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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

story!

It took me substantially longer than expected (the last scene was an absolute bear to write), but I just finished “To Rise No More.”

Needs revision, of course, but right now, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’ve managed to write a short story! And not even one that was spoken for before I wrote it. The last seven things I wrote sold on their first trip out the door, because they were either solicited by editors or very nearly so, i.e. I knew that if I wrote them, then so-and-so was extremely likely to buy the result. Which isn’t a bad position to be in, of course — but it’s less good when you have to use that as a motivation to actually get the thing done. This one, I wrote because I wanted to.

Hopefully somebody will buy the result. 🙂

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hahaha, you only *thought* my brain was helpful

I’m only one scene away from the end of “To Rise No More” (because I wrote the other remaining one last night, after I posted), so what do I do tonight? Do I settle in and finish that one?

No, of course not. I write two thousand words of the punk Tam Lin story instead.

Seriously, I don’t even know. I just work here, man. Now I have two half-finished short stories instead of one finished one and one barely-started one. Well, one is three-quarters done. Maybe if I go re-read the relevant period in Ada Lovelace’s letters, I can crank out that final bit tonight? It would be nice to be able to put paid to one of these things.

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poll results

I’m sort of fascinated by seeing how people have voted in the short story poll. (Which is still open, so if you want to go register your opinion, feel free!) I mean, ultimately I’m going to write whichever one(s) say “oooh oooh write me write me,” but it’s enlightening to see where other people’s interest goes.

Dead last is “A River Flowing Nowhere,” which surprises me because it’s a Driftwood story, and historically those have been something people really want me to write more of. Of course, all I said about it at the time was that it is a Driftwood story, so maybe it would have done better had I said something about the premise?

Next lowest is “An Enquiry into the Causes.” I’m tempted to make a new poll saying “Do you know what the Bow Street Runners were? Y/N” — because if you don’t know, then, well, there’s not much reason to vote for that one, apart from “it’s an Onyx Court story.”

Then we have a bunch in the middle, and then after that, two runaway favorites: “To Rise No More” and the punk Tam Lin. The former, I imagine, gets votes because a) I have a sizable part of it written already, b) I’ve been talking about it recently, and c) who doesn’t love Ada Lovelace? The latter . . . you all just want to watch the spectacle of me trying to write anything punk, don’t you. 😛

We’ll see what happens. Odds are that “To Rise No More” will be first, because it’s the closest to being done and also the freshest. After that, who knows. My brain keeps trying to say “The Unquiet Grave,” but until I figure out what the hell I’m doing with it (a straight-up narrative treatment of the song lyrics would be boring), it’s kind of hard to make it go anywhere.

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Writing Fight Scenes: Focus

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

I may have a big soft spot in my heart for the fight scenes in R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf series, which describe the mechanics of each combat in loving, blow-by-blow detail, but as I said at the start of this blogging, you don’t actually need to do that in order to write a good fight. Even if you do, you’re unlikely to detail every single move of anything but the shortest clash: you’ll pick key moments to focus on. The same is true of the less mechanical approach. But then the question becomes, which parts deserve focus?

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Writing Fight Scenes: Dialogue

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

This is something I should have touched on before, but it only occurred to me now: what about speech in a fight scene?

In reality, it doesn’t work very well. Have you ever tried to talk while running? Now imagine that in addition to being out of breath, every second or so you encounter a jarring, unexpected impact that threatens to break you off mid-sentence. And remember that you aren’t running — a nice, repetitive activity that requires only a fraction of your attention — instead you’re making split-second decisions the whole time, and distraction could be fatal. Speech is luxury you mostly can’t afford.

Which isn’t to say you can’t have any.

three conversations at once

I have other things I should be doing, but wshaffer made a very good point in the comments to my last post, so I’m back for another round. And at this point I’ve made a tag for the grimdark discussion, because I’ve said enough that you might want to be able to track it all down.

To quote wshaffer:

The thing that strikes me about the grimdark discussion is that there are multiple different-but-interlocking conversations going on at once. One is an argument about whether “realism” is grounds for granting a work a higher degree of artistic merit. Another is an argument about to what extent realism actually requires focusing on the darker and more unpleasant aspects of life. And the third is: supposing that we grant that the historical prevalence of misogyny and rape requires that they be addressed in realistic fiction, are there ways of portraying them that do no themselves reinforce misogyny and rape culture?

I love things like this, because they simultaneously clear up a bunch of confusion in my head, and make it possible to see things I couldn’t before. Let’s take her questions one at a time.

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gritty vs. grimdark

Yeah, I’m still thinking about this topic. Partly because of Cora Buhlert’s recent roundup. The digression onto Deathstalker mostly went over my head, since I haven’t read it, but she brings up a number of good points and also links to several posts I hadn’t seen. (Though I use the term “post” generously. I have to say, when the only response you make to this debate is “meh” followed by links to people who already agree with you, you might as well not bother. All you’re doing is patting yourself on the back in public.)

So I’m thinking about our terminology — “gritty” and “grimdark” and so on. What do we mean by “grit,” anyway? The abrasive parts of life, I guess; the stuff that’s hard and unpleasant. Logistics and consequences and that sort of thing, the little stony details that other books might gloss over. It’s adjacent to, or maybe our new replacement for, “low fantasy” — the stories in which magic is relatively rare, and characters have to do things the hard way, just like us. Hence laying claim to the term “realism”: those kinds of details that can ground a story in reality.

But that isn’t the same thing as “grimdark,” is it? That describes a mood, and you can just as easily tell a story in which everything is horrible and doomed without those little details as with. (As indeed some authors do.) Hence, of course, the counter-arguments that grimdark fantasy is just as selective in its “realism” as lighter fare: if you’re writing about a war and all the women are threatened with sexual violence but none of the men are, then you’re cherry-picking your grit.

What interests me, though, are the books which I might call gritty, but not grimdark. I mentioned this a while ago, when I read Tamora Pierce’s second Beka Cooper book, Bloodhound. The central conflict in that book is counterfeiting, and Pierce is very realistic about what fake coinage can do to a kingdom. She also delves into the nuts and bolts of early police work, including police corruption . . . I’d call that grit. Of course it’s mitigated by the fact that her story is set in Tortall, which began in a decidedly less gritty manner; one of the things I noticed in the Beka Cooper books was how Pierce worked to deconstruct some of her earlier, more romantic notions, like the Court of the Rogue. But still: counterfeiting, a collapse in monetary policy, police corruption of a realistic sort, etc. Those are the kinds of details a lot of books would gloss over.

Or an example closer to home: With Fate Conspire. I was discussing it over e-mail recently, and it occurred to me that I put a lot of unpleasantness into that book. Off the cuff, it includes betrayal, slavery, slavery of children, imprisonment, torture, horrible disease, poverty, racism, terrorism, massive amounts of class privilege and the lack thereof, rape (alluded to), pollution, fecal matter, and an abundance of swearing. All of which is the kind of stuff grimdark fantasy revels in . . . yet I have not seen a single person attach that label to the novel. Nor “gritty,” for that matter, but I would argue that word, at least, should indeed apply. A great deal of that story grinds its way through the hard, unpleasant details of being lower-class in Victorian London. Realistic details, at that.

Of course, the book has a happy ending (albeit one with various price tags attached). Which makes it not grimdark — and also not gritty? Or maybe it’s that I was writing historical fiction, not the secondary-world fantasy that seems to be the locus of the term. Or, y’know, it might be that I’m a woman. One of the posts Buhlert links to is from [personal profile] matociquala, who — unusually for this debate — names some female authors as having produced gritty work, and Buhlert takes that point further. This is a highly gendered debate, not just where the sexual abuse of characters is concerned, and if we don’t acknowledge that, we’re only looking at a fraction of the issue.

I’m sort of wandering at this point, because there’s no tidy conclusion to draw. You can have grit without being grimdark, and you can be grimdark without grit, but doing either while being female is rare? Not very tidy, but something to keep in mind. I think I’d be interested in reading more gritty-but-not-grimdark fantasy, from either gender. Recommendations welcome.

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Chickens and eggs

mrissa has posted her Minicon schedule, with a panel on which comes first: the story or the setting. To quote the description,

Which Came First

The chicken or the egg? The story or the world? Does the story you want to tell determine the setting, or does your chosen setting demand a certain kind of story to be told in it? Are there some types of stories that simply cannot be told in a particular setting? How do creators balance these seemingly opposing forces in imagining their tales?

Which has gotten me reflecting on that question and how I would answer it. Off the cuff, I thought I probably start more with the setting — hi, anthropology, yeah. But does that hold up when I actually look at the data?

(For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to keep this to novels, but I will include unpublished novels in the list. It’s probably a different ballgame if I look at short stories; that, however, would require more time than I want to devote to this right now, and a refresher course as to what the heck I’ve written.)

Cut for length; I have more novels than you guys know about.

Batman had it easy

Only just now remembering to link to it, but this months’ SF Novelists post is “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” in which I challenge the notion that so-called “gritty” fantasy is a) realistic and b) superior on account of its realism.

(Both that post and the rest of this one discuss sexual violence — quelle surprise, given the obsession gritty fantasy has with that topic — so if you don’t want to read about them, click away now.)

This is part of a much larger discussion floating around the internet right now, which I keep encountering in unexpected corners. The most recent of those is “The Rape of James Bond,” which makes a lot of good points; toward the end, McDougall talks about her own decision-making process where fictional sexual violence is concerned, and whether you agree with her decisions or not, her questions are good ones.

But the part I found the most striking was where she talked about reactions to Skyfall and the first encounter between Silva and Bond.

Cut in case you haven't seen the movie and want to avoid a spoiler.

more thoughts on the epic fantasy thing

My post on writing a long epic fantasy has been generating some interesting discussion in a variety of places: the comment thread, Twitter, etc. I wanted to come back to it long enough to highlight a few lengthier responses that I think make very good points.

The first comes from C.E. Petit at Scrivener’s Error; scroll down to the third bit to find his thoughts. I tend not to talk about “theme” because the word has been so badly treated by high school English classes, but his point is a sound one, and can provide guidance as to how the author might gauge whether their story has begun to grow out of control. Are you diluting your thematic message by adding in all these other subplots? Or, conversely, are you hammering your reader too energetically with that message, by playing through sixteen variations on the motif? (Which is not, of course, to say that the work will have only one thematic message, especially if it stretches to four books or more. But a central line is still vital.)

The second, or rather the second and third, is Patricia C. Wrede’s two-part response to my own argument, which digs further into the question of why authors fall into these traps, and what they can do about them. I want to say that she is 100% right about the arbitrariness of your opening structural decision: even if you base it around some kind of pattern (as she suggests in the second post), ultimately that’s a framework you then try to pour your story into, rather than a natural outgrowth of the story itself. You don’t set out to write seven books because that’s precisely how much character and plot and so on you have to tell; you write seven books because you decided to build each one thematically around the seven deadly sins or chronologically around the years Harry will be in school, and then you try to scale everything else to match.

Note that we do this all the time in fantasy: it’s called a trilogy. You sign a contract for three books, okay, and so you plan your story based around that arbitrary decision. I’d venture to say that the vast majority of series that are planned as trilogies end up as exactly that. There are exceptions (Terry Goodkind, as discussed in Zeno’s Mountains; George R.R. Martin; the Hitchhiker’s series), but it seems that most of us are capable of sticking to three books when that’s what we said we’d do. It’s only when we go beyond three that our control seems so liable to slip — because we have so few models for how to do it right, and because one more book is much less expansion when it’s ten instead of nine than when it’s four instead of three. And, maybe, because if you’re selling well enough for your publisher to support nine books, they’re eager for you to make it ten instead.

But we manage it with trilogies, and TV writers manage it almost without fail when they write shows with season-long arc plots. Absent the network jerking them around, they finish their story in twenty-two episodes of X minutes each, period, the end, no “please just one more ep” or “sorry, this one ran twelve minutes long.”

Is that kind of discipline detrimental to the story? Sure, sometimes. But so, manifestly, is allowing one’s discipline to falter. And I say — with the spotless virtue of an author who has never yet had a publisher throw stacks of money at her, begging for a bestselling series to continue — that I would rather make myself find a way to tell my story more efficiently, with fewer digressions and wasted words, and end it while people are still in love with the tale, than risk losing sight of the original vision in a swamp of less productive byways.

(“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” Speaking of tales planned as trilogies, and delivered that way, and in my opinion all the better for it.)

It isn’t easy. As Wrede points out, it requires frequent check-ins with your plan, however you may have built said plan. It may require you to murder some very beloved darlings. But just as a sonnet’s structure can force you to make really good use of your fourteen allotted lines, so can a fixed length to your series.

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How to write a long fantasy series

It took three years and two months rather than the two years I initially planned, but I have, at very long last, finished the Wheel of Time re-read and analysis. And as I promised quite some time ago, we’ll end with what I’ve learned.

This post, unlike the others, is not WoT-specific. I’ll be referencing the series, because it’s the primary source of my thoughts on this topic, but the point here is to talk about the specific challenges of writing a long epic fantasy series — here defining “long” as “more than a trilogy, and telling one ongoing story.” (So something like Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books wouldn’t count, since they’re a conglomeration of multiple trilogies.) My points probably also apply to non-fantasy series, but other genres are much less likely to attempt multi-volume epics on this scale, so I’m mostly speaking to my fellow fantasists.

I do not pretend this is in any way, shape, or form a recipe for commercial success with an epic fantasy series. After all, most of this is a checklist of errors I feel Jordan made, and you could paper the walls of Tor’s offices in fifty-dollar bills with the cash he made for them. Nor am I claiming artistic failure awaits if you fail to heed this advice; you might squeak through on luck, or just really good storytelling instinct. But I do feel that bearing these points in mind can help the would-be writer of an epic series avoid falling off some of the more common and perilous cliffs.

With all of that intro material out of the way, let’s get to it.

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Writing Fight Scenes: Sentence Structure

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

Step up one level from the nouns and verbs you’re going to be using over and over and overandoverandover again in your fight scenes, and it’s time to consider how you’re going to string them together into sentences.

There are two main schools of thought on this, and I’m going to give you the one I disagree with first.

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Writing Fight Scenes: Word Choice

NOTE: You can now buy the revised and expanded version of this blog series as an ebook, in both epub and mobi formats.

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

One of these days, I will actually finish this series of posts. 🙂 Today, we come one step closer to that goal!

Fight scenes, oddly enough, have certain technical challenges in common with sex scenes. Namely, both of them are primarily concerned with describing physical movement, and in the course of so doing, they have to refer to certain objects and actions again and again and again and again. And if you try to get too creative in the avoidance of repetition, you very rapidly slide down into the abyss of purple prose.

So how do you get around this?

Something more like a book

After yet more whinging and moaning and telling myself I earned a break with yesterday’s work, I made myself put my butt in the chair and start typing . . . and two thousand words later, I have hit the mighty 80K mark, which is the point at which this starts to feel like a Real Book to me.

Of course, this isn’t the Onyx Court: I’m aiming for 90K total, rather than the nearly 160K that With Fate Conspire ended up clocking. So that particular boundary lies quite close to the Finished Book line right now. I still have various things that need fixing — in fact, I’ve been revising as I go for a while, settling the characters who kept changing their names, putting guns on mantelpieces after I realized I needed to fire them somewhere in the 70K stretch, etc — but I’m going to arrive at the end of this month with a passably decent draft, I think.

And that, my friends, is victory.

Edited to add — bonus (spoiler-redacted) quote, to celebrate my achievement, and the fact that two finished copies of A Natural History of Dragons showed up today:

This is how I marched out of [place] toward [place] with what, at first glance, might understandably be mistaken for a small invading army.

Fortunately, the confusion was resolved before anyone fired upon us.

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this is why the first rule is, put your butt in the chair and start typing

For a night when I really didn’t want to start working and whinged and moaned about it and tried to convince myself I could get away with a night off (I really, really can’t), those 3500 words sure fell out of my head awfully easy.

Especially given that my aim was only to write 2000 words tonight.

I could take the night off tomorrow, if I wanted. But I need to remember this part is fun, and also that getting the book done sooner rather than later is a good thing.

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to whet your appetite some more

It’s probably mean of me to tease you guys with tidbits from the second book when the first one isn’t even out yet . . . but I have to share. Tonight’s writing featured a location based on this:

Yeah.

(I saw that image back in November, I think, and instantaneously chucked out something I had half-planned for the novel, because CLEARLY I needed to use this instead. And writing these scenes? Is awesome.)

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wiktory.

OH MY GOD IT’S DEAD THE SHORT STORY THAT WAS TRYING TO KILL ME I KILLED IT INSTEAD HAHAHAHA okay now I have to revise it.

But at least I have a draft.