Self-Measurement Through Writing

A couple weeks ago, Kyell was talking about how to measure your improvement as a writer. One of the things he recommends is going back through your old work from time to time, as you should be constantly acquiring better skills to evaluate your work.

This post on BLDGBLOG, which is usually about architecture, talks about measuring your progress through life by reading the same book every few years, or visiting the same building every few years. Oddly, I was just talking about this yesterday, how I remember the Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas as a big, glamorous place. I have a very vivid memory of standing right by the pit, because as a seven-year-old I wasn't allowed to go down in where the slot machines were. But Circus Circus was (and remains) one of the more kid-friendly casinos on the Strip. Returning there a few years ago, it seemed shabby to me, dirty and old, not as glamorous as it had been.

The problem with buildings is that they change while we are changing, so unlike a novel, it's not a fixed mark. Where Geoff of BLDGBLOG recommends going back and reading the same novel every few years, I think writers can go one better. You should go back and re-read when you can*, but you should also go back and examine your own work, to measure your growth as a person (what was important to you then? what were you writing about?) and as a writer (how have you matured? what mistakes did you make then?).

*My favorite books for re-reading, over the course of my life, are Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" series, though currently my favorites are probably the Harry Potter books, because I've been re-reading them every time a new one comes out and they hold up surprisingly well. But "The Dark Is Rising" has been on my bookshelf since 1976-77ish, and I've re-read them every few years. And I did not go see the movie.

I admit I don't spend a lot of time going back and re-reading my own work. Maybe in a couple years I'll revisit "Common and Precious," though I'm already embarrassed at some of the language errors I've come across just doing readings...

Review: Reading Like A Writer

Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose
8/10, A useful analysis of writing with excerpts from some of the greats

One of the best parts of "Reading Like A Writer" is the examples she brings in from writers she esteems. In a few cases, I was left scratching my head, but most of the writing really is superb. I'm a firm believer in teaching by example, and so, apparently, is Prose. She picks passages from books and shows us what she loves about them, breaking the book into sections as basic as word choice and sentence structure and moving on to more complicated sections like dialogue and gesture.

I found the word choice and sentence structure sections rather slow. I appreciate the wonder of a well-crafted sentence, but I believe you can get by with those painstakingly constructed sentences at key points in your book: the beginning and the end, most notably (I agonized over the last sentence of "Common and Precious" for a week, and in the end, it's still not as good as I would like it), but also at breaks in the story, chapter beginnings and endings, and at key emotional moments. If you agonize over every sentence in your novel, you will take a decade to write it. For some people, that's fine; my writing is not that good, so I have to rely more heavily on story and character.

She writes about constructing paragraphs, which is a useful if somewhat dry section, and then gets into the meat of the book: story, character, and flow, the things that give a book texture and life. Don't get me wrong: you need the foundation to be able to move on the wallpaper and decor. That doesn't make the foundation any less dry. It was the later parts of the book that inspired me to re-examine my own writing, and to want to read some of the authors she excerpted (most notably Gertrude Stein).

This is a melange of an instructional manual for writers and an homage to great writers. The short excerpts give the reader the feeling that they, too, can do this with just a little extra work. After all, it's laid out so clearly here, and in short, digestible bites. That kind of confidence is invaluable for a writer, and is one of the best points of this book. Once you close the last page, it remains with you.

R.I.P A.C.C.

Safe travels to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, wherever the next stage of his journey takes him.

Sean Murphy over at Wyrdsmiths says it best: "He will be remembered fondly, and re-read often."

On Characters in Fiction

Via Nancy Nall:

"My experience with fiction is very limited — one screenplay, some abortive stories here and there — but the wonderful thing about it is, it’s a conjurer’s trick. You create your characters out of clay, breathe over them and make them live, and then they turn around, kick you in the kneecap, and start doing what they want. You can try to stop them, but doing so will retard your story. Your responsibility, as a writer, is to tell their story, and they will tell you what it is. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it; it’s the closest your average modern person will ever get to voodoo possession."

Speaking just for myself, this is one of the things that keeps me writing fiction, that makes me cranky when I'm not writing, that gives me a rush when I complete a story. It's that act of creation, of bringing characters to life and watching them grow, that odd feeling that they are almost independent of you (there's a post coming in the future about the concept that writers "channel" their stories rather than creating them, the subject of a discussion with the award-nominated Ryan Campbell this weekend), watching them have triumphs and failures, loves and losses, lessons learned and lessons ignored. It's why, even though "Moby Dick" is a huge, ponderous tome that most people haven't gotten through, or have forgotten large chunks of it if they have, its beginning is one of the most famous in literature, because it introduces a character and a mystery and the tone of the novel all in three words.

And if you don't know them, go look them up. :)

Award Nomination!

Hey, Common and Precious got nominated for an award! The Ursa Major Awards celebrate the best in fiction with anthropomorphic themes, and I'm on this year's ballot! It's a small award, but a cool one, so if you helped nominate, thanks! The voting is open to anyone, so now if you'd like to drop in and cast your vote for my novel, that'd be super cool! Also, my journal "New Fables" got nominated for best "fanzine," so while you're there, drop a vote in that category as well if you like. :)

Let me know when you're nominated for something and I'll vote for you too. :)

Clarity in Language

Blogs are supposed to be places where you get unfiltered, undiluted information. Of course, it comes with a bias, and the problem is not that that bias exists, but that it causes people to write--and read--without clarity in order to make a point. For example, this piece from last week's "Right Wing Nut House":

The Republicans, also seeking to get control of the primary process, took away half the delegates from Florida, Michigan, South Carolina, Wyoming, and New Hampshire – also as a result of their violations of primary scheduling rules. They also allowed full participation by all candidates in those primaries.

As a result, while there was some grumbling and even some legal challenges, the primaries went forward on the Republican side with little or no backlash.


It's that last sentence that I want to call out. It's easy to read it, especially if it's one of ten blogs you're looking at to get your morning news, and say "yeah, there was no backlash on the Republican side." But if you examine it more closely...well, grumbling by itself might fall under "little backlash." But "legal challenges"? Isn't that a fairly large backlash? It's not been well-publicized, but still, you could rewrite that sentence factually as: "As a result, while there was some backlash, the primaries went forward on the Republican side with little or no backlash."

Doesn't sound quite as informative, does it? More accurate would be for the author to have written: "As a result, while there was some grumbling and even some legal challenges, the primaries went forward on the Republican side with much less backlash than the Democrats are now experiencing."

I don't mean this to be a political post, or to call out the accuracy of the facts. I just hate unclear writing, especially when it is trying to influence people's attitudes.

Gesture and Detail: An Exercise

I just finished Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer, which started slow but got really good later on (full review forthcoming). Anyway, she has a chapter each on gestures and details, the upshot of which is that if you're going to write a gesture a person makes into your manuscript, or a detail of a place or person, you should make every effort to make that a unique, distinguishing feature of that person or place.

For example, rather than:

"Is that so?" Joe took a drink of wine.

... think about why Joe would drink wine, what it reveals about him that he drank it at that moment, or in what way he takes the drink that can tell us how he's feeling. Like:

"Is that so?" Joe raised the glass to his lips, his eyes never leaving hers as he sipped.

So my exercise to myself is to try to look around each day and notice one person's gesture and/or one detail about a person or place, something unique and individual, and note it in my notebook. Part of being a writer is being a reader, not just of books but of the world around you.

Should You Give The People What They Want?

No matter what the Kinks say, it's not a good rule for writers unless you're writing on a contract. If you're writing for your own pleasure, or writing stories you want to tell, at least, then mostly you need to keep in mind that you're the one you have to please.

However, it's not a bad idea to keep in mind what your target audience wants. In general, the ideal situation is that what's interesting to you is also going to be interesting to them, so you can happily scribble down all the stuff you like, and they'll be just as satisfied.

There are times, of course, when opinions diverge. They, for instance, want the same characters in the same stories (thinly disguised as requests for sequels); you want to explore new ground. Or maybe you want to write the same characters, but moving on to new problems that make them less the characters your readers liked. There may also be times--and these are the tough ones--where you'll know that a scene doesn't belong in your story from a structural standpoint, but you'll also know that the people who like your work will really like that scene.

Say, for example, you have a character whose dry, cynical wit is what you (and others) love about her. You've got her in this scene at a restaurant and have come up with some absolutely terrific zingers for her to fire at the slovenly waiter about the underdone food. It really shows off her character and will make everyone smile. But alas, the restaurant scene does really nothing else for the purposes of your story.

So what do you do there? If it's something extraneous that you really should cut to move the plot along, but it highlights a part of the character that you like, and your readers will like, do you keep it? Try to work it into the plot a little more? Rework some of the more critical plot scenes to fill the same niche?

My answer, and it varies by situation, is that I try to get that scene to be more integrated into the plot. Failing that, I'm inclined to leave it. It adds color to the story, and if it's got enough entertainment value, people won't mind that it doesn't move things along. You're making the story fun to read and fun to write, and in the end, that's what matters.

When you can do all that AND make it integral to the plot AND have a significant message AND do it in a fresh new way ... well, that's what we're working towards, isn't it?

Truth = Beauty

I love Wondermark. Especially this one. Authors, take heed!

O Say, Coen You See

One of the interesting things about the Coen Brothers' movies is the variety of reaction they elicit from their fans. People who claim to be fans of Coppola generally have the same set of favorite movies (perhaps re-ordering them a bit). Spielberg fans don't say they love "Schindler's List" but hated "E.T." But ask a dozen Coen Brothers fans what their best movie is, and you'll get six different answers. Not only that, you'll inevitably get someone in the list who hated someone else's favorite.

Lance Mannion, for example, in a very interesting post on their movies, writes, "The Hudsucker Proxy is a failure, and The Man Who Wasn't There is a bad movie."

The Hudsucker Proxy might be my favorite Coen Brothers movie, or The Big Lebowski might be, though I like O Brother Where Art Thou and No Country For Old Men. Lance loves The Big Lebowski and O Brother. He also likes Intolerable Cruelty, which I've mostly heard panned (haven't seen it), and Raising Arizona, which is the Coen Brothers movie most people seem to agree on as "good" (and, oddly, I don't have much affection for).

He doesn't mention The Ladykillers, wisely. That might be the one most people agree on as "bad."

I liked The Man Who Wasn't There, personally, except for the odd space alien subplot. I thought Billy Bob Thornton was pretty effective, and the movie itself strangely touching. And I have a co-worker who hated The Big Lebowski. So who knows?

The interesting thing about all this is that I think Lance is right when he says they are cartoons, but the effect of that is that the characters become templates (tying into my last posting about characters) and we can project easily onto them. The Coens tell stories and create characters that people read a lot of themselves into, that they take very personally. They're exaggerated enough that we can take their exaggerated traits and apply them to ourselves, or people we know. So people will say, "I can appreciate that No Country For Old Men was a good film, but I hated it."

I don't know whether there's a conclusion to all this. Certainly the cartoonish aspects of the Coens' characters is one of the main appeals of their movies (the others being the writing and the stunning way they immerse each movie in its own world). They've forged a successful career out of creating specifically unreal characters. Whether that's something you want to do is your call, but you should remember at least that most memorable characters have some exaggeration or cartoonishness about them.

I think you should be decisive

The lovely Nancy Nall writes about hedging your bets. She's talking about journalism, but everyone does it. "I think the way to go is..." "I'm no expert, but..." In our workshop group, we've gotten eleven stories submitted so far, and six could be said to be science fiction, or at least magical realism. And yet, when people comment on them, we hear over and over, "I'm not a science fiction reader, but..." or "I'm not familiar with science fiction, but..." All this even though the piece was submitted to the workshop specifically to get their opinion! Just tell me what you think and let me judge whether it fits into the conventions of SF or not.

Nancy's point is a good one. There are cases in which you have to qualify your opinion. I promise you that they are far fewer than you think they are. Be decisive. As my eleventh-grade English teacher said, "Who cares about being careful? We just want to be right!"

[I don't know if he actually said that, but doesn't it sound better to say he did? And what's the harm?]

What is a story?

At WonderCon this weekend, I had someone asking me when there'd be a sequel to "Common and Precious," and it got me thinking about this.

Our screenwriting teacher has a saying that no character in a movie represents a person. Every character represents a message, or a belief system: a way to live. Even in biographies, most characters are tailored to show a message of some kind through the story of their lives.

So a story, being the movement of characters through a plot, is actually a debate between different beliefs or responses to a problem. The resolution of the story is the success (or failure!) of one of the belief systems to resolve the problem.

Of course, this doesn't mean your characters don't have to be believable. It just means that in addition to being believable characters, they have to be consistent ("on message" in business-speak) throughout the story, or they have to have a reason to change. They have to be believable so that the reader believes that their solution to the problem at hand is a valid one. Otherwise, as Slartibartfast would say, "that's where it all falls apart."

So when I write a story with some characters I enjoy, I don't automatically write a sequel. Sometimes I do, if I feel that the story didn't really resolve. More often, the reason to write another story with the same characters is that you're trying to illuminate another kind of problem, and the character's approach to the problem matches a character you've already written. Which is why I am gratified to have people demand sequels of stories with the same characters, but I'm always unsure how to respond to it. It's not that I don't *like* the characters. It's more that I just don't have anything more to write about them. There has to be a story; I can't just do a "what's next."

Now, all of the above is very clinical. And certainly, I don't sit down to write a story and think, "Hm. This is an interesting problem. I wonder which belief systems I can use to illuminate my preferred solution, and how to create characters out of them." But, to paraphrase my screenwriting teacher again, those concepts are at the foundation of any good writing, and although very few people actually work from the concepts out to the story, they are the underpinnings you need to be aware of when you are constructing your story.

Which is why, when someone wants to know what happens to the characters next, they are actually looking at the characters in somewhat the wrong way. The character has nothing to do without a problem to solve. And that is also why I find myself really interested in secondary characters, to the point of giving them their own stories on occasion. Their problems have not only not been solved, they've often not even been explored. I'd much rather do a story on them than another story with characters whose story has played out.

(And in fact, I am working--slowly--on a Night and Bright story, which a couple people have also requested. I like them too--not their belief systems, but the wrapper around them. They're fun to write. And that, more than anything I just spent half an hour typing, is what determines whether another story gets written. :)

Critiquing

One of the benefits of participating in so many workshops has been getting practice at critiquing. I've always been good at criticizing others, but not necessarily in a way that they can take as positive. So it's good to practice shaping your criticisms in a way that will not be taken as "you stink" and will also give the recipient a direction in which to focus his or her editing.

The latest round of stories I read for our fiction workshop were really good, and so they were easy to critique. In all the cases, there were only one or two things that stood out as being rough, so I had no trouble saying "great job, try to polish it here and here." One of the things I saw is something I tend to do a lot myself, perhaps worthy of another post sometime, and that's just writing something that sounds good without thinking about exactly what it means. There are a few phrases that are not quite cliches, but are familiar enough that they spring to mind when you're just trying to get the next words out, like "he tried to figure out where it had all gone wrong," or "for whatever reason..."

I also had to write critiques for the latest round of New Fables rejections, and those were pretty hard, because in some cases the stories were pretty good, just not what I was looking for. So I had to explain what I was looking for and then point out that the author might not want to change the story in that direction. But that's their choice; it's my magazine and I have a pretty clear idea of what kind of story I want for it, even if it is occasionally frustratingly difficult to communicate that to others. Anyway, in at least two or three of the cases, the author responded and indicated that the feedback was helpful, so I feel good about taking the time to do that.

Yet another reason to go out and join a workshop, if you're not in one now! Practice critiquing; it makes you a better writer as well as a better reader.

Financial Advice for Writers

John Scalzi of SFWA writes about writers managing their finances (h/t Wyrdsmiths). My favorite paragraph:

2. Don’t quit your day job.

Lots of wanna-be writers wax rhapsodic about how great it would be to ditch the day job and just spend all their time clickety-clack typing away. These folks are idiots. Look, people: someone is paying you money and giving you benefits, both of which can support your writing career, and all you have to do is show up, do work that an unsupervised monkey could do, and pretend to care. What a scam! You’re sticking it to The Man, dude, because you’re taking that paycheck and turning it into art. And you know how The Man hates that. You’re supposed to be buying a big-screen TV with that paycheck! Instead, you’re subverting the dominant paradigm better than an entire battalion of college socialists. Well done, you. Well done, indeed.

Award Nominations!

Hey, the Ursa Major Awards, recognizing the finest work in anthropomorphic fiction, have their nominations open 'til the end of February, and my novel and short story and journal are eligible. The way it works is like this: You go to their nominations page and enroll. They'll send you a key you can use to log in and submit your ballot. Sometime in March, the final nominees will be announced, and then you can use your same key to log in and cast your final vote.

For the nominations, you just write in the works you want to nominate. I've helpfully written out my three below, so you can just cut and paste. :)

Best Novel
Common and Precious, by Tim Susman. (Sofawolf Press, January)

Best Short Fiction
The Shifting Sands, by Tim Susman. (in New Fables, Summer 2007, Sofawolf Press, July)

Best Fanzine
New Fables (#1, Sofawolf Press, Summer)

I encourage you to vote, even if it's not for me. The Ursas are a great way to recognize the fiction you love and find worthwhile fiction in this genre. But of course, if you liked my stuff, please do vote for me. :)

Workshop Feedback

I workshopped "Other Side of the World" (formerly "Aya's Journal") Monday night in class. It was, as always, a rewarding experience. Everyone seemed to like it, even the people who avowed that they never/rarely read science fiction. There were some interesting reactions to the Roux/human marriage, with some people calling it "creepy" and others wanting more detail. I guess when you have equal numbers on both sides, you've struck the right balance. :)

Workshopping is always valuable because you get such different perspectives on your work. For example, everyone liked Aya's character, but had difficulty with the combination of how uninterested everyone in that world seems to be with the Roux and how dispassionate she herself seems about them. That was intentional, but obviously I didn't convey a justification for it well enough in the text. That's okay, I have some ideas now for how to get it across. The second entry (also known as "the big lump of exposition") can probably be modified to get that point across better.

I've never participated in an online workshop, but I can't imagine the energy in the room Monday night being reproducible in an online situation. People feed off of each other and follow ideas around further than they normally would. Our workshop leader did a good job of making sure that it was a very positively focused session, too. All in all, I'm very jazzed, and actually anxious to go back and edit!

Just What I Needed

We had our local convention this past weekend, and with all the busy-ness and stress that my day job has been affording me this past week or two, it was nice to get a break. Friday I was not in a great mindset, but by the end of the day, I succumbed to the environment of creativity and fun that reminded me that there is more to life. We sold a good number of "Common and Precious" at the con and I signed a few of them--thanks to everyone who bought! A couple people were nice enough to ask what I'm working on next, which is a great compliment. One of my goals for this year is to get a short story or two out there, whether to Amazon Shorts or to another publication. In any case, it was just the perfect time for me to be steeped in another world and remember the importance of these parts of my life.

There are a lot of challenges ahead of us this year ("us" here includes me, my partner, my writing group, and all of you). I think I have a few posts to come about marketing yourself, persistence, and networking, which all go hand in hand and are sometimes thought of derogatorily as "the business of writing." For now, though, I just want to make the observation I have before, which is that although writing happens as a solitary activity, it doesn't require a solitary life.

Are you overwriting the obvious again?

One of the more common mistakes I see in the writing of more experienced amateur writers is the tendency to overwrite. They write more than is needed to get the point across, often inundating the reader with the same information expressed in a few different ways (or in some cases, expressed in the same way). Most of the time, you don't need to tell the reader something three or four times. The reader is usually capable of picking up information with one or two clues, so there's no need to overwrite. All this does is slow down the pace of the story and ...

Yeah, see what I did there? It's not that there's anything particularly wrong with that first paragraph, except that it contains about three too many sentences. Try this one out:

One of the more common mistakes I see in the writing of more experienced amateur writers is the tendency to overwrite. The reader is usually capable of picking up information with one or two clues; anything more is annoying overkill.

Overwriting is not an indication of poor writing skills. It's an indication of insufficient time spent editing. A friend of mine once said that he'd read that every sentence needs to move the story forward. I thought that was a bit excessive at the time, but it's not a bad rule to keep in the back of your head. Are you writing what the reader wants and needs to see next? Or, as Frasier Crane said on Cheers, "Oh, now you're saying that I'm redundant, that I repeat myself, that I say things over and over."

In fact, overwriting is a good thing in drafts. It's not bad to have the same sentiment expressed several different ways. Then, while editing, you pick the one that works the best in terms of pacing and language, and get rid of the rest. But don't be afraid to edit. If you feel you have to mention something several times for emphasis, space it out. Let the feeling build through the story rather than being slammed home all in one paragraph.

It's not a bad flaw to find, and I guarantee you, everyone does it. Be diligent while editing, and it won't be an issue.

Review: Cheating at Canasta

Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor
8.5/10, a superbly written collection of relationship stories

William Trevor joins the elite ranks of repeat authors reviewed in this space thanks to Rikoshi, who gave me this collection for Christmas. I liked the collection quite a bit, but most of the stories didn't have the power of his novel. Odd, because he's mostly known as a superb short story writer.

Indeed, there are a few stories from the collection that shine. It was just that I ended many of the stories thinking, "Wow, I enjoyed meeting those characters and being in Ireland, but...that was it?" The themes of the book center around relationships, whether between friends ("Folie a Deux"), families ("Children"), couples ("Cheating at Canasta," "The Room"), or an odd love triangle ("Old Flame," my favorite story in the collection). The relationships range from passive to passionate, the characters always very alive and real even if they are despondent or lethargic.

Character is a strength of Trevor's work, probably why I like him so much. His focus on relationships is interesting because he picks out many non-traditional ones. There's a woman blackmailing a man for affection ("The Dressmaker's Child"), a former child wheedling money from a priest who cared for him ("Men of Ireland"), and a sister who depends so much on her weaker brother that she controls his life ("Faith"). When I praise his writing, I mean mostly the way he's able to express character traits without stating them, how he shows you a character naturally and builds the setting around them in the same way, and the occasional turn of phrase that just makes you stop and say, "That's great."

...seen through drizzle on a pane, the sea is a pattern of undulations, greyish green, scuffed with white. The sky that meets it on the far horizon is too dull to contemplate.

I appreciated the short stories he wrote, but in many cases I wish he'd spent more time developing the characters. It seemed I'd only gotten to know them before the story was over. Still, if you want some terrific writing, Trevor is always a good choice, and this collection got finished in the middle of a fairly busy time for me specifically because it was short stories and could be read episodically. And, honestly, it'd be worth getting just for the four of five of the dozen that really do grip you, even if the writing weren't so good.

Unexpected Poetry

I got the above in my spam filter over the weekend. Rather pretty, I think, and I like that it came from a coincidental sending of two unsolicited e-mails.

Unless they coordinated it to produce specifically this effect...I think that's a lot more work, but if it happens again, I'd definitely take notice.