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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Now it can be told . . . .

The coyotes of Mexicali were bold. They did their business in cantinas, in the middle of the afternoon; the police, well-fed with bribes, looked the other way. Day by day, week by week, people came into Mexicali, carrying backpacks and bundles and small children, and day by day, week by week, they went away again, vanishing while the back of the police was obligingly turned.

The short story I was having so much angst over was “Coyotaje,” and it’s been sold to Ekaterina Sedia’s anthology Bewere the Night. (A sequel anthology of sorts to Running with the Pack, but there’s no connection between my two stories.)

It just goes to illustrate what every writer figures out eventually: that the ease with which a story comes out of your head has no particular relationship to its quality. I’m actually quite proud of “Coyotaje,” even if writing it was like pulling my teeth out one by one with rusty pliers. Not that the difficulty automatically implies quality, either; I’ve had stories that just raced from my fingers which I was also extremely proud of. The two things just don’t correlate at all.

Release date is April, if Amazon can be believed; I’ll keep you updated.

Writing Fight Scenes: Who?

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

The short story is DEAD AT LAST — or at least written, revised, and sent off to someone who can check it for howling factual errors — and so it’s time for the triumphant return of How to Write a Fight Scene!

So: who’s fighting?

I said last time that the most important question to ask yourself is, what is the purpose of this fight? Only slightly less important is this: who is involved in the fight? This both arises from and feeds back into purpose, of course, so you generally end up asking them both at the same time, but they’re both major enough issues that I split them apart for the purpose of discussion.

The answer to this is, in its simplest form, very short: a minimum of two people (or one person and some kind of opponent, anyway). But it isn’t enough to have their names. There are a lot of details packed into the question of who, and those details can have a strong effect on how the fight goes. So let’s take a moment to unpack them.

Do not be frightened by what you find inside.

a missive from the salt mines

Why won’t this short story just die?

I’m itching to do things like get back to the fight-scene blogging, but I can’t let myself do that until this damn thing is finished. Which will happen tonight, come hell, high water, or the lure of sweet sweet procrastination . . . but god, it’s taking forever.

more fiction!

It’s just raining stories of mine around here, ain’t it?

Erin Underwood of Underwords has put together a free fiction sampler for 2011, and it includes some stories from Clockwork Phoenix 3, including “The Gospel of Nachash.” So if you’re interested in me, um, fanficcing the Bible? . . . in full-blown King James Version style . . . with sekrit ingredients thrown in . . . then go check it out. And if you’re not, check the sampler out anyway, because I am only one of twenty-seven authors bundled into it, and there’s sure to be somebody else you enjoy.

in-flight wireless, facilitating Yuletide silliness

So I discovered I have longer to write “Coyotaje” than I thought, which means I was able to let myself stop pushing on a stone that really doesn’t want to roll yet. Still need to get the thing written soon, but as long as that one wasn’t moving forward, I let myself write a silly little treat for Yuletide, above and beyond the story I was assigned. The recipient is somebody I don’t know in the slightest — which pleases me, because there’s something delightful about total strangers writing stuff for each other. Friends writing stories as gifts is also nice, but when it’s a stranger, it’s all about shared love for the source. Somebody else going, “omg, you’ve seen/read/heard that, too? Isn’t it fabulous?”

After the brain-drain that was With Fate Conspire, this is, indeed, what I needed. Stories as play, without having to put on my professional hat. December is a good time of year for recharging, and I can feel myself getting excited about other things now. We’ll see how much I can get done before the calendar ticks over.

Right now, though, I’m on a plane, which was okay for polishing that Yuletide story, but not terribly good for drafting something new. Plus, I’m very sleepy, and can’t let myself nap. Time to find someway to keep myself awake.

aaaaand . . . . GO!

Got my Yuletide story uploaded. Now I have three days in which to try and finish a story for (hopefully) paying purposes. I would have done these things in the opposite order, but the pro piece didn’t actually cohere in my head until tonight; in fact, I was on the verge of giving up and not submitting anything after all.

Working title, “Coyotaje.”

Go.

Writing Fight Scenes: The Question of Purpose

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

All right, enough vague philosophizing. Let’s start digging into the practicalities.

For my money, the most important question you should ask yourself in writing a fight scenes is, What is the purpose of this fight?

“Who is involved in this fight?” is also a critically important question, and we’ll get to that soon enough. But the who is a matter for inside the story, whereas the purpose is a matter for both within and without.

Inside the story, we’re asking why these characters are fighting. What’s their impetus for doing so, and what do they hope to accomplish? Outside, we’re asking what the fight is supposed to do for the story as a whole. As we discussed last time, there should ideally be more than one answer to that latter question.

For this, I will use the Inigo/Man in Black duel as my example.

Writing Fight Scenes: my philosophy

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

So you’re working on a story, and there comes a point where it really ought to have a fight scene. But you’re sitting there thinking, “I’m not a martial artist! I’m not an SCA member! I have no idea how to fight!” Or maybe you’re thinking, “Fight scenes are so boring. I’d rather just skip over this and get back to the actual story.” Or something else that makes you dread writing that scene, rather than looking forward to it with anticipation.

Don’t worry, dear reader. I’m from the Internet, and I’m here to help. <g>

To the first group, I say: the details of how to fight are possibly the least important component of a fight scene. The important components are the same ones you’re already grappling with in the rest of your writing, namely, description, pacing, characterization, and all that good stuff.

To the second group, I say: it’s only boring if the author does it wrong.

Cut for length.

Writing Fight Scenes: Introduction

This month’s SF Novelists post is a bit different, because it’s the launching point for a series I’ll be doing over here on LJ for the next indeterminate amount of time.

At Sirens this past month, I did a workshop on writing fight scenes, and promised those who weren’t able to attend that I’d be posting the material online. That begins today, and will be continuing for a while. Check out the aforementioned post for sort of an anecdote-cum-mission statement, then head behind the cut for a bit more about me and why I’m interested in this subject, plus an outline of how I’m going to approach this.

I’ve always loved fight scenes.

medical/law enforcement questions

Do psychiatric facilities generally fingerprint their patients?

If cops were to get hold of bloodstained clothing, how long would it take to run an analysis on the blood? And what information would that give? How about analyzing non-visible blood residue on a knife?

(I’m trying to clear some written-but-not-revised stories out of here.)

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. (Or in my case, sweep the floor.)

There is a story.

It started out as a fanficcy little speculation on somebody else’s world, and at that stage it lived only in my head. One day the seed attached itself instead to another idea, this one mine, and having done so, it grew.

I tried many times to write it as a short story. Seven times, according to my files, and of those, only attempt #5 was ever completed. But I knew it sucked, and that’s why attempts #6 and #7 happened — continual attempts to cram the narrative into the confines of a short story. Until one day I said, screw this; let’s see how long it wants to be. Whereupon I wrote a twenty-two thousand word novella.

That being a useless length for a young writer with no publishing credits, the novella went into the drawer. Later I brought it out for critique, thinking I might try to sell it after all, but I never got around to revising it. My odds of selling it were too low, and I had this subconscious feeling the story needed more than just a polish. So back into the drawer it went.

Until I found myself with a reason to pick it up again, and a chance of maybe selling it, too. More than seven years after writing the novella, I brought it out for critique again, this time with the knowledge that I would probably do a ground-up rewrite: after all, one hopes I had improved in the intervening years. I knew I wanted to make substantial changes, but what I didn’t know — not consciously, not until one of my readers pointed it out — was that the story had a fundamental flaw at its core. One that made most of the narrative action pointless and unnecessary. The kind of flaw you have to fix, or dump the story.

Tonight, while sweeping the dojo after karate, I figured out how to fix that flaw. And given the story, that was a very appropriate time for such an epiphany.

No, you don’t get to know what the story is. Not yet. But I promise you’ll know within the next six months, whatever the tale’s ultimate fate will be.

five things I want

1) I want to write a secondary-world fantasy, where I can Make Shit Up rather than having to bend myself around reality.

2) I want to write short stories again.

3) I want to move forward on some piece of the logjam of ideas building up in my mind.

4) I want to know what I’m doing next.

5) I really, really want to be done with this revision, so I can get on with my life.

Fascinating Title Goes Here

The Internet has this magical ability to cough up stuff on whatever topic you’re thinking about, even when you aren’t looking for it*. At the moment, that’s this post by Jay Lake, which led me through daisy-chain of other posts by Seanan McGuire, Edmund Schubert, Misty Massey, and David Coe, all on the topic of titles.

I have titles on the brain right now for two reasons:

1) I just sent my crit group the most recent Driftwood story, which doesn’t really have a name yet, though my tongue-in-cheek dubbing of it as “Two Men in a Basket” might end up sticking just for lack of anything better.

2) I still don’t have a title for the Victorian book.

These two situations have different root causes, I think. Thanks to the first three installments in the series, the Victorian book is hedged about with all these requirements that I should fulfill if humanly possible: it has to be a quote, the passage the quote comes from has to work as an epigraph (ideally for the last part of the book), it should have a verb (ideally at the end of the phrase), etc. Finding a piece of Victorian literature that will fit all the requirements at once is proving much more difficult than I expected — to the point where I may well have to compromise on one or more points, though the perfectionist in me doesn’t want to. For the Driftwood story, on the other hand, the problem is that I don’t have any requirements. It’s a wide-open field, and so I end up standing around in it, not sure where to go.

And it’s made more complicated by the fact that novel titles and short story titles aren’t quite the same kind of beast. Certain things could work for either, and in fact I think you can generally port novel titles onto short stories without too much problem. But short story titles can’t necessarily go the other way. “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” strikes me as only working for the short form; “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual” would NEVER go on a book. Short story titles are allowed to be wordier, because they don’t have to function as a piece of marketing in the way their novel-related cousins do. (Exceptions like The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making are just that: exceptions.) Cleverness in book titles is somewhat limited to humourous work, while a broader range of short stories can get away with it.

I’ve said before that my best titles usually show up at the start of the process; my average titles are the ones I stick on after the fact. (I have some bad titles, too, but let’s not talk about those. They’re after-the-fact efforts, too.) What makes a title good? It has to be evocative — which is one of those vague, hand-wavy descriptors I actually kind of hate, but I don’t have a better one that manages to combine the concepts of “striking” and “memorable” and “suggestive of more than it’s saying.” Lots of writers try to achieve evocative-ness (evocativity?) by throwing in nouns that supposedly carry that quality: Shadow. Soul. Dragon. Yawn. My attention is drawn more to odd juxtapositions. Queen isn’t a terribly interesting word, but the contradiction of The Beggar Queen is a lot more intriguing.

And then you have to worry about titles in a series, and how to make it clear these books belong together. I have to say I’m not a fan of the Mercedes Lackey answer to this question: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price; Winds of Fate, Winds of Change, Winds of Fury; The Black Gryphon, The White Gryphon, The Silver Gryphon . . . well, if you dropped all the books on the floor it would be easy to sort the trilogies from one another, but exciting this is not. I prefer Dunnett’s approach with the Lymond books, where the titles may not be individually brilliant, but the running chess metaphor connects them all. This is why the pattern of the Onyx Court titles matters to me, too, because the structural characteristics are what advertise “this is part of that series!”

But you still have to come up with the title. For the Victorian book, I go looking in Victorian literature, but what about stories or novels where the title could be anything? How do you even get started? I swear, sometimes it’s harder than writing the actual stories. If you have any brilliant thoughts, please do share them in the comments.

*By which I mean that our brains have this magical ability to notice stuff that matches the pattern of what we’re interested in. But it’s more fun to say the Internet gets credit.

I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself.

Kate Elliott on authorial intent.

Word.

I’m smart enough not to respond publicly to reviews, of course; that pretty much never ends well. But if you want to know which ones get up my nose the worst, it’s the ones that make unfounded declarations about what was in my head while writing. If you read a particular thing out of the story, fine — far be it from me to say ur doin it wrong. But please don’t claim you know why I did things that way.

Mind you, the line between the two isn’t entirely clear. Sometimes — as Kate’s contrasting examples show — a lot of it comes down to phrasing; if you say “it seems the author felt X,” that creates a different impression than “the author felt X.” This is one case where I think it’s a good idea to use qualifiers for your assertions, even though in other circumstances it’s better to just say things directly. And, of course, if you’ve been reading my blog or an interview with me or whatever, anything I say there is fair game for use later; your review can say “because Marie Brennan is concerned with not taking events out of the hands of the real, historical people who were involved, she does Z” — though even there, it would be better to say you presume there’s a causal relationship, because when you get down to it I may have forgotten my own agenda and done Z simply because it looked nifty, or the rest of my plot required it.

Talk all you like about the product. What you say may sound very odd to me; I may blink in surprise at the cool thing I apparently did without noticing, or wonder exactly what novel you read, but in the end “the book” is the product of a chemical reaction between the words on the page and the contents of the reader’s head, and I only control one half of the ingredients. The contents of my own head, on the other hand, do not belong to the reader, and so I would prefer that reviewers phrase any speculation as speculation. Don’t be the guy who went around telling people what Ursula LeGuin “intended” with the Earthsea books. Don’t presume to speak for the author. If I’m going to bite my tongue and not tell you how to read my work, don’t tell me how I wrote it.

Never underestimate the importance of body language.

Last night I was watching Brick while ironing my gi (fabulous movie, btw; noir set in a high school, and it works), and thinking about how Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of those actors I don’t often see, but generally enjoy when I do. Then I thought about N.K. Jemisin’s guest post on Whatever about Inception, and a comment in the thread there about JGL, and I realized what it is that gets me about his performances:

He understands how to use body language.

Most guys look good in three-piece suits, but as Arthur in Inception, he doesn’t just wear the suit, he wears the posture that makes the suit look good. In Brick, when he’s been beaten up something like four or five times in as many days and is coughing his lungs out, there’s a shot of his feet stumbling down to the path that will lead him to a very dangerous confrontation — and then he stops, and his feet settle, and then he walks off as if nothing’s wrong. (Gamer-brain says, “that’s what spending a point of willpower looks like.”) He doesn’t just act with his face and his voice; it goes through every part of his body, so that the telling details might be in his hands or his shoulders or something else you maybe don’t even notice, not consciously, not unless you’re looking for it.

I’ve realized this is a common theme among actors I like, the ones where hearing they’re in a movie will instantly get me more interested. Johnny Depp does it, and brilliantly. Cate Blanchett does it, though at the moment she’s about the only actress I can think of who does. (I blame the industry, not the actresses; they don’t often get as wide a range of roles to play.) Paul Bettany does it, and he was the one who made me realize body language was a key point for me, after noticing the subtle physical cues he works into his performance. When Vin Diesel remembers to do it, he can hold the entire screen by presence alone; one of the most bad-ass shots in all of Pitch Black is him simply standing up.

And when people forget to do it, that failure can undermine an entire performance. (Now I’ve got kitsunealyc in my head, ranting about Gwyneth Paltrow’s terrible posture in Emma, that made all her dresses look like sacks.)

This drives me a little crazy because of course I want to make use of this idea in fiction, and I can’t — not exactly. The kinds of physical quirks I’m thinking of work best when they’re done subtly, in the background; in prose, though, I have to describe whatever I want you to see, and that automatically draws your attention to it. Especially because getting the nuance of a gesture or twitch might require an entire sentence of description, when the act itself takes half a second. You have to approach it differently: well, duh, it’s a different medium. I think the equivalent in prose is finding that precisely-calibrated angle from which to describe something, that will carry a whole weight of implied meaning without taking up a lot of space. Dunnett does this brilliantly (as she does so many things), particularly with Lymond’s hands; she’ll say something about his face being caged behind his fingers or whatever and somehow her descriptor manages to make me see everything else surrounding it: posture, white knuckles, the whole ensemble of body language, from that one perfect detail. It won’t always work, because one reader’s metaphoric connections aren’t the same as the next, but it’s the only way I can really see to accomplish what I want.

So, I just have to become as awesome as Dorothy Dunnett. <g>

I’d love other examples of this, either in the form of authors who really pull off physical nuance on the page, or actors/actresses who make good use of it in performance. Do you find it as effective as I do, or are your particular buttons of a different sort?

Yay Driftwood!

Finished another Driftwood story. Wrote most of this one on the Bahamas cruise, because it wasn’t really work work, it was fun work. (Especially since the goal of this one is to have a Driftwood story that isn’t depressing.)

Current title is “Stone and Sky,” but I hope to find something more interesting before it gets sent out to magazines. It needs to sit for a bit and get critiqued first, though, so the title fairy has some time to show up.

(Right now, my subconscious wants to call it “Two Madmen in a Basket.” It is possibly a silly enough story to make that work.)

What happens when I do Fun Work

It’s hard to say how many words I wrote today, since some of it involved replacing a bit of scene I’d written before, but it’s definitely north of 5K.

This is what happens when I let myself work on something other than What I Should Be Working On. (Even if the something else is, technically, also something I should be working on. It ain’t the novel currently under deadline, which is all that really matters.)

Tomorrow, we see if we can’t polish off that nearly-finished short story, and get some other stuff done, too.

They don’t have to be one-armed.

A question for my buff female friends: how many push-ups can you do?

(I ask for story purposes. I’m doing Fun Work, and need to know how many my jock protagonist would do if she felt like showing off. Which she does, ’cause she’s like that.)

mini-post-novel ennui

I had grand plans of doing some “fun work” (that is to say, writing that isn’t the novel) tonight.

Hah. I’m going to curl up in bed with Red Hood’s Revenge and read until I ptfo.

Work can resume tomorrow.

70K!

Bit by bit, the landmarks pass.

If I can just figure out what’s happening in Dead Rick’s next three scenes or so, I’ll be set for the rest of this Part. Then I can maybe kick my pace up a bit and try to finish before the end of the month, giving me a few days to plot strategy for Part Three before I dive into it. That would be nice. This whole “days off” thing is still weird, but I like to do it when I can.

. . . dang it. I had figured out something for Hodge’s scene, and now I’ve forgotten it.

Oh well. If it was a good idea, it’ll come back.

Word count: 70,092
LBR quota: Love, maybe? Whatever covers figuring out that doing something constructive can help tide you over until that revenge thing happens.
Authorial sadism: Hodge can’t get no respect. <g>