memery

Disabled

I don’t seem to post about much other than writing these days. Maybe because writing is eating my head?

In an attempt to provide a pale shadow of variety, I give you . . . a meme about writing!

(From David Moles originally, by way of anghara.)

    Ten Things I Don’t Know About Writing
    1. How to describe people’s faces. I really, really suck at it.
    2. How to create truly broken characters. I’m getting better at incorporating flaws, but the real headcases are still beyond me.
    3. How to avoid the phrases “for a moment,” “at last,” “finally,” and their near cousins. Weasel words are showing up less in my prose, but those are still driving me crazy.
    4. How to really hack something up in revision. The occasions when I’ve been able to do this, it’s generally taken a year or more of downtime for me to get sufficient perspective. My revision tends to be more of the polishing sort.
    5. How to write sex scenes. I’m with Alma on this one; they just tend to happen offscreen. Which leads to an awkward compromise in one unpublished novel where the mechanics of what’s going on are actually relevant.
    6. How to outline. I suspect this is on a lot of lists. I’m very glad my editor doesn’t ask for real outlines. (She asked for one the other day, but it turned out to be more like “two paragraphs we can use for promotional purposes,” which is much more within my reach.)
    7. Corollary: how to estimate length. I can try, and sometimes I’m more or less right, but with The Waking of Angantyr, the last novel I wrote before selling Doppelganger, I whiplashed back and forth between “how am I going to make it to eighty thousand words” to “oh jeebus this thing is going to be at least a hundred and fifty thousand.” (It ended up at 123K.)
    8. How to describe nature. I grew up in suburbia. That’s a tree. Over there is a bird. What kind? Hell if I know.
    9. How to get really squicky. I have friends who adore the grotesque. I am not like them. Some of my stories edge closer to horror, but I’ve never managed anything really and truly gruesome or horrific.
    10. How to describe my own writing. One tip for query letters to agents and (book) editors involves saying what authors you’re similar to, or what audiences might like your novel (e.g. “This story would appeal to readers of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice“). I can’t do it. I don’t think I’m such a perfectly unique snowflake that I am beyond comparison; I just have no idea who I should be compared to. Which led to some pretty crappy query letters on my part, I imagine.

How about you all? What don’t you know? (Or any good tips on learning the things I don’t know?)

0 Responses to “memery”

  1. moonandserpent

    5. How to write sex scenes.

    I tell ya, they’re like fight scenes.

    Although if you ever actually end up using the word “swordfight” you lose.

  2. rj_anderson

    I adore doing #1, and indeed have to be forcibly prevented from doing so. Bone structure, nose and eye shape, skin and eye color, the way the hair hangs… I could go on forever. However, #3, #4, #7, #8 and especially #10 are me all over. I had to do a lot of research on #8 for my last novel and am going to have to do some more for this one.

    Further to #10, I tried to come up with a marketing-type description for my latest novel and it ended up as “It’s like Thomas Covenant meets Watership Down. With faeries.” Which is really not very accurate at all. But I thought the whole point was to write something that isn’t exactly like X, Y and Z stuff already out there? So confusing.

    #6 would have been my nemesis not that long ago, but in the last three months I have become positively addicted to outlining and writing synopses. The trick is to do it all before writing the book, and then to edit and revise the outline/synopsis as necessary during the writing process. I got a lot of great ideas from Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, which I’ve adapted to my own peculiar needs. I’ve found the Character Map exercises on Laurie Hutzler’s Emotional Toolbox site to be helpful for fleshing out characters and figuring out their conflicts (as well as how they would conflict with each other), too.

    • Marie Brennan

      Re #10: That’s the other pitfall; my agent has said it’s also not very helpful to describe one’s novel as being the collision of several utterly unrelated things. (“It’s Bridget Jones, but in the style of a Tom Clancy thriller, with the temporal scope of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy!” Okay, so how the hell is she supposed to market that to editors? Where would it be shelved in the store?) You don’t want to write something exactly like everything else out there, but on the other hand, if you go too wildly off on a tangent, nobody — agents, editors, booksellers, readers — will know what to do with it.

      • moonandserpent

        “It’s Bridget Jones, but in the style of a Tom Clancy thriller, with the temporal scope of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy!”

        I would read that in a heartbeat.

        Just so you know.

      • rj_anderson

        “It’s Bridget Jones, but in the style of a Tom Clancy thriller, with the temporal scope of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy!”

        I would SO read that. 🙂

        Seriously, it’s a good point, but that description would be a case of colliding genres, and therefore an obvious shelving and marketing problem. When you’re referring to several works in the same genre to get your description, I’d think it wouldn’t be nearly so problematic…?

        I find it a lot easier to talk about the authors that have influenced my writing generally than to try and come up with comparisons for my individual books. But even then it’s a stretch — I mean, just because I have read oodles of Patricia McKillip and drooled over her prose doesn’t mean my writing style is similar, or that my plots and characters resemble hers. (For one thing, I hope my plots make more sense.)

        I could sometimes wish it did work that way, though: I’d give my left arm to be able to write like Sayers or Dunnett.

        • Marie Brennan

          Seriously, it’s a good point, but that description would be a case of colliding genres, and therefore an obvious shelving and marketing problem. When you’re referring to several works in the same genre to get your description, I’d think it wouldn’t be nearly so problematic…?

          Well, if you claim to be a hybrid of George R.R. Martin and Tom Holt, they’ll still have trouble knowing how to market you. But in general, I think their ideal is for you to be close enough to familiar things that they know where to start, while still doing something original enough to stand out.

          Which is rather like juggling greased batons while balancing on a wire. But y’know.

          I find it a lot easier to talk about the authors that have influenced my writing generally than to try and come up with comparisons for my individual books. But even then it’s a stretch —

          Welcome to my boat; there’s room for everybody! I can tell you who I admire, but I don’t think I sound anything like most (or any) of them.

  3. sartorias

    These are fascinating to read, glimpses of writerly process.

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