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Series Writing: A Conversation with Jim Hines (part one)

Jim Hines (jimhines) and I have been friends for a while, and so when he and I both wrapped up four-book series this summer, I suggested to him that we might have a conversation about the challenges of writing — and most particularly ending — a story that stretches across multiple books. We’ll be sharing the results of that conversation with you today and tomorrow, the first half here, the second half over on Jim’s site.

Who are we? Well, Jim is the author of seven fantasy novels and more than 40 published short stories. He’s written about underdog goblin runts, ass-kicking fairy tale princesses, and is currently writing about a modern-day librarian who pulls ray guns out of SF books. He’s also a moderately popular blogger, and caretaker of various fuzzy beasts. As for me — if you’re not already aware — I’m the author of six fantasy novels and more than 30 published short stories, which puts me just a little behind him. I’ve written about people split in half (mystically, not with an axe) and faeries hiding out underneath London, and I’m currently writing about a nineteenth-century gentlewoman who travels around the world to study dragons and get into trouble, not necessarily in that order. I am a mildly popular blogger, and alas, have no fuzzy beasts to take care of — unless you count my husband.

Our most recent books are, respectively, The Snow Queen’s Shadow and With Fate Conspire.

Without further ado . . . .

***

Marie: There are a million books out there that will tell you how to write a novel, but I’ve never seen one that tells you how to write a series. Nobody tells you how to do that; it’s something you figure out the hard way, after you’ve got a contract — no pressure! And it’s hard enough figuring out what to do in the middle, but sticking the landing . . . that’s the real killer.

With Fate Conspire was really my first experience with ending a series. You had the goblin trilogy, so at least you’d done this once before; but me, all I had under my belt was the doppelganger duology. Those weren’t even conceived of as a series, not originally; I wrote the first book to be a stand-alone, ending on something major happening, and then built the second around how people reacted to that event. It was a before-and-after model, which is relatively simple — kind of like one long book. The Onyx Court series, on the other hand, was very different. Each plot stands more or less alone, but there’s a certain amount of thematic and character arc across the four, which I felt needed to pay off in a satisfying fashion — but without making the book something that would only make sense to people who had read the whole series.

How about you? What was it like writing Goblin War, versus Snow Queen’s Shadow?

Jim: Don’t you love writing a sequel to a book you never planned to write a sequel for? Goblin Quest was similar, very much written to be a complete, standalone book. I like to joke that of course I planned it all out and knew exactly what I was doing for all three books, but that would be total dung.

Writing the second goblin book was difficult. Ending the series was even harder. Even if each book could stand completely on its own, I was still ending a series. Expectations were higher. I wanted something big, something that brought a sense of closure.

I think closure was my biggest concern. I love that people e-mail me and try to convince me to do another goblin book, but generally it’s because they love the characters, not because they feel like they’ve been left hanging. There needs to be a payoff, like you said. And before I could figure out how to write that payoff, I needed to figure out what the underlying themes and questions of the series were.

Unfortunately, I generally don’t figure out my themes until after the fact … if ever. With the princess books, I was halfway through book four when it clicked that I’d spent the whole series deconstructing and challenging “Happily ever after.” So in addition to wrapping up some plot threads (will T get together with S or won’t she?), I needed something that brought closure to the various ever-after storylines. For the goblins, it was more about survival — so I needed to address how Jig and his fellow goblins were going to survive in the long run.

Your turn! What themes did you find yourself struggling to resolve in book four? And I’m curious, was there a point where it just felt too big? Writing one book is overwhelming enough, but when you’re talking about four books worth of story and characters and setting and details…

Marie: Closure is exactly the kicker, isn’t it? I got the same thing in response to the doppelganger books, people wanting me to write a third one. I won’t be surprised at all if I get the same thing after With Fate Conspire. (In fact, I hope so. Otherwise it might mean I’ve ticked my readers off so thoroughly they’ve given up on me . . . .)

In my case, it’s complicated by the fact that I may actually continue the Onyx Court series someday. Each book takes place in a different century, the sixteenth through the nineteenth; it would be cool to add the twentieth and twenty-first to that sequence. But right now that’s just a possibility, and not one that will be happening any time soon. So I had to approach Fate with the mentality of, this is it. This is the end. How do I make it satisfying?

It helped a bit that when I decided to write sequels to the first book, I knew right away what some of the series’ over-arching structure would be. There’s actually three layers to it, which sounds very fancy when I think about it. Midnight Never Come (#1) and A Star Shall Fall (#3) share the characteristic of being more interpersonal, while In Ashes Lie (#2) and With Fate Conspire (#4) are driven by larger-scale conflicts: ABAB. It’s also AABB, in that the first two books take place pre-Enlightenment (an important sea-change in society) and have Lune as one of the major protagonists, whereas the later books are more “modern” in feel and focus on other characters. And finally, it’s ABBA: Ashes and Star form a pair around the Great Fire of London, whereas Midnight and Fate are about the creation and dissolution of the Onyx Hall. I also knew, as soon as I sketched out the progression of the series, that its focus would gradually slide down from the royal court of Midnight Never Come to the lower classes of With Fate Conspire.

But all of that didn’t help me very much when it came time to plot out what was actually going to happen in the fourth book. Before I started writing, I sat down and did something I should have done from the start, namely, made a list of all the characters and locations and so on that had appeared in the story so far. Then I had to decide which ones were going to return in book four. My reflex, as you might be able to sympathize with, was to include ALL of them. There are two problems with that: first, it leaves no room for new stuff to be added, and second . . . this is supposed to be a book about the final days of the Onyx Hall. Lots of people are dead or fled, bits of the palace have disintegrated out of existence, etc. If everybody’s still there, it isn’t very convincing, is it?

Honestly, though, I think the biggest squid to wrestle came from history itself, rather than my own narrative canon. You want to talk “too big”? Try Victorian London on for size! They called it “the monster city” for a good reason. And I wanted to include a variety of stuff, not just the usual upper-class tea parties: Fenian bombings and the construction of the Underground and photography and dockworkers and evolution and all the rest of it. For everything I managed to work into the story, though, there’s four more that just didn’t fit, no matter how cool they were.

Did you feel the same impulse to go back to people and places we’ve seen before? Or did you have a lot of new things you wanted to incorporate? And whichever route you went, how did you try to ensure that you don’t (as you said) leave people hanging? Wanting to see more of the characters you love is one thing, but quitting while there are still unanswered questions or unresolved conflicts is another.

Jim: See, that’s exactly why I don’t write books set in Victorian England…

***

Speaking of “unresolved,” we’ll break there, and you can pick up part two on Jim’s site tomorrow. (I’ll advertise the link once it’s up.) Feel free to post questions either here or there!

And then there were thirteen.

I generally count a night’s work as belonging to preceding day, even though the clock says otherwise, but in this case I wanted to be sure I finished before we technically passed over into August.

A Natural History of Dragons is done, at 86,174 words.

(God, I love writing a shorter novel for once.)

brain bunnies

So last night I write a little over 2300 words on A Natural History of Dragons, and then it’s Very Late, so I go to bed, and lie there for a little while, and then get up and go back to the computer and type in this:

I’m one of those people who, soon as you tell me not to do something, I turn around and do it. Because fuck you, even if you are a friend. And Tia wasn’t that much of a friend.

So I’m talking about how I’m bored with the Meltdown and there’s this old club over on Hall I might check out, and she says I shouldn’t, and we argue about it a bit until she says — only half-joking — “J, I forbid you to go,” and that’s it: to hell with her. Which I say. So she storms off, and I pin up my favorite skirt with some giant safety pins, braid gold LEDs into my hair, and go off to see what this old club is like. Because fuck Tia, and anybody else who tells me what to do.

I’m not sure why my brain decided that 4:30 in the morning after 2300 words of novel was the ideal time to mug me with a framework and two opening paragraphs for a “Tam Lin” retelling that could possibly cruise all the way through without having any fantastical content whatsoever (only then where would I sell it?) . . . but that’s how it goes, sometimes.

The funny thing is, I’ve had the opening page and a half for a “Tam Lin” sequel story hanging out in my “unfinished” folder for years now. And now I’m wondering if what I need to do is throw out everything but the first line (“Faerie trouble never really goes away.”), splice a bit of fantastical content into the story up above, and then link these two together.

Well, no need to decide right away. I have several deadlines breathing down my neck which take first priority. But it’s a thought for the future.

Er, I missed one hundred. Let’s go for eighty-one instead!

I’ve been so occupied with other things that I completely missed my usual “one hundred days until publication” landmark. Also ninety days. Eighty is tomorrow, but that’s the weekend, so let’s go with eighty-one days, and give you your first excerpt from With Fate Conspire!

“You were unable to stop them.”

In other news, I made it to forty thousand words on A Natural History of Dragons last night. I need an icon for that series, so let’s do a combined event here: post an icon (or even just an image) in the comments that you think would be appropriate for the adventures of my !nineteenth-century lady naturalist, and the winner will get an ARC of With Fate Conspire.

And I’ll try to keep on track better from now on. <guilty look>

in which I post ALL the writing links!

Seriously, I’ve got a lot of these piled up.

First: genarti! Congratulations! You have won the “ARC and Desk Delivery Day” giveaway. Email me your address (marie dot brennan at gmail dot com), and I’ll get that on its way to you.

Second, you have a chance to win a complete set of the Onyx Court books by bidding in Brenda Novak’s 2011 Auction, raising money for diabetes research. That runs until the end of the month, so you have about twelve days left to bid. (The prize will ship in summer, when I receive my author copies of With Fate Conspire, or I can arrange to send the first three earlier if desired.) Also, there are lots of other awesome things on offer there, so go browse.

Third, you also have until the end of the month to buy one or more of my stories from AnthologyBuilder, and get a dollar off the cover price. (Fuller details here.)

Fourth, some of you may be interested in , a Yuletide-style fandom exchange for Asian fandoms (e.g. Japanese anime, Bollywood, Hong Kong action flicks, etc). Nominations are open until the 25th, and I’m vaguely tempted to participate; I had fun writing my K-20 story for Yuletide last year. I’m waiting to see how many of the nominated sources I know well enough to write, though, since a lot of the current ones are totally unknown to me.

Fifth, for the language wonks reading this, “Singular ‘they’ and the many reasons why it’s correct.” I am a big proponent of “they” as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, largely because it’s one we’ve been using for that exact purpose for centuries now, and it’s a lot more graceful than “he or she” and similar constructions. Mind you, I do find it unsatisfactory for referring to a specific individual who doesn’t fit into standard gender categories; for whatever reason, in those cases my brain seizes up on the apparent plural meaning of the word. (And it’s politer anyway to use whatever pronoun such a person prefers, though that can be hard to do — and the pragmatist in me does wish we could settle on a single alternative, rather than the motley assortment currently in use.) But for sentences like “everyone took out their books,” or referring to somebody whose gender identification is unknown (frex, somebody you only know online), I like “they.” We’re already using it; I think grammar pedants should accept it.

That’s enough for now, I suppose. There may be other link salad-style posts in the future, though; Firefox’s new tab-grouping setup has really encouraged my tendency to hoard these things. :-/

Writing Fight Scenes: Maps

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

After a delay of much longer duration than expected, I finally have for you a follow-up post on the topic of where to set the combat, which will function as our segue into craft-related aspects of writing fight scenes.

If the layout and contents of the environment are important to the scene — as they should be — then you need to have a very clear grasp on their relative positions. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll communicate that information effectively to the reader, but believe me: if you don’t have that clear grasp, your odds of communicating the necessary information go way down.

To that end, I suggest making a map.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. Mine, in fact, are hideous. Let me show you, with three examples from Warrior (the novel formerly known as Doppelganger):

Nobody ever has to see them but you. Unless, of course, you decide to write a series of posts on the topic of fights, and use your own work as a demonstration.

huh . . . upgrades

So you know how sometimes Amazon gets a wrong piece of information into its book database? The wrong format, or release date, or cover copy, or whatever.

That didn’t happen here.

With Fate Conspire really is going to be a hardcover.

It’s kind of awesome to get that news right after I posted about the celebration of my five-year anniversary of Realio Trulio Being a Novelist. 🙂 And it prodded me to stop waffling over the lovely, lovely icons you guys made for me and finally pick one, with victory going at last to airo25. (This was a hard decision, y’all. So props to everybody else who made me an icon, too.) airo25, e-mail me your address at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll make a note to send you an ARC of Fate when they come in.

My first hardcover. Maybe I can use that to stave off the tedium of the page proofs, which arrived yesterday. 🙂 Whee!!!!!

doing my part, what little I can

There is, as you might expect, another LJ charity auction underway, at . There are many things on offer there, but this one is mine: a short story to a prompt of the winner’s choosing, drawn from Japanese history or folklore.

I’ve set the minimum bid at $50 because unlike the Onyx Court auctions of the past, this time I’m guaranteeing a fully-written short story. Having never offered something like this, I don’t know if that’s too high and I’ve just scared you all off, or it’s too low and you’re going to jack the price way up in bidding. (Since this is for charity, I hope it’s the latter.) Instructions for bidding (or offering) are here, and the auction will run until Saturday the 26th.

Categories of offer: art and artistry, audio work, interesting stuff, food, graphics, words. Go forth and bid, for a good cause.

For those who weren’t at FOGcon . . .

. . . or those who didn’t hear me announce it there:

I have a new book deal.

Three books for certain; the series may run as long as five; title of either the first book or the entire series — haven’t decided yet which one — is A Natural History of Dragons. They are the memoirs of Isabella Trent, Scirland’s foremost lady adventurer and dragon naturalist, and cover her illustrious career traveling the world to study dragons (and getting into large amounts of trouble along the way).

As you might guess from the “Scirland” bit, this is a secondary-world fantasy, albeit one based on the real-world nineteenth century. Hallelujah, I get to make stuff up. There will still be research, of course — there is always research — but it will be of a more compost-y sort; I’ll read stuff, get the flavor in my head, and then make up something in an appropriate vein. You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to that part.

I came up with the idea for this series just before the first round of Novel in 90, several years ago, and it should tell you something that I wrote about thirty thousand words of it in a rather short space of time, before stalling out on account of not having figured out my metaplot. In the interim, I’ve made progress on that problem, and am very eager to get back to the story. The narrative voice is just a delight to play with. In celebration of the deal, here’s an excerpt, from the foreword to the first volume of Isabella’s memoirs:

Not a day goes by that the post does not bring me at least one letter from a young person (or sometimes one not so young) who wishes to follow in my footsteps and become a dragon naturalist. Nowadays, of course, the field is quite respectable, with university courses and intellectual societies putting out fat volumes titled Proceedings of some meeting or other. Those interested in respectable things, however, attend my lectures. The ones who write to me invariably want to hear about my adventures: my escape from captivity in the swamps of Mouleen, or my role in the great Battle of Keonga, or (most frequently) my flight to the inhospitable heights of the Mrtyahaima peaks, the only place on earth where the secrets of the ancient world could be unlocked.

Even the most dedicated of letter-writers could not hope to answer all these queries personally. I have therefore accepted the offer from Messrs. Carrigdon & Rudge to publish a series of memoirs, chronicling the more interesting portions of my life. By and large these shall focus on those expeditions which led to the discovery for which I have become so famous, but there shall also be occasional digressions into matters more entertaining, personal, or even (yes) salacious. One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a “national treasure,” is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and may not write.

Beyond this point, therefore, lie foetid swamps, society gossip, disfiguring diseases, familial conflicts, hostile foreigners, and a plenitude of mud. You, dear reader, continue on at your own risk. It is not for the faint of heart — no more so than the study of dragons itself. But such study offers rewards beyond compare: to stand in a dragon’s presence, even for the briefest of moments — even at the risk of one’s life — is a delight that, once experienced, can never be forgotten. If my humble words convey even a fraction of that wonder, I will rest content.

Expect much babbling over the next few months about Darwin and Stanley and Isabella Bird, who actually wasn’t the source of my protagonist’s name, but it’s a nice coincidence nonetheless.

DIE YOU STUPID THING DIE

HAH. I have ~~ridden from Stamford Bridge to Hastings in six days~~ written 6,410 words today and KILLED THE NOVELLA DEAD.

Apparently February is my month for writing novellas. Deeds of Men was written two years ago. I kind of hope it’s another two years before — or longer — before I try to write another one.

this icon is good for both celebration and frustration

OH MY GOD THIS STORY WON’T BLOODY DIE

(How much won’t it die? I wrote more than 4300 words on it today. Which were added to the rather sizeable amount I had already. And I am nowhere near done.)

(Novellas. Man. I am here to tell you, they suck.)

Writing Fight Scenes: Where?

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

My apologies for the hiatus; I’ve been busy, and this is another one of those posts that requires me to pull together a bunch of things I don’t normally think about consciously, ergo requires more brain-power than I was able to muster for a while there. But let’s get back on the wagon, and ask ourselves the next important question: where are the combatants fighting?

As with the question of who’s fighting, this often has a simple answer that turns out to have more packed inside it than you might think. Unpacking that can be useful for two reasons: first, well-placed description can bring the scene to life for the reader, and second, it can influence the course of the fight.

So, what aspects might you want to consider in setting your scene?

Y'all really need to read Dunnett, if you haven't.

first lines meme, novels edition

You know how I recently mentioned that my mental queue of Books I Could Write includes twenty-two entries in six series? It’s more than that, really, when you count the standalones and the things I’ve already written but haven’t sold and son on. Rather than do a first lines meme for short stories (which are kind of guilting me right now), I thought it might be fun to tally up all the openings for the novels. Note that most of these are currently laboring under working titles, and for shits and giggles I’ll include some I think are dead in the water.

A terrifyingly long list, really. And it doesn't even include sequels.

newsletters make it official

If you are San Francisco Bay Area-local, or capable of traveling here in March, you might want to check out FOGcon. It’s a new con starting up March 11-13, with a theme this year of “The City in SF/F;” having looked at their programming possibilities, they definitely have some interesting and varied ideas for how to approach that topic.

I’ll be there, and will presumably be on at least one panel. Furthermore — I guess it’s official, since it got mentioned in the recent newsletter — I’ll be running one of their writing workshops. Looks like the setup will be stories under 10K, submitted with cover letter by February 15th; default arrangement is for a Clarion-style workshop, with each student reading and critting the other pieces in addition to the instructor’s feedback. Erin Cashier, Jed Hartman, and David Levine are the other instructors, and we’re each getting our own section, so if you have a preference for one or another of us (or want to specifically run away from me), mention that in your cover letter.

(This will actually be the first time I’ve run a workshop like this at a con. But I have taught writing before, for one semester.)

Anyway, if you’re interested, register soon! I hope to see some of you there.

as the industry moves online

An Archive of Our Own, one of the big fanfic sites, is working on implementing “subscriptions,” where you can designate particular authors (or fandoms or tags or what-have-you) and be informed when new stories get posted.

It occurs to me that, as more and more short fiction publishing moves online, how useful this could be. I mean, I post links when stories of mine go up, so if you read my LJ you hear about those things. But that requires you to follow a bunch of different separate feeds, and it buries the story links in the noise of everything else you read. Maybe some online ‘zines tag their stories in a way that allows you to tell Google Reader or whatever, tell me whenever Clarkesworld publishes a Cat Valente story — I don’t know; I haven’t tried — but if she then publishes a story in Lightspeed instead, you won’t know about it. How technically difficult would it be to create an aggregator site that covers all the online ‘zines (ending at whatever bar the site’s operator chooses), and then once you pick an author from their database, notifies you whenever that author publishes something, wherever it might be? I have no idea; IANenough of a webgeek to do that kind of thing myself. I imagine it would require some amount of cooperation from the publisher’s side, tagging the pages according to the aggregator’s requirements, etc. The benefit, however, is that it drives traffic to your site; and if I discover a lot of the writers I’ve subscribed to are being published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I might start checking out who else they print, because clearly that place fits my taste. (Heck, print magazines could even benefit, with a blog that advertises the latest ToC.)

I dunno — maybe it would weaken the sense of loyalty to particular publications in favor of the writers. We still haven’t solved the problem of funding online magazines, and if something like this makes it harder for Strange Horizons to raise money, etc, because people are no longer self-identifying as “SH readers” but readers of one author or another, then that would be a problem. But if you really like Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya stories, it would be neat to have something automatically alert you when one of them pops up, even if it’s in a place you don’t normally look. It seems to me this fits with the a la carte trend I’m seeing in how we consume media: Tivo to pull down the programs we want to watch, iTunes selling us individual tracks instead of whole albums, etc. I’m reading some serialized stories online, and I know having new chapters pop up in my reader, without me having to go check for updates, is damned convenient. If short story publishing in general had something like this, I’d use it in a heartbeat.

I dream of writing middle-grade

Copy-edits are here, all five hundred forty pages of ’em.

Dear Self: please to be writing shorter books in the future, kthxbye.

more (sort of) Onyx Court to tide you over

I screwed up my neck and shoulder on Sunday, so I’ve mostly been staying away from the computer. But I’ll have another fight post soon — possibly tomorrow* — and in the meantime, you can entertain yourselves with “Two Pretenders,” my latest offering over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This is, by the way, the product of one of my charity auctions, where the winner was allowed to choose one event or person in English history and I would tell them what the fae of the Onyx Court had to do with it. In the case of “Two Pretenders,” because the event chosen actually predates the Court itself, the link is more tenuous; but the short story grew out of the summary I gave the winner. So if I do another such auction in the future, remember, you may get an entire short story out of it. 🙂

And remember, after you’ve read the story, you’re always welcome to leave a comment on the forums.

*By which I mean Friday for everybody who isn’t in Asia. I’m actually posting this before midnight my time, but in social terms I don’t believe it’s the next day until the sun has risen or I’ve slept, so even if it were three a.m. Friday morning for me right now (and six a.m. or later for some of you), “tomorrow” would still mean Friday. Confused yet? 🙂

Writing Fight Scenes: What?

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

Enough with the touchy-feely stuff about character and purpose; you want to know about weapons.

I said at the start of this series that you mostly don’t need technical expertise to be able to write good fight scenes. Weapons are the one place where that’s less true. You don’t have to be trained in everything you put into your characters’ hands, but it does help to have a grasp of general principles, and to look up details once you’ve decided what to use. What I’ll aim to do here is give you a sense of those general principles, and a few examples of what I mean by detail.

Let’s get to the stabby things!

why I have this icon

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .

. . . it was the time between contracts.

That’s right, folks, I am at present the writerly equivalent of unemployed. Aside from the copy-edits and page proofs for With Fate Conspire, I have no contractual obligation to a publisher. Which means it’s time to go rooting through the brain and figure out what I’m going to try and sell.

It’s a fun time because, dude! New ideas! Shiny! Four years of Onyx Court means four years’ worth of creative backlog, all kinds of characters and concepts that have been stewing away in my subconscious. Some that used to look all sparkly and keen have now faded, but others have arisen to take their place. Just off the top of my head, I can think of twenty-two books in six series that I would be willing and able to do next, plus some stand-alones. So I am living in a time of wondrous possibility, where anything could happen . . .

. . . or nothing. This is also the time where I chew off my fingernails, wondering if my sales figures are good enough, whether the ideas are commercial enough, second-guessing what would be the best thing to do next from a career point of view. Self-doubt creeps in, because right now I have no safety net, and the publishing industry is not exactly in good health. I don’t think I’m likely to find myself sans new contract, but it’s taken writers by surprise before, and what if I’m one of them?

And, of course, the worst part is that it’s slow. I have to polish up a proposal, send it to my agent, get her feedback, maybe polish it some more, then wait for her to submit it. After that, it might take weeks or even months to achieve resolution. Hence this icon.

You may be seeing more of it in the days to come.

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