Flashbacks

I recently read a novel by a first time author that included heavy use of flashbacks. The writer will, I hope, do well as he has a good style and invents interesting characters. However, the flashbacks ruined the book for me. The primary now-time story could not have sustained a novel.

The flashbacks covered the key events in the primary character's life over decades that explained his character and situation, starting at the age of five years or so. Important characters in the flashbacks had no connection with the now-time plot, which I found confusing.

This novel made me realise why I dislike flashbacks in stories. It takes a skillful author to handle the plot construction. David Drake pulled it off in one of his Venus stories but he is extremely gifted and experienced in matters of plot construction.

It also struck me that flashbacks are rarely necessaey. The story that prompted this article could easily have been constructed as a chronologically linear story, telling the protagonists tale from childhood to adult, as in Great Expectations for example.

Is this just me? Are there stories where multiple flashbacks are necessary to the plot? Are there stories that have been improved by flashbacks?

John

PS: As I mentioned Great Expectations, I thought you might like to see Cooling Churchyard where Pip met Magwitch. The photo shows the childrens' graves of Pip's brothers and sisters. Dickens based his stories on real places that caught hid imagination. many are on the North Kent Coast.

Antagonist Viewpoint

How far should a writer journey into an antagonist’s mind? How far should they go in presenting this on the page?

I don’t think anyone is going to dispute that fact we need to know the antagonist’s backstory and motivations in order to construct the story. But how much to present?

I personally love writers who give you the full viewpoint of the bad guy. That was one of my frustrations with writers such as Tolkien, where the ultimate bad guy remains little more than a dark cloud on the horizon over Mordor, and the menace of a floating eye glimpsed for a moment from an old stone chair. Can you imagine LoR where you get to see inside Sauron’s mind?

David Gemmell loved to get inside the villain’s head. I always enjoyed his exploration of the bad guys thinking process, where evil acts were often rationalized as the sensible choices made by any rational man -- how there was no good or evil, no ultimate morality, only power and weakness, and those with the strength to do what the weak feared. The sort of reasoning that appeals to psychopaths. Great stuff.

For me it always heightened the final conflict, to see the good guy and the bad guy coming at each other, both inside their minds, and also in the story. An inevitable pair of tangents that had to intersect spectacularly. And when the bad guy took his last gasp and uttered a few fateful words – you knew exactly where these sat in terms of his thinking.

I tend to always give my bad guys a good slice of PoV, not too much -- usually around 5% of the story – but a like to get inside their heads. I like to think this increases the sense of menace and raises the stakes for the good guy.

What are your thoughts on writing the antagonist’s viewpoint? Is the Evil Overlord better as an unknowable mystery? Or do you like to see the dark mechanics of his twisted mind?

A Tinker's Lot is not a Happy One

Or: travel and trade in medieval times

Continuing my erratic tour of the middle ages for writers, I'm moving on to the question of travel and trade. For those whose attention spans don't survive their jobs, I'm doing this because the default setting for fantasy is something that looks sort of medieval with castles and sometimes knights and usually lords, and always a whole lot of oppressed peasants (Of course they're oppressed. It's kind of de riguer in modern fantasy. A kingdom that isn't oppressing its peasants isn't trying).

The actual era - mostly from around 1100-ish through the early renaissance, say 1500, 1600 or thereabouts - was rather more complex. While most people would never travel more than a few miles from their village, that didn't mean they were completely isolated. What happened was rather more like the current-day New Guinea uplands, where there are different dialects, cultures and languages within a relatively short distance. (As an aside, this is why England has so many dialects and accents. The same happens elsewhere in Europe, too - and a regional dialect can identify someone's home to within a few miles)

Every community saw a number of travelers each year. Those nearer the cities saw more, while the more remote communities might only see a few travelers. Some of the 'traveling classes' were the tinkers, who made minor repairs to pots and pans and sold small goods, various pedlars usually selling whatever they could carry, various flavors of gypsy (largely distrusted since even the best tended to regard the belongings of non-gypsies as theirs for the taking - yes those reputations tend to be based on a certain amount of fact), and entertainers, including jongleurs, troubadours and so forth (usually conflated as 'minstrels', and generally the carriers of news about the rest of the world). Often when a number of the travelers were in the area at the one time, there would be a fair where people could relax and forget their normal concerns for an afternoon or so, sell the "crafts" (weaving, wood carving, anything they could do that would sell) to the travelers, and stock up on the goods that weren't locally available.

Nearer the large cities and on the major trade routes, wagons and large groups of traders would travel equally well-defined circuits, sometimes covering hundreds of miles in Europe. The Silk Road stretched from Italy to China, with variants that ran through Constantinople, went by sea to avoid the never-ending wars for possession of the Balkan areas, sometimes via the Arabian Peninsula and sometimes north through Mongolia. It wasn't just silk that was carried. Trade empires were built on exotic spices - which are now commonplace for us. Salt was such a valuable commodity it was kept in a container on the high table - hence 'below the salt' meaning of lesser value. Pepper and other more exotic spices were weight for weight more valuable than gold at times (depending on how dangerous it was to get them from where they were grown).

Dyes were another lucrative trade item. A dye that would hold (was 'fast') and give a rich, strong color was immensely valuable. Sumptuary laws limited the access of many people to the best fabrics and dyes, although ingenious people always found ways around them. Slipping out of period a little, one reason why 'russet' is such a common color for clothing in Elizabethan times is that the black dye in use at the time faded to that color. Someone wearing russet was basically wearing old, faded clothing he or she couldn't afford to re-dye.

Another interesting feature of medieval times that generated a fair amount of travel - one that grew less important as the feudal system broke down - was the 'free city'. These were cities which weren't owned by anyone in particular but were jointly governed by a council of some sort, usually under royal charter. One of the reasons London became such a major center is that it was a free city.

Free cities attracted runaways who would apprentice themselves or find some other legal means of remaining in the city for the allowed length of time (Usually a year and a day, if I remember right). For youngsters who showed talent in a particular field, the nearest free city was a beacon of potential freedom - although if they became apprentices, they were the lowest ranked apprentices and could anticipate seven years or more of hard labor before they emerged as fully fledged guildsmen. In an era with strict limits on moving between classes, the free cities were the loophole.

Of course, rebellious youngsters joined the travelers as well, becoming entertainers or pedlers or tinkers or whatever (rarely gypies, as the gypsy clans tended to be rather insular). And even the travelers were bound by class - those who did the village circuits were lower status than the merchants who carried wagonloads of goods from city to city. But, when you consider the difficulties of travel in a world that was just starting to pull itself out of the gulf that was left by the collapse of the Roman Empire (yes, it did take close to a thousand years to recover, and we still haven't worked out some of the Roman technologies), there was a surprising amount of it.

But You Have To Send A SASE

The most commonly asked question to any writer is "Where do you get your ideas?" My favorite answer is "Hayes, Kansas, you have to enclose a SASE."

So, what does this have to do with short stories? Or were you hoping I had forgotten? (Evil laugh? What evil laugh? I just choked on my tea.)

The reason we’re going to take a detour through ideas is that generating ideas is both more important and more difficult with short stories. (Pauses for appropriate question.) Right. You see, novel ideas tend to be things you have to live with for a year or so (okay, three days, but only one novel. Yes, I realize it sold better than all the others. Shut up now, or I give you homework.) They usually speak to something deep within you or at the very least are around themes that have always interested you.

Short story ideas, otoh, are lighter, smaller, self-contained, and depending on your speed of writing you won’t have to live with them for more than a week or so, and after you get a little more practice, probably no more than a day. Also – remember that short stories are both your practice in sending things out and your "loss leader" and promotion once you’re published – you’ll need a lot more short story ideas.

When our group required each member to send out a short story a week, we developed many means of coming up with short stories. For instance, we had a set of ziplocs. One labeled character, another setting and another problem. Inside each back were a ton of little strips of paper, each with, well... a character, a problem and a setting. You got one from each baggie, and off you went.

I can see you staring at me in horror. Yes, I can. Stop it. You’re thinking I’m a total hack and that no idea generated that way could be any good. Try it. For one, sometimes the sheer mismatch of elements required extra creativity. One of the group members got Flea, The Moon and Hunger. She wrote a story about an orphan nicknamed Flea, in a moon colony. The thing is exactly that – these words give you something to start thinking about, but the story that emerges is always ... yours. In a way that can’t be imitated by anyone else.

I confess that this particular form of coming up with story ideas never worked for me. Not sure why. The other method is to start from a sentence. One of the ones we used was "Step away from that feather boa" and even though the entire group started from the same sentence, the stories ran the gamut from sf to funny fantasy.

A method that worked very well for me was the dictionary potluck. Open the dictionary twice. Write a story centering on those two ideas. For instance, my story Sugarbush Soul came from that. You are allowed a discard, btw, and in that case I discarded twice – had to. First draws were Sugarbush Stroke. Followed by Sugarbush Whip. (Gah.)

Another method that worked well for me was to take a headline and "twist" it. Usually I discarded the two first, obvious twists from the headline, because they’re likely to have been done before. (No, really. Look, I’m fairly sure that’s how they come up with most sf movies in Hollywood. Water World. The Postman. Ridiculous stuff that would never fly in a real novel. Or even a short.)

Before we pass on to the exercises (Well, I didn’t tell you I WOULDN’T give you homework) let me touch the concept of stories-that-are-great-but-not-yours. You’ll get these every once in a while, when you start tinkering with ideas. An idea of absolute and undeniable brilliance will hit you, and you’ll pursue it, and it will take you months to realize it was never your idea to write. My son Robert, for ex, had a brilliant short story idea once, called The Minotaur Does Not Bleed – in which the minotaur was a war robot that accidentally gets sent back in time. Look, it’s a great idea. He can’t write it. And he won’t let me do it (the little so and so.) It’s not just that the research would take him years, it’s simply that a serious, mil sf short story is completely at odds with his authorial personality. But he is not experienced enough to realize this, and is sure that in another few years he can do it. (This is also possible. Take my short story, Thirst. I first had the idea for it five years before I wrote it. I also thought it was a novel idea. It took me years of toying around with it before I grew into the author that could write it.) This doesn’t mean it’s always "the story is too good for your ability." It’s often just not for you. Learn to let it go. Like the sappy saying goes – if it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was. Generate a new idea and move on. And submit, submit, submit. The stories ain't gonna sell themselves -- if you don't send them out.

Your challenges, if you should wish to accept them – without reading any of your fellows replies, until you have done yours – let’s try the following. I give you an example each of these story generators, and you give me a sentence description of the story you’d write from it (giving me something about the character. Say for first method, I get Angel, Desert, Nudity. My answer would go something like this: Explorer lost in planet where natives think he’s an angel has to find a suit that will protect him from radiation, while thwarted by interplanetary regulations on how you can dress in space. – fine, it sucks, but you get the idea) Okay, let’s start:

Random character/setting/problem: King; Spaceship; Confusion
Beginning sentence: He hated it when he woke up dead.
Dictionary draw: Mythopeic; cere (and in case you have to do a discard or two) turquoise; mutation
Ripped from the headlines (BEG) - (in this one you can take the route of the technology as a basis for a story or simply the title) – from the WSJ – The Book That Contains All Books
The globally available Kindle could mark as big a shift for reading as the printing press and the codex

Now, have fun. I’ll look over your ideas and point out if you aren’t doing it right ;) Oh, and it’s perfectly fine to comment on each other’s ideas – AFTER you write yours.

Mini Nano for Wimps

Some of my friends are doing Nano -- setting themselves the challenge of writing 50K in a month.

I'm not so brave. I've set myself the challenge of writing 25K, a Mini Nano.

I could list my excuses but I won't. We all have work and families.

I've started a new job and find it eats into my time, much more than 'two days a week' should. So I've started carrying around a little laptop. I call it 'Baby Bug'. My sons laugh at me. But it helps having a lap top that's small enough to fit in my bag. I can pull it out anywhere and start writing.

I know a friend who goes to a coffee shop, so she has coffee on tap, and no family interruptions.

What do you do to keep up your word count? Do you set mini goals, like my Mini Nano? Do you carry around a note pad, or a lap top? Do you run away to write?

Slow tide rising

"There is a tide, which, if taken at the flood..."
Yeah well. At the moment I must admit to feeling like I am walking along a huge sandspit of very soft sand, textured and shaped by the waves and currents of the past - the landscape of publishing and book-buying. There are some magnicent sandcastles on it, built on the hillocks, commanding all that they survey.

But lately I've noticed the ripples of sea-water edging into the lowest points. Not a surging wave... just a foam-edged trickle... electronic publishing. A new tide and its waves are coming to affect that landscape. If it is the full tide I think it's going to be the builders of the castles had better start piling sand or prepare to move to new shoreline.

It's taking various forms: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/10/kindle-numbers-traditional-publishing.html (and an answer to that http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2009/10/you-can-become-a-kindle-millionaire-part-joe.html )

or as a different approach http://www.cherryh.com/WaveWithoutAShore/?p=406

and I am sure some of the tide will falter, and at least that parts of it will change nothing. The keeper of the castles are building little ramparts as fast as they're able. And they are the only ones on the beach with spades (and in some cases, steam-shovels). If they build fast and clever they could still survive the tide. We'll need gatekeepers and promotion. Websites like Amazon have huge traffic to sweep the sand up around them. Publishers have accumulated sand (or capital and contacts). Big bookstores have dug quite large moats.

But I don't think anyone knows where it is going. All we know is the landscape is going to change.
So how best do we-- the writers -- navigate that? How do we avoid being swept away completely?
How are we to adapt?
What should we be doing?
What do we need to avoid?
Thoughts, gentle-folk?

Shiny Vampires and Emo Weres

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm an old-fashioned sort of girl. I like my monsters to be, well, monsters. Vampires should be creatures of the night. They don't go out in the light, at least not without getting a really serious case of sunburn, and they most certainly don't go to high school. Werewolves are ruled by the cycle of the Moon and shifting from human to wolf or back again isn't quick and painless.

So, faced with the split in current literature -- don't hit me for using the "L" word. I mean it in it's most general, least insulting way. Truly I do. -- how do you go about setting the stage for your vampires or weres?

The first thing you need to know as the writer is how your vampire or were (or shifter) came to be.

There are any number of legends out there that can be the basis of their metamorphosis. A person can become a werewolf (or other type of were) through magic, a pact with the devil or a demon, a curse, or through infection. American Indians have legends about skinwalkers who hang the pelt of the animal they want to become on their belts and through various means become the animal when putting on the pelt. There are legends about the seventh son of the seventh son or those conceived under the new moon or born on a full moon Friday the 13th becoming weres. Then you have genetic mutation, both natural and of the mad scientist type. There are others, all of which make good fodder for the backstory of a novel.

Vampires can be turned by another vampire -- we're all probably familiar with this one. Legend also has it that if a child is conceived during a holy period or if that child is the illegitimate offspring of illegitimate parents, he will become a vampire. As with weres, there is also the mutation theory as well as any number of others out there to play with.

Another issue you have to consider as a writer is what happens to your character after he's been "changed" or "turned". How does this affect his humanity? A were or shifter is human when in human form. At least initially. But what happens when he's in his animal form? Does he maintain the ability to think and reason? Or does he become fully animal? Does his humanity decrease the more he shifts and does there come a time when, if he stays in his animal form too long, he can no longer shift back to his human form?

Versions of the same questions can be asked about the vampire. Does death, and possibly the loss of his soul, remove his humanity? How does this affect him and his interactions with the humans he is going to come into contact with? More importantly, if he doesn't have a soul, can he relate to those non-vamps in your story in a way that seems even vaguely human (yes, I know this is a religious and moral issue. I happen to think it is one you have to deal with). Another question to ask is what being basically immortal will do to your vampire. Is the human mind capable of maintaining its sanity over the centuries, especially if your vampire has any sort of emotional ties to humans over those long years?

With regard to your characters changing into the appropriate "creature of the night" (no, this is not a cue for the song of that title from Rocky Horror), how does the change occur? I just saw an ad for the latest Twilight movie where the emo were takes a flying leap and changes from human to wolf in the blink of an eye. Of course, the shiny vampire was there too and, oh, it's daylight. Sorry, back to the topic and away from my pet peeves.

Does your were shift only during the full moon? What are the mechanics of the shift? Is it slow and painful? Do you take into account mass to mass ratio? In other words, does it violate the rules of your world for a 5' tall, slender young woman to shift into a mouse -- or into a mastodon? Does your vampire change into a bat? If he does, is it only one bat and a normal sized one at that or a number of bats? Sally, in Terry Pratchett's THUD!, turns into 130 bats, some of whom occasionally fly off, making it a real pain to re-materialize as a "human". Another interesting twist on the common vampire mythos is that only the male vampires reappear fully clothed. For some reason, the female vampires don't. Which can make for some embarrassing situations.

Other issues to deal with are deciding if your world knows about the existence of the weres or vampires. If they do, how did they learn about the existence of the "monsters" and how are they adapting to that knowledge. The early Anita Blake books by Laurel K. Hamilton are good about showing how the world is slowly admitting to the knowledge of weres and vamps, if not exactly accepting them. If the world doesn't know about them, how are they trying to keep their presence a secret? This is especially tricky in this day and age of forensic science and video cameras on every corner.

What other issues do you see in writing about werewolves and vampires? What do you think about the current trend of making them "human" with extra powers ala Twilight and its ilk?