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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

NaEverythingWriMo

My senior spring of college, I was taking three courses, one of which was my thesis tutorial. After I’d turned that beast in, I was down to two courses, one of which I was taking pass/fail. In other words: I wasn’t very busy. So — because that semester was also my last chance to write material for this award — I decided to see how much I could write in the final two months of college.

The answer ended up being “a novel and six short stories in seven weeks flat,” which is a total I don’t expect to equal again. But I spent most of November as a spinster hermit (kniedzw being in Poland for three weeks after I left), so I figured, as long as there was nobody around to look at me funny for working at all kinds of random hours and not having a social life, I might as well see how much I could write in the month of November.

As it turns out, I managed 59,144 words. (Which annoys me a little, since I thought I had hit 60K that final night. But apparently I did some math wrong in there.)

It isn’t NaNoWriMo. I will almost certainly never do NaNoWriMo; I don’t need the event to make myself write a novel (duh), and I know the pace would result in me writing a bad novel if I tried. Only 30,492 words of that is book, i.e. my standard working pace. The rest, the other 28,652, is a combination of other things: substantial blog posts (like the nearly 4K I wrote for my first ToM entry), promo stuff for A Natural History of Dragons, Yuletide material, progress on the short story that’s trying to kill me, the beginnings of a new Driftwood story, etc.

Even changing up my focus like that, 59K was a lot to churn out in thirty days flat. I’m not a slow writer, but I’m also not one of those people who can do 4K days for an extended period of time. It was, however, good to work on gear-shifting between projects — that’s something I’m not great at, and could benefit from improving. My short story production has fallen off substantially these last couple of years, because it’s hard for me to get my head out of whatever the current novel space is and find some kind of flow on a totally different setting and characters. There are more reasons for that than just gear-shifting, of course; it also has a lot to do with the increased investment my short story ideas are requiring, research and other things. But still and all: gear-shifting is a good thing to work on.

So that was my November. I still have two thirds of this book to go, so it’s going to stay busy around here for a while. But all in all, a nicely productive month.

more snippet

Because my life right now consists almost 100% of writing.

“They are solitary hunters, yes?” I asked, determined to make use of his knowledge.

“The females are, like that one there. Males will hunt together sometimes, in pairs or trios, occasionally quartets. Especially if they’re brothers. If you hunt males, you must be certain how many there are, or that last one will be on your head while you’re taking aim at the others.”

I’m modeling this particular kind of dragon on cheetahs, and it’s giving me all sorts of entertaining ideas.

a snippet for your weekend delectation

Mostly I don’t post quotes from works in progress because I have trouble picking good ones that aren’t also full of spoilers. But this, the final paragraph of tonight’s work, entertains me:

Of course, there was the minor problem of the Green Hell being one of the deadliest regions on earth. But my interest was, that evening, still academic; my purpose in coming to Bayembe was to study the dragons of their arid plains. Moulish swamp-wyrms were a minor note — in much the same way that a fisherman’s lure is a minor note in the world of a fish.

Isabella: still fun to write.

I wasn’t kidding

No, seriously, this short story is trying to kill me. It has taken me two. hours. to write about five hundred words, and that’s with me saying “screw it, I’m going to let this turn into a synopsis, and then go back and flesh it out into an actual story later.” By my calculation, it is going to take at least two more multi-hour sessions before I have something resembling a draft.

Note to the wise: do not, repeat, DO NOT attempt to write a short story in Anglish. I kind of want to light this thing on fire.

get the creative juices juicing

I owe teleidoplex a post for the meme-type-thing she tapped me for, but that one will require a fair bit of thought and effort from me, so in the meantime, I’m going to do something frivolous. 🙂

By way of yhlee on Dreamwidth: Tell me about a story I haven’t written, and I’ll give you one sentence from that story.

(Or possibly more.)

In the meantime, I’ll be over here, figuring out how to arrange my novel to include a semi-kidnapping.

no kitchen sinks, though

Since I just put Chekhov’s hang glider into this story, I thought I would share with you guys some of the items scribbled down in my notebook, on the page designated for Cool Things What I Intend to Put Into the Second Dragons Book:

  • talking drums
  • griots
  • witchcraft
  • blacksmiths
  • leeches
  • malaria
  • poisons/hallucinogens
  • waterfall island
  • guard dragons
  • masks
  • iron/gold/salt/ivory
  • booby traps

And some other things that would be too spoilery to share.

Mind you, Isabella is looking over my metaphorical shoulder and objecting strongly to my classification of malaria as a “cool thing” (she’s no happier about the prospect of me replacing it with yellow fever), but narratively speaking, it qualifies. 🙂 (Confidential to kurayami_hime: at least it’s not the plague!)

I’m still working on stringing all this stuff together into a book, rather than a collection of things I think are neat, but hey. There are worse ways to build a novel than throwing awesome bits of setting at the page. (It’s more or less how I built several of the Onyx Court books, and that seems to have worked out okay.)

Suspension

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in the responses to “Waiting for Beauty.” (You can read it for free online; go ahead and click. It’s less than eight hundred words long.) Multiple people have said something to the effect of “I could tell where it was going, but I enjoyed it anyway.” And this has inspired Thinky Thoughts about predictability in fiction.

Normally my metaphors for writing tend to revolve around textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing, etc), but I’ve been having misadventures in piano lately, so this time I’m going to go with music. There’s a thing called a suspension, which you’ve heard many times even if you don’t know that’s the term for it. You know how sometimes, before a piece settles into the final chord, it hangs there for a moment being not-quite-right? That’s a suspension: a note from a different chord persisting before at last resolving into the sound you expect.

Suspension works because you do expect the resolution. You hear it before it happens; you know where the music is going. Resolving into another chord entirely might be a clever trick, but it isn’t “better,” and if you use that trick too often you’ll annoy a lot of your audience.

We tend to talk about predictability in fiction as if it’s a bad thing. The word itself has a negative connotation — and heck, some writers decry “resolution” as being the cheap and easy way out of a story in the first place. But we crave resolution; we derive satisfaction from that feeling of knowing where the music is going, and following it to the end. And it’s true in fiction, too. Predictability is only a bad thing when it’s done badly.

Okay, tautologies are tautological. What’s the difference between doing it badly and doing it well? If I knew that for sure, I’d be selling my wisdom to the masses. But I can suss out three factors, at least, the first of which is that the suspense (in the musical sense of the word, more than the thriller one, though the breathless anticipation of the camera panning around to show the murderer is often suspense of the music-analogous variety as well) — right, that parenthetical got too long. Let’s start over: suspense should not overstay its welcome. “Waiting for Beauty” is less than eight hundred words long because its central conceit can’t bear a heavier weight than that. If I wanted a five-thousand-word story, I’d have to bring in other material, delay for as long as possible the introduction of that element — and that still might not work, because whatever filled the first 4500 or so would have to be substantial enough that it would probably take over the story.

The second factor is that the material of the suspension has to be worthwhile in its own right. “Waiting for Beauty” depends heavily on the specificity of the details along the way, the image it builds up, brick by brick. If that doesn’t work for a given reader (as it hasn’t, for some), the story itself will fall apart on the spot. For other stories, it might be the vivid emotion leading up to the revelation of what the reader has seen all along. Or the clockwork precision of disparate plot elements falling into place. The point is, the general point of “the writing has to be good” becomes critically true when the unexpected ceases to be one of your selling points: you need the reader to admire the journey for its own sake.

And the third, of course, is that the final chord — the thing the reader is anticipating — has to be something they want. One of the things that makes M. Night Shyamalan’s later movies not work for me is that when I see where they’re going, I really, really wish they would go somewhere else. To some extent this ties into the issue of cliches: suspension turns into predictability (in the negative sense) when the thing you’re making the reader wait for is a thing they’ve seen a bazillion times. But it’s possible to be not a cliche, and still undesirable. The Sixth Sense is arguably more cliched than Shyamalan’s subsequent films, but I like the former and dislike the latter because of where he’s leading me in each one.

As obvious as it seems to say that predictability is okay — even beneficial! — if you do it well, I feel like sometimes we lose sight of that in our rush to condemn “easy” storytelling. Some of Shakespeare’s plays start with a prologue that spoils the entire plot; we still keep watching. Uncertainty is not the only thing that can create suspense; sometimes, in a different way, certainty can do the same.

more Driftwood!

My short story output has been dismal lately, but I did manage to complete and sell another Driftwood story: “The Ascent of Unreason,” now live at BCS (not to be confused with BVC, which is what I originally typed), both as text and as a podcast. (And if you check that last link, you’ll see that there are also e-reader versions available — pdf, mobi, epub, etc.)

I have work I really ought to be doing today, work with deadlines attached . . . but I sort of feel like writing a short story. I may poke at my various seedlings and see if any of them are ready to sprout.

Writing Fight Scenes: Smooth Moves

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

I’ve said before that you don’t actually have to give a blow-by-blow description of your fight in order to write a good scene, and in fact you often don’t want to. Going into detail slows the action down and risks confusing a reader who can’t visualize the movement very well.

But sometimes, at key moments, it can be good to describe specific moves. The sequence that leads to somebody being killed or disarmed or knocked to the ground can be worth focusing on — a brief snapshot that shows a character’s desperation, competence, etc. So let’s talk for a moment about how you can work that out, even if you don’t have a lot of training.

Warning: it involves looking like a complete weirdo. 🙂

Kids: try this at home!

Spoiler Alert! (Watch this make people not read the post.)

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece from January about spoilers and how we respond to them. Short form: for many people, spoilers actually enhance, rather than detract from, their enjoyment of the full story. And this is true even for people who are convinced that they prefer not to have any spoilers at all.

I would put myself in the camp of not wanting spoilers, but when I read through the reasoning presented in the article, it was exactly what I would have predicted. By knowing where the story is going, we allay our subconscious anxiety. Knowing that Character A lives means we don’t have to be as afraid for her; knowing that Character B dies means we’re prepared for it when it comes. As brilliantly cathartic as it can be to go through those experiences without the psychological safety net, that works best when we really, really trust the storyteller not to disappoint or betray us. And how often is that true?

A story can work even when we know the ending — even when we can quote the entire thing line for line. Usually people say this is because you can still appreciate the craft, the process by which that ending comes about, and there’s a lot of truth to that. But it isn’t the whole story (no pun intended). A good enough narrative can still pack its emotional punch as well as an intellectual one, even on a revisit. My favorite example of this is Apollo 13, a movie I adore and have watched quite a few times. Not only is it familiar to me, it’s based on freaking history. You would think that by now, there would be zero suspense for me in the question of whether they’ll get home safely or not.

And yet, every time I watch that movie, I’m on the edge of my seat during those minutes of radio silence.

There’s a secret ingredient that makes it work: empathy. Sure, I know that the astronauts will be safe. I knew that even before I sat down to watch the movie. But the characters don’t know. And because my heart is with them, because I am imagining myself in their shoes rather than sitting comfortably in my own, I am petrified and tearful, just like they are. And when it all turns out okay, I get the same cathartic release.

I find myself thinking that when people say spoilers ruin the story for them, I am the most inclined to believe the ones who also never re-read books, never re-watch movies. But I have plenty of books and movies I revisit, and enjoy just as much (or more) the second time around. So it makes me think that, for me at least, what spoilers ruin are bad stories. Weak ones, that don’t do the work of making me empathize with the characters, and don’t provide the intellectual pleasure of examining how the dominoes got lined up. They have to rely on the element of surprise to engage me, and once that’s gone, they’ve blown their wad. Good stories survive the spoiler process just fine, and maybe even turn out better for it. I can relax into the experience, knowing I’m in skilled hands.

Possibly this explains why I love movie trailers as much as I do. I still get annoyed when I think the trailer gave the whole story away (and feel pleasant surprise when it turns out I’m wrong — that’s happened in the oddest places, sometimes), but I like the preview of what I’ll be getting. I read the cover copy of books, I read friends’ reviews (though I sometimes — not always — avoid the ones that say they contain major spoilers) . . . but I don’t go as far as some do and read the last five pages. I’m sort of tempted to try that now, and see how it goes. After all, the good books should, in theory, be unharmed.

But I’ll still put spoiler alerts on things I write. It’s expected courtesy these days, and I might get lynched if I didn’t. So I’ll just say: it’s okay. You’re allowed to highlight the hidden text, to click through and see what’s behind the cut. I won’t judge you for it if you do.

we can’t all be the goddamned Batman

There’s a moment in The Dark Knight Rises — don’t worry; no spoilers — where Bruce Wayne gets from one part of the world to the other, in a very short span of time, without access to his usual resources.

How does he manage that? As kniedzw said when I brought this up to him, “He’s the goddamned Batman, that’s how.”

And you know, I’m fine with that as an answer. It fits the genre, and the place that scene occupies in the story; nobody wants to pause there for an extended dissertation on the logistics of international travel. Or even a short one, really. If it isn’t an interesting and relevant part of the story, we should skip over it and get to the parts that are.

. . . I talk a good talk there, but the truth is that I have a damn hard time doing this in my own work. Skipping over routine things, sure. I don’t do a blow-by-blow of every last action my characters take. But when something less than 100% routine happens, I have a hard time saying “my character is the goddamned Batman” and moving on. If I’d been writing The Dark Knight Rises, I would have had to figure out — for my own edification, if nobody else’s — just how Bruce Wayne got from A to B under those circumstances. And, if it were a novel, probably looked for a place to toss in a line of narration or dialogue nodding in the direction of whatever explanation I worked out. Because however willing I am to grant other people’s stories the benefit of the doubt in these cases, I have a hard time believing anybody else will do the same for me.

Obviously there are places where the benefit of the doubt falls down. If the thing being glossed over is too outrageous, I can’t bridge that gap, and the stumble distracts me from the story. Or if you make too frequent a habit of doing it, I begin to feel like you’re lazy, dodging all the hard stuff because you only want to have fun (and your fun gets flimsier as a result). Or if you’re trying to be all realistic and crunchy about how things get done, and then you handwave past something major, I suspect you did that because you couldn’t find a way to get it done, and your only answer was to cheat. I also think it’s easier for movies to get away with this trick than novels. They move at their own pace, rather than the reader’s, leaving less time for spotting holes; they also aren’t expected to go into as much detail, lest their run time be nine hours. And some genres accommodate this trick better than others.

But we do it in novels, too, whether the extent is lesser or greater. Dorothy Dunnett spends all of a couple of sentences on telling us how half a dozen guys made their way across sixteenth-century Europe to Russia. Those sentences nod to them having a lot of trouble doing it, but it’s only a nod, with no explanation; we are invited to understand that they are each the goddamned Batman, and that’s how they managed it.

Sometimes it’s a benefit for me to work through those things, to answer all the logistical questions for myself, if not for the reader. Sometimes, though . . . it’s easy to get hung up on this, to stall forward progress because I have to nail down every last detail in my head. And sometimes I catch myself subsequently putting those details into the story, because if I don’t show my math I don’t trust that the reader will trust me.

It isn’t just a plot issue; sometimes it’s a worldbuilding one, too. For Isabella’s memoirs, I’m working through a myriad of details on climate, geology, and other such details of the natural world, because my hindbrain is convinced that I can’t be allowed to gloss over a single thing there. We aren’t talking Tolkien’s suspiciously rectangular mountain ranges here, either: I mean that if I don’t set up the elevation and surrounding topography of the swamps of Mouleen precisely right for the amount of rainfall they receive, everybody will notice.

And the truth is, only some readers will. The climatologists among you. If they’re paying close attention. And maybe not even then, since it isn’t like I’m providing information on the exact latitude of Mouleen, or the direction of ocean currents along its shore. (Though believe you me, my brain would try to work the ocean currents out, if I didn’t keep it on a leash.)

I have to do some of this for the series because it’s about a scientist, and that means I need to be able to talk about the science without the whole thing falling down. But it is also supposed to be an adventure. The adventure tone is not served by me anxiously showing my math on every last detail of plot and setting. And yet I still struggle to believe that I can get away with anything, even as I let other people do it all the time.

I’d be interested in examples of authors you think have done this badly or well. What factors determine how willing you are to leap over those gaps?

Information Density Pt. 2, or, let’s try an example

I said before that it’s hard to talk about certain issues in writing without specific examples. Since I just finished reading a book that I think illustrates the challenge of information density and scale very well, I’m back for a follow-up round.

Before I get into the example, though, an anecdote. One of the archaeological sites I worked on has reconstructions of period houses as part of a public display. Several are very well-constructed, and one is a mess. But I’ll never forget what one of the archaeologists said about that one: “We’ve learned more from our mistakes here than we have from the ones we did right.”

The book I want to discuss is one I think failed to manage the kinds of issues that don’t fit easily into fiction. It tried, but it didn’t succeed. I think well of the author for trying, and am not here to mock or belittle her effort; in fact, as the author in question is Tamora Pierce, she’s someone I think fairly well of overall. But I think you can often learn more from an ambitious failure than a success.

Oh, and just in case anybody didn’t see this coming: there will be MASSIVE SPOILERS. If you haven’t yet read Mastiff, the third and last of the Beka Cooper books, I will be discussing the main conflict (though I will try to stay away from spoiling some of the other important things that happen along the way).

For those who haven’t read any of the series . . . it’s about the Provost’s Guard, aka the Provost’s Dogs, who are the police force for the medievalish kingdom of Tortall. (Aside: yes, it’s odd for a setting like that to have an organized police force. But whatever; it’s the buy-in for the story.) The protagonist, Beka Cooper, starts off as a “Puppy” or new Guardswoman, and becomes more experienced as the series goes on. Each book deals with a different type of crime: in the first one, it’s smuggling; in the second, it’s counterfeiting; in the third, it’s slavery.

. . . sort of. Slavery is actually legal in Tortall; the actual crime in this book is treason. But slavery is more central to the plot in many ways, and if you follow me behind the cut to spoiler territory, I’ll start to unpack that.

(more…)

Information Density, or, cramming a fifty-pound sausage into a five-pound sack

alecaustin recently had a thought-provoking post on his LJ, riffing off some recent discussions about the people and issues that are “invisible” in fiction to talk about information density and how you can’t fit everything into a story. In particular, there are certain kinds of topics that fit very badly indeed. He has a few examples of his own, but since I want to dig into this issue more deeply, I’m going to use one I know fairly well, which is the English Civil War.

One of the books I read when doing research for In Ashes Lie was called Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642. As the title suggests, its argument is that the wars of the mid-seventeenth century had their roots in the sixteenth — which is exactly the kind of thing that’s hard to convey in fiction, when the cause in question isn’t a simple case of “this person was assassinated five generations ago, and we still bear a grudge for that.” In particular, I’m going to tease out one economic strand for the purposes of our discussion here. If you’re not interested in reading about that sort of thing (if you aren’t, I can’t blame you), then scroll on down; I’ll get back to my point in a moment.

(Fair Warning: my point is long. And digresses along the way.)

***

Causes of the English Revolution, The Nutshell Version.

Fourth Street Fantasy

Last weekend I went for the first time to Fourth Street Fantasy, a Minneapolis con that apparently ran for many years, died out, and was resurrected five or so years back by a local fan, rising from the dead to be more awesome than ever*.

(*I never went to the old version, so this description is based entirely on how awesome I found the con as it is now.)

If you are anything resembling local — or even if you’re not — you should think about checking this one out. It’s small (in the 100-200 attendee range), but the sort of smallness that allows for good, intensive conversation with cool people. And with alecaustin putting together the programming, there is no shortage of fodder for such conversations. He has said before that he’s tired of the introductory, freshman-level nature of panel topics at many conventions, and wants more upper-level or graduate kinds of subjects. Thus it was that my three panel topics this weekend were: politics and complexity of same in fantasy (which delved into some of the nitty-gritty of what is necessary to do good, believable political complexity in fiction, and what historical examples one might look to for inspiration and instruction), “blood, love, and rhetoric” (using the Player King’s speech from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a jumping-off point for talking about violence and “domestic narratives” in fantasy), and . . .

Okay, so they have this tradition. You know how sometimes when you’re at a con, the panelists will either digress wildly onto some unrelated topic, or teeter at the edge of such a digression before regretfully declaring “but that’s another panel”? Well, Fourth Street keeps a list of those “other panels,” and for the last programming slot of the con, picks one of them to be the special last-minute topic. I ended up getting tapped to talk about “why we want stories about divine-right kings” on Sunday afternoon, and had to cudgel my brain into talking about the origins of state formation in early agricultural societies (and what this means for the stories we tell). Despite the fact that I was nearing unto mental exhaustion by then, and had to throw every ounce of remaining energy into holding my own against Steven Brust and Beth Meacham (executive editor at Tor), along with Caroline Stevermer and Mary Robinette Kowal, I think it went fairly well.

If you weren’t at Fourth Street, you can still get in on a piece of the fun: they made the very sensible decision to keep track of all the books mentioned on each panel, and have posted the list for everyone’s delectation. (It also includes some quotes from the panels.)

Anyway, excellent con with excellent people. I’ll be a few days yet regenerating the dead brain cells, but on the way home I had several pieces of the next novel shuffle themselves into something like a line, so clearly something is still working inside my skull. Now I just need to spend some quality time working up a map, since I can’t figure out the politics of Nsebu and Mouleen and the Labane and the places that don’t have names yet if I don’t know where they are in relation to one another.

a meme, because why not

Via alecaustin and mrissa:

1. Go to page 77 (or 7th) of your current ms
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating.

I chose page 7 because page 77 happened to fall on a chapter break, and didn’t have enough lines on it to suffice. Appropriately, the incident being related happened when the character was seven years old. From A Natural History of Dragons:

My curiosity soon drove me to an act which I blush to think upon today, not for the act itself (as I have done similar things many times since then, if in a more meticulous and scholarly fashion), but for the surreptitious and naive manner in which I carried it out.

In my wanderings one day, I found a dove which had fallen dead under a hedgerow. I immediately remembered what the cook had said, that all birds had wishbones. She had not named doves in her list, but doves were birds, were they not? Perhaps I might learn what they were for, as I could not learn when I watched the footman carve up a goose at the dinner table.

I took the dove’s body and hid it behind the hayrick next to the barn, then stole inside and pinched a penknife from Andrew, the brother immediately senior to me, without him knowing. Once outside again, I settled down to my study of the dove.

. . . Isabella’s sentences are on the long side. But I’d call that pretty representative of her story. (And yes, she is about to engage in amateur dissection.)

MIA, and a call for corrections

I’ve been very absent from here lately due to busy-ness and illness; KublaCon was last weekend, and kniedzw and I ran our one-shot LARP, which went very well I think, but now I have Con Crud and that isn’t much fun. Especially since I have work I need to do.

But! I am breaking radio silence to say that I’ve gotten the page proofs for the mass-market edition of A Star Shall Fall. This is my chance to correct any errors that made it through me, my editor, me again, my copy-editor, me again, my proofreader, and me yet again in the trade paperback edition — and believe me, there are some. I know of two instances of a duplicated word (“an an” in both cases), and one place where the line “Galen’s mouth gone dry” is missing the word “had,” and the arithmetic error on page 171. If you’ve spotted any others, please let me know!