found the only man in the universe who is not an abuser.” And in the last ten years or so, either I’ve got more crotchety (Hey, you kids, get off my literary lawn!) or the instances of this type of nonsense have gotten WAY thicker. I’d suspect both, as the older I get the more I have trouble suffering fools – gladly or otherwise – and as we’re churning out generations of women who have been taught an entirely imaginary history, not to mention sociology and economics. (You need to be exquisitely educated and exceedingly brilliant to believe that much nonsense.)

Anyway, so I ended up reading mostly historical mystery but some years ago the publishers decided historical mystery was out. (No, don’t tell me it didn’t sell. It was a niche, like anything else is, practically. Mostly it didn’t sell because the publishers wouldn’t get it on shelves. They decided all that needed to be pushed was what I call “sex and the city” mysteries, which is fine, but I’m simply not that interested in shoes. Oh, and craft mysteries, which are the resurgence of the cozies they also decided wouldn’t sell about twenty years ago -- but the fact I write those about furniture refinishing should tell you how ‘with it’ I am about crafts.)

I still need popcorn books. These are things read when cooking or cleaning, and usually not remembered at all. The things I consider ‘vacation’ because I can retreat into them and not think about much of anything. Ideally they’re the books I read while walking around amusement parks in the wake of the boys.

So I started reading romances. (They’re also great recessionary reading because I can buy a used book for a dollar pretty consistently, and then I can trade them in, four for one more book. And it is only after two of these transactions that I have to head to the used bookstore with thirty dollars again. So, a month’s worth of popcorn reading might cost me fifty.)

Unfortunately, you can take the writer out of her field, but you can’t make her stop being a writer.

So lately my mind has been turning on what makes some of the regency-popcorn I’ve been ingesting particularly tasty, and what makes some of it a snort-giggle fest.

We’ll eliminate genius from the equation, first. I should point out what led me on this primrose (or at least pinkish) path to hell to begin with was Dave Freer making me read Georgette Heyer. I’ll say it right now: Heyer is not like any other regency romance. Just isn’t, period. That’s genius.

So, I’m fairly sure I’m not a genius, and that’s where THAT analysis ends. Now, onto the other ones.

Like with any other genre I plunge into, I started noticing stylistic and character building stuff in some of the books I buy more or less blindly (no, really blindly sometimes. As in, I tell my friend at the used bookstore “grab me thirty regencies, put in a bag, I’ll pick them up in an hour.) So I started making “friends” – i.e. “I like her style, I’ll look for her name.” – and “enemies” – “oh, my freaking Lord, I’d pull out my eyes rather than try to read anything else by this woman” lists. We’ll leave those aside too. Right now my hatreds are way more violent than my loves which mostly rise to “oh, okay, she’s pleasant.”

Instead, let’s say that in the mass of books I get I get any number of “category” romances, as well as the more complex – better covers, far more push – “bigger” romances.

It wasn’t till this weekend I realized I could tell which one I was reading and would be able to even on kindle, with no cover or weight to tip me off to which it was. And then it occurred to me you might be interested, as I suspect this applies to all books.

A lot of the category romances are painless enough to read. None has made it to my hate list. On the other hand, none has come close to the love list.

What I will say for them is this – none of them is very deep. Now I think a lot of people have made this observation and in usual the cure for it from editors – who are not, after all writers, and who are, most of them university graduates in the fuzzier fields – is “let’s make it relevant.” This usually results in the injection of the sort of ideas that could only pass as facts on a college campus. I suppose that makes them feel “deeper” or more “relevant” if you either agree with them and/or you’ve been living in an hermetically sealed chamber for the last fifty years and the idea that someone would write a book positing women are the equals (or even the superiors) of men is a mind blowing thought. For the rest of us it amounts very much to a yawn.

No, what makes these books – as opposed to other regency romances – lighter or less relevant or, let’s face it, less interesting is more difficult to correct and I’d say it’s this: the writer studiously avoids the big emotions.

I realized this last night as I was reading one where a young girl “ruins” herself by attending a masquerade and being recognized. In one of the “bigger” books, this would be a serious thing (whether historically accurate or not is something totally different) and the subplot of her finding true love despite this would be if not the secondary subplot (she’s the supporting-role character) to the entire book, at least the subject of the second half of the book. It would require some soul-searching and changes on her part. You’d see character growth. In this book it is merely a diversion on the way to something else, and a reason to go to the country for a few days and you know that the problem will be solved in the way other problems in this book are solved: through luck.

In fact, we already know how it will be solved because, behind the back of the character, we hear that the guy who bragged of seeing her is not really believed since, what young lady of proper upbringing would go unmasked at a masquerade? Coincidence also helps a character follow another character who elopes, because someone with a carriage just drives by. In other words, it is too easy.

Is that all, you say, and you’ll remind me Heyer also employs coincidences. Well, sure. But because not everything is easy and passing, you don’t feel the coincidences are unwarranted. In this book the coincidences mar a plot punctuated with irrelevancy.

What do I mean irrelevancy? Well... take the disgrace above, even though we’re assured it won’t matter in the long run and the girl is none too worried about it and doesn’t seem to give it a thought, this is the reason the main male character chooses to throw a hissy fit we never saw coming, and the reason the girl then chooses to elope with someone she never looked at twice before, and who in fact doesn’t want to elope with her. Uh?

In the better romances, they start with something the character wants desperately (and usually it’s not JUST love) and then wind love and other contretemps around it, TIGHTLY never letting go until the climatic moment.

What this means is that people don’t acquire emotions and discard them simply to move the plot forward. If they want something they’ll continue wanting it until they either get it or are convinced it’s bad for them. The emotions don’t LET UP. They continue going deeper and deeper throughout the book.

If you do that, then even a fluffy romance can touch the heart of the human condition. I know it’s uncomfortable and it requires putting a lot of yourself in, to go into the emotions – but trust me, it’s the only way to make your book memorable and rising above the general stream of pap. And it doesn’t matter what field you write in.

*Crossposted at According To Hoyt*

Doing the Happy Dance!

We writers spend most of our time in the 'writing cave', head down living in our imaginary worlds. We send out the stories we've slaved our, poured our hearts and souls into, never knowing if they will be accepted by a publisher.

And, even if they are published, there is so much that is beyond our control. We don't know if the cover will do the book justice, if it will say 'Pick me up, I'm fantasy and you love fantasy!'. We have no control over things like bookstore chains going bankrupt and leaving our book sitting in a warehouse somewhere, not that this has happened so me, as far as I know. But I once heard of a romance writer whose books were sent via train and the train was derailed.

So when we get a good cover we do the happy dance! Here is it The Outcast Chronicles book one cover. (Yes, I know there is a typo in the title. I didn't see it. I think the publishers and I were so preoccupied by the design, we didn't see the misspelling).

Your publishers will ask you for cover suggestions. Don't expect the artist to read your book. Have a file prepared. I have a Resonance file with pictures of what the city/country is like, how the people dress etc. I also write up a description of the main characters so that the artist can capture their personality. And I surf the internet to see what kind of covers are currently out there and collect covers that I admire to show the kind of look I'd like.

What had you done to prepare a Resonance file on your current manuscript?

My computer has been playing up so my DH is going to reformat it. I may be out of contact for 24 hours. (Hopefully, it will be less than that as I have deadlines).

Satisfaction

Well, I'm feeling very cheery to hear my favorite villain Osama bin liner is dead. There is something cathartic about finally getting the bad guy. Of course Kate's post some time back about the complexity of villains springs to mind: this was a man to whom life, innocent babies even, were chaff, to killed without qualm or guilt. The sort of human being who is model villain... but who convinced millions that he was a wonderful man and a great leader, and that somehow, just because he told them to do something which any human with a shred of decency or fellow feeling for anyone else would find abhorrent, and justified it in terms of their predjudices, he was worthy of their worship and unquestioning loyalty. The parallels with Adolph Hitler, Stalin, and even Mugabe are obvious. Some humans have a weakness for villains, and, even if it is not a majority of humans with this weakness , the minority following these pieces of snake excreta are most earnest and brutal in their following and unquestioning dumb 'loyalty'

It's a real challenge to get right in your writing. Because, yeah, the real major villain has people who believe in him (or her) and think their actions are heroic. And the trouble with doing it too well is of course that the book can become a masterpiece of realism... and an excercise in Mick Jagger (I can't get no...)
Because yes, it's not inevitable and it's not every book, but WE LIKE TO SEE THE VILLIAN GET HIS. It leaves us satisfied. It's as much of a delight that the noxious Dursleys get it Harry Potter, or Reacher Gilt fail to look at the door he's stepping through and all his greedy little cohort go down.

So what books left you feeling "YES, that sorted the Bastards!" and which didn't - but you still loved?

And the winner is. . . .

Drum roll please. . . .

Stephen Simmons.

Steve, email me or leave a comment here about what prize you want. You can have any two e-titles from NRP or one print novel (Nocturnal Origins, Impaler, Death of a Musketeer, or The Calvanni by Chris McMahon).

Congrats to Steve and thanks to everyone who entered. You really made it hard for the judges to decide a winner.

So here's the question. . . Would you like to see more contests on MGC? If so, what sort?

(Sarah said to tell you she has t-shirts with the world's worst cover, guaranteed to become collectors items, she'll be glad to donate to the cause.)

Sunday Morning Thoughts

An announcement first. The winner of the writing prompt contest will be announced later today. We apologize for the delay, but several of our judges are fighting deadlines right now and are running behind. So, check back later this afternoon or this evening to see who won.

As I sit here this morning, staring at the computer screen and trying to figure out what to write, a lot of things pop into my head. I could do a follow-up to the on-going debate about Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea. Or there is the Borders bankruptcy and their "need" for another $50 million in financing even as they give their executives bonuses. Or there's the latest insanity -- the witch hunt in Pennsylvania where a group of parents are trying to force a teacher to choose between teaching their little darlings high school English or continue writing erotica (see here and here).

All of those are good topics. They just don't call to me this morning. So, with your indulgence, I want to expound on something Sarah commented on in her last post.

One of the questions she addressed was if e-books are "merely paper books transformed to electrons". It would have been easy to answer "yes" and go on from there. Instead, Sarah brought up the so-called "enhanced" e-books we see advertised in the iBookstore and, to a lesser degree, at Barnes & Noble. For those not aware of what these "enhanced" e-books are, they are e-books with active hyperlinks, video, author interviews, etc., included with the book. Think of it as the director's cut of a DVD. You get the book plus all these extras.

I'll admit, I'm torn about the enhanced e-books. Part of it is as Sarah said. Someone clicking a hyperlink and navigating away from the book may not return. If they don't return, they don't finish the book. If they don't finish the book, they don't buy my next book. See the problem?

The enhancements such as hyperlinks and embedded video might work for non-fiction works, especially text books. I know having that sort of reference at the touch of a finger in college would have been wonderful. However, I don't want it for my fiction. Either the writer has crafted a story strong enough to pull me in or they haven't. Adding music and video and links will only distract me. I shouldn't have to hear the theme from Jaws to know the main character is in danger. The words on the screen should be enough. Remember, the words paint the picture.

Mind you, this is coming from the girl who loves tech toys. Maybe that's why that particular question struck me. I've spent a good part of this past week looking at tablets -- no, not the iPad or the new Galaxy Tab. As much as I'd love to have either one, they are outside of my price range. So I've been doing my research. Part of that was to look at the Nook Color. Here's a tablet most folks will think of as an e-book reader first and that led me to think about enhanced e-books.

My question is if these enhanced e-books will last or if they are just a flash in the pan. My gut feeling is that they will last, in some form, for textbooks and reference books. But I don't think we'll see them long term for fiction. This is simply because the latest figures I've seen about people who actually read using their iPad are dismal. I'll bet if a comprehensive study was done, that would be the trend for all tablets. People see them more as computing devices and not as reading devices. But it is actually more fundamental than that. Enhanced e-books cost more than regular e-books and we all know about the controversy surrounding e-book pricing. Will readers willingly pay more for a book with an author interview and active hyperlinks than they will for "just" the book? Will enough readers do so?

Who knows? All I can say is that it will be interesting to see where things go from here. Fingers crossed it's "interesting" in a fun way and not in the proverbial "may you live in interesting times" way.