Different Kinds of Writing

On Reporting vs. Journalism, some--okay, a lot of--very insightful words by one of this blog's favorite writers-at-large, the guy with the gay porn star name, Lance Mannion.

There's no real 'money line,' but here's a good one for writers to keep in mind:

And journalists, real journalists, don't go out into the world just to talk to people. They go out to see how the world is working. They have to collect data. Writers and poets and painters and most other people call this data the details that God is in. Journalists have to see the landscape, they have to see and be able to identify the flowers and weeds dotting the landscape. They have to observe processes and understand how those processes function to the point where they can explain them as well as any expert but in language non-experts can follow (and there's some of the writer's work that has to be done even before sitting down at the keyboard; gathering the details precisely requires finding the right words on the fly), they have to know so they can describe it later, as Hemingway said they had to be able to, how the weather was, the weather being both a metaphorical and a literal fact.

Getting published

I did a panel at the recent Rocky Mountain Fur Con called "From Writer To Author: Getting Published," which went okay. At least, it generated good discussion and I ended up rambling on about character wants and stuff. I thought I'd post my notes here for interested people. It includes a rather long quote from the fangs_fur_fey LJ community, because I'm lazy and didn't want to take the time to say it myself.

The problems most people have with getting published--by a moderated, edited press or journal, as opposed to a "throw whatever online" site--come down to two large areas:

1. Make your writing better
2. Figure out how to submit

So here's my thoughts on those two:

Making your writing better
1. Learn to read with a critical eye.
2. Read a story twice, first to get the feel of the story, the second time to read it critically and pick out what the author is doing and how it contributes to the overall tone of the story.
As an exercise: pick two of your favorite books/stories from the past year. List three things you really liked about each one. This can be anything—a character, a setting, a twist of the story, the way the author uses language, whatever. Now, for each of those things, take some time to figure out why you liked it. Don't just say, “because it was cool.” Try to figure out what the author did that made that particular character, setting, language stand out for you. Look at other books with similar stories, similar characters, and compare. Why does one appeal to you more than another? Take those lessons and apply them to your own writing.
3. Read your work out loud to a friend. Reading out loud forces you to consider every word, to hear them rather than letting your mind skim over them.
4. Join a workshop or form a workshop group. Get critiques from people who are actually interested in critiquing, not in either tearing you down without being helpful or building you up without being critical. Learn how to critique: this will help you look at your own work more critically.

How to submit
1. Do some basic research on the publication. Make sure your submission fits their profile and guidelines.
2. Read what else is being published in the field. Your work is going to be read in that context, so you need to understand the context too. This doesn't mean you have to write something that's exactly like everything else, or completely different from everything else. Ideally, you should be in the ballpark, but distinctive enough to make an editor sit up and notice.
3. Format your submission properly and follow all submission guidelines. When you think your submission is ready, go back and read the guidelines again with a fine-toothed comb to make sure.
4. BE PROFESSIONAL AT ALL TIMES.

On that topic, a comment on author-editor relationships from Phil Brucato, in the fangs_fur_fey LJ community:

As a professional author, an occasional publisher, a writing professor, and an editor for over five years, I think I can answer your question... though my response might not be the answer you want.
Editors receive massive numbers of manuscripts. In order to process even a fraction of them, they (and/or their assistants) must scan copious submissions, applying a number of criteria(*) to see whether or not the submission in question warrants deeper consideration. This is not an elitist power-trip, but an absolute necessity. After all, even editors need to eat and sleep, and there's far more to an editor's job than simply scanning, reviewing and polishing manuscripts!
From my own experience, I can say that barely 15% of submissions get beyond this stage. The majority of submissions are poorly written, grammatically appalling, stylistically unsound, unproofed, badly-printed (if printed at all!), or otherwise violate basic publishing standards. I have no idea whether or not your manuscript fit any of those categories, but the overall rule is usually "If it violates Standard A, B or C, I'm not reading past page 1." Again, this is simple practicality. An editor simply does not have the time to make personal in-depth evaluations of everything s/he receives. There isn't time or energy enough to do so!
Beyond that, an editor must judge submissions by other criteria: whether or not the author(s) meet the promise of their premise; whether or not the project holds that reader's interest; whether or not the proposal fits the plans, needs, identity or limitations of the publishing company; whether or not a similar project is already in the works or on the schedule; whether or not the book is likely to exceed the H-U-G-E costs involved in producing, printing, stocking, shipping, marketing and producing said book; and finally, whether or not the editor enjoys, agrees with or believes in the proposal at all. Any or all of these considerations may derail a book during the reading stage - and believe me, an editor is too busy to keep detailed records about each element of every project that crosses his/her desk, especially at a major publishing house!

MythAdventures Remembered

I met Bob Asprin while I was in college working for the science fiction magazine. We wanted to do interviews with authors, an initiative that lasted exactly two authors, but if they'd all been like Bob, we would never have stopped. He was friendly and accommodating, talked a mile a minute, and was as entertaining as his stories, if not more. We followed up and he was extremely helpful in editing the interview and allowing us to go to press with it. There are plenty of nice people in the science fiction community, but he was more than nice.

I remember picking up the Myth-Adventures series and loving the balance he struck between fun and a serious story, something I've never been able to quite get to my satisfaction in my own work. He slung puns with the best of them, but never lost sight of the heart of his story. His characters, larger than life, remained true to it throughout, or at least as much as you can in a fantasy world.

After the interview and perhaps during the same time as the interview, which was longer ago than I care to remember, he was dealing with other issues that took his energy away from writing. I heard through the grapevine recently that he was working on projects again and was delighted.

Today I heard that he passed away.

His MythAdventures books stay on the shelves, published and republished through Meisha Merlin and others. They're perennial favorites and have now, I think, become firmly cemented as a part of essential fantasy reading.

They'll always be a fondly treasured part of my own reading memories. I can still remember sitting in the room, thanking the heavens for the tape recorder that was capturing everything he said, because my pen couldn't keep up. And I'll remember the conversations afterwards, a young fan being treated like a professional, the way he treated his stories: with humor and respect. Thanks, Bob.

Appearances

Anyone who's in Denver over Memorial Day weekend, come by Rocky Mountain Fur Con and attend one of my two panels. The first, Saturday at 2, is "From Writer to Author: Getting Published." The second, on Sunday tentatively at 2 (I had to rearrange the schedule I got from them only a week ago) is "Building Furry Worlds," about creating an engaging setting for your anthropomorphic characters. I'll also be around the Sofawolf Press table, so swing by and say hi!

Review: City of Ashes

City of Ashes, by Cassandra Clare
7.5/10, a worthy and exciting sequel to "City of Bones"

SPOILERS for "City of Bones" contained herein...

In "City of Bones," Clary, a teenaged girl growing up in New York, spots what appears to be a brutal murder in the back room of a dance club. The three teenagers involved are surprised that she's seen them, and lead her into a world of demons and angels, werewolves and vampires. More shocking than that is the realization that she herself is a part of this world, more intimately than she knows.

"City of Ashes" picks up right where "Bones" left off, with Clary's mother in a coma and herself torn between feeling not romantic enough about her best friend Simon, and too romantic about her newly-revealed brother, the Shadowhunter (demon slayer) Jace. Meanwhile, her--and Jace's--father, Valentine, has stolen one of the Mortal Instruments that will allow him to overturn the rule of the Shadowhunters, and has designs on a second one.

Clary, Jace, and Simon get tossed right into the action, fighting not only Valentine, but also demons, werewolves, vampires, the faerie court, and other Shadowhunters. "Ashes" does what every good fantasy sequel should: keeps the story racing along while expanding the world. We get to meet Valentine for the first time, see the world of the Downworlders (werewolves and vampires) more in depth, meet more Shadowhunters, and witness an existential argument between a werewolf and a vampire over who is more human. Clare's prose carries the story well, building rich, vivid descriptions and terrifically bright characters.

The characters are one of the strongest points of "Ashes." Clary is a pretty typical teen, as is Simon, and the secondary characters in their world have the distinctive palette of a good supporting cast. Especially entertaining are the gay warlock Magnus Bane and the Queen of the Seelie Court. The weakest point is Jace, who is flip and sarcastic almost to the point of being a caricature, even when his life is threatened, his father confronts him, and he's trying to reconcile his love for his sister. But his sarcasm is at least amusing, and it really balances Clary's serious nature. To be honest, I have a bias against all-powerful pretty-boys (see Aiken Drum from the Saga of Pliocene Exile), so that might be coloring my perception. Certainly I'm not the primary audience for the book.

The book is a fast, fun read, and if the plot occasionally hinges on a character's stubborn refusal to listen to advice, it never stretches believability to do so. By the end of it, as is appropriate for the middle book of a fantasy trilogy, things look pretty dire, both for the characters' personal lives and for the world at large. If you like urban fantasy, this is one of the best examples of the genre--the major strike against it being that you'll have to wait a year or two for the third book.

Review: Webmage

Webmage, by Kelly McCullough
8/10, a solid, fun adventure in urban fantasy with surprising depth

Disclaimer: I read Kelly's writings over at Wyrdsmiths and have corresponded with him.
In fact, I picked up "Webmage" at a book signing and feel bad it's taken me so long to read it!

I can't really complain about the modern fantasy market being dominated by cookie-cutter Dragonlance adventures, because I only read fantasy that's come with pretty good recommendations, or else authors I know and trust (like Tim Powers, who could not by any stretch of the imagination be called "cookie-cutter," unless you happen to have a trans-dimensional cookie-cutter, and even then it would have to be shaped like an ancient god or something). That said, I picked up Webmage largely on the strength of having read some of McCullough's short works--and attending his book signing.

The big hook of Webmage is that it melds classical mythology-based fantasy with modern technology (hence the title). Ravirn, the protagonist, is a descendant of Lachesis, one of the three Fates (Clotho and Atropos are the others). He and his family stand for Order, in opposition to the goddesses of Chaos. He's an expert hacker--not as good at coding spells, but great at digging into them.

The problem he faces is that one of his aunts has gone a bit too far. She wants to impose a lot more order on the universe--namely, getting rid of that pesky free will that knots up her threads. Her spell doesn't quite work, however, and that's where she's tried to rope him in. Ravirn doesn't like the sound of the spell, and goes about trying to expose his aunt to the other Fates.

Webmage keeps the reader involved with some great chases, problems, and characters. Ravirn, though clever and resourceful, relies heavily on the assistance of others, most frequently his snarky laptop/familiar Melchior. Even though the "familiar with attitude" is a fairly common modern fantasy archetype, it works wonderfully here. Mel is a great complement to Ravirn; together they can muddle through lots of situations, and other characters show up to help when they can't.

In the end, the hook is really little more than an entertaining magic system, but it adds enough originality to the book to elevate it above the traditional fantasy. McCullough has a great touch with character, description, and action, but beyond that, the question of free will is woven nicely into the book in a way that makes it more than just an adventure. I love mythology-based fantasy and Webmage did not disappoint. Having attended the U of M (Minnesota), I particularly enjoyed following Ravirn through its campus (and in one scene in which he breaks into the hated Weisman art museum, I was cheering for him to do more damage).

If you're looking for something that stands out from traditional dragon-fighting medieval quests, or just for a good story, Webmage is a fun, engaging read.

Good Writing

You want good writing? You want a great story? You want a lesson in how to build up your readers' expectations, build tension, give them way more than they thought they were getting?

You want Gene Weingarten. You want the Great Zucchini.

(It's a couple years old, but this is the first time I've seen it.)

Review: The Soul of Baseball

The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America, by Joe Posnanski
8.5/10, a terrific look back at the Negro Leagues through the eyes of its most enthusiastic ambassador

I grew up a Philadelphia Phillies fan, becoming aware of baseball some twenty years after Jackie Robinson made his historic debut. In the mid-to-late seventies, the Philly press had still only grudgingly accepted African-American ballplayers onto their club: Mike Schmidt was the hero of that team, Greg Luzinski the slugger, Larry Bowa the scrappy shortstop. Garry Maddox, who served just as faithfully in center field for years, was one of the only non-white players on the team, let alone starting.

A kid growing up in a liberal household had no idea that there were differences or attitudes. It was only later that I recall my father telling me how cold the Philly fans and press were to embrace Maddox, compared to the affection they lavished on Schmidt and the others. In my mind, his is the only name I can remember the announcer saying, the name, "GARRRRY LEEEEEEEEEE MADDOX" echoing through the ballpark.

I had no idea the Negro Leagues existed until college, and then it seemed to me that they were a loose, patchwork show, a bunch of guys who weren't allowed to play baseball in the bigs, so they got together just to play, like a grown-up sandlot league. I had never heard, nor heard of, Buck O'Neil.

In the past few years, his name has been all over, from his famous Hall of Fame snub until his death last year. Joe Posnanski, a Kansas City sports columnist, traveled with Buck for a year, admitting that he himself didn't know what the book was going to be about until he started to write it. He found his topic in Buck O'Neil himself, the man more than the collection of his stories.

Not that the stories aren't great. His "Nancy" story is worth all the buildup. But the stories are only pieces of the whole, the experience of the men in the Negro Leagues, including Buck himself, who played as fiercely, as colorfully, and as competitively as their "official" counterparts.

Buck's story, encompassing the stories he tells over the course of the book, is compelling and moving. There are some former players who are consumed by bitterness at the discrimination they suffered, others who have learned to live with it. Buck, magically, seems to be free of it. And that is at the heart of "The Soul of Baseball," the paradox of this man who experienced firsthand the worst in people and chose to see only the best.

Posnanski's writing is skillful and evocative, crisp and colorful as a sportswriter should be. In fact, my main complaint about the book is that he doesn't let enough of himself show. I picked up the book because of Joe's blog, a consistently entertaining and insightful look at sports in general and baseball in particular. The personality of the author is one of the great delights of the blog. But in this book, I understand his dilemma: the book is about Buck, and to color it with himself would be to overshadow Buck. I think he made the right choice, but it wasn't the book I expected to read.

It's still a great read, even if you're not a baseball fan or a Joe Posnanski fan.

The Fight Against Evil

In lieu of my own words, some wise ones from Eleanor Arnason, explaining her aversion to "quest against evil" fantasy novels:

In so far as evil exists, it is people, and they are evil either because they have malfuctioning brains or because they have become corrupted. Evil is not creatures with many legs that remind you of spiders, and it isn't dark lords who loom in the distance. It is the greed heads and power freaks who decided to invade Iraq and destroy a nation to meet their personal needs, whatever those may be.

If fantasy is going to help us understand the world, then it ought to come up with descriptions of evil that help us recognize evil in the real world. Tolkien does this in Saruman, Wormtongue, Boromir, Denethor, the thugs in the Shire and so on. He shows us a wide range of corruption: those who intimidated by evil, those who are tempted, those who utterly corrupted.

I guess what I am saying is, evil is not The Other. It is right here in our neighbors and allies and the leaders we trust.

I like that. I've always thought that the corrupted friend was a better villain than the guy who was just "evil" for whatever reason. Even though I do write some fantasy, I don't think I've often, if ever, written a "pure evil" villain. The villains in my stories are, as Eleanor says, the people among us who feel themselves above our moral codes, better than our society, more important than you and me.

Last Day for Voting

Hi all!

Today's the last day for voting in the Ursa Major Awards. If you haven't already, it's important to go vote for your favorite works!

(Especially if, y'know, those works happen to be a certain novel or magazine...)

Busy busy!

Apologies for the lack of posting, if anyone's noticed. I have been traveling the last three weekends, and am trying to wrap up layout on two Sofawolf books for the summer. Hopefully this weekend will see the bulk of that work done. I have a book to review and writing to talk about, so look for more postings soon! And keep an eye on http://yourtablesready.blogspot.com for restaurant reviews and maybe a neat surprise...

Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
9/10 because I love history and science and Bill Bryson and this has all of that

One of my favorite books during my childhood was Isaac Asimov's "The Universe," a non-fiction* exploration of how we have looked at the universe from historical times to the present day. It's where I learned about the Cepheid yardstick being wrong, about the redshift discovery of the universe's expansion, and about the steady-state vs. Big Bang controversy. Along comes Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything," a sort of updated and expanded "The Universe," focusing more on Earth than on everything else. Asimov, for instance, spent no time on the evolution of man or the history of Earth except insofar as it related to our understanding of the age of the universe.

* It's interesting, I think, that when we want to say a book is based on fact, we have to specify that it's "non-fiction." I was trying to think of another adjective and could only come up with "fact-based" or "factual," neither of which sounded right. We just assume a "book" is fiction unless told otherwise.

Bryson's "History" (technically, that is the subtitle, footnoted to a picture of the Earth, but I'm too lazy to find a picture of the Earth to put everywhere I want to show the title), conversely, does cover the establishment of our view of the universe, but only to show how we view our place in it. Fully half the book is devoted, lovingly, to the history of the Earth itself and the development of life thereon.

The strength of Bryson's work has always been his stories about people, and in this book, he humanizes the science by focusing on the scientists. He tells us that one of the scientists really responsible for the discovery of the structure of DNA (who was never recognized with the Nobel that Watson and Crick received) was a scientist who jealously guarded her findings because, as a woman, her male colleagues never stopped trying to take advantage of her. We learn about the great international project to map the transit of Venus in 1761, for which scientists were dispatched around the world, including one tragic Frenchman who missed not only the 1761 transit, but the subsequent one in 1769, and whose story just goes downhill from there.

Every chapter is full of these stories, balancing the enormity of the discoveries with the humanity of the discoverers. From Aristotle's greatest insight to Einstein's greatest mistake, from cyanobacteria to antibiotics, Bryson shows us not only the history of our humble home, but our place in it, concluding with a moving chapter on our responsibility to our fellow inhabitants.

Not as consistently entertaining as Bryson's other non-fiction work, but just as engaging and more informative, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is a great read and a great story, and best of all, we're all characters in it.*

* Not really.

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.

Vocabulary Lesson

Today's word, courtesy of the New York Review of Books: chiliastic.

It's nothing to do with superb Texas spicy beef dishes, and it's not pronounced that way (it's "kill-ee-as-tik"). It actually means "millenarian," or pertaining to the belief Christ will return to rule for a thousand years.

Etymologically, it's Greek, which you can see if you spell it more phonetically--it comes from khilioi ("a thousand")--the same root we use for "kilometer."

I don't know when you'd use this word, but I liked it and wanted to share.

Colm Toibin

I attended a reading at Stanford this week by Irish author Colm Toibin, whom I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of until our workshop instructor recommended him to us. I am now writing to recommend him to you.

The man who introduced him recommended Heather Blazing of Toibin's published works. It's going on my list as of now. Toibin himself is an engaging, pleasant speaker, who began his talk by saying, "My father died when I was twelve." In true Irish fashion, this story leads through a few other stories about Irish funeral customs, how people would just come over to his house to pay their respects for months afterwards, to the story that leads into the work he's going to read from. A woman he didn't know well was over to pay her respects to his mother, and told his mother a story of her own, about her daughter who she found dead in her bed (two dead people already--you can tell this is an Irish story). The death prompted her other daughter to return from Brooklyn (not just "America," but Brooklyn specifically). For a time, she stayed with the mother, the mother thinking she'd returned for good, until one day the daughter said, "Mum...I'm married in America." And then it became clear that she would have to go back.

That one small story became the basis of his upcoming novel, "Brooklyn," which he read two passages from. It's funny (no dead people in either of the passages) and very lyrical, and despite the fact that I hadn't slept well the night before, my eyes didn't droop once. The first passage he read concerned his heroine's passage in third class on a boat from Liverpool to New York, much of which is spent vomiting; the second passage takes place in Brooklyn on Christmas Day, 1951.

I'm adding his books to my stack and will certainly pick up "Brooklyn" when it comes out. Though I wouldn't have discovered him without the workshop, ironically, I won't have time to read any of his books until the workshop is over.

... Happily Ever After?

There's a line in one of my favorite musicals: "But we go on pretending / Stories like ours / have happy endings." In some of the recent memes floating around the web of "top ten signs a book is written by me" (which I have yet to complete), I saw several people write that there is usually a happy ending.

I think that's true of my own work as well, but I started wondering how much of a cop-out it is. We complain about stories being unrealistic, but we often squirm at depressing or uncomfortable endings. Myself, I like a happy ending as long as it's satisfactory. That is, the protagonist has to learn something and change somehow, but not be ruined or killed by the experience. There are some stories I've written that are a mix of the two; "A Prison Of Clouds," the first New Tibet story, has what I consider a happy ending, though people have disagreed with me on that one.

Personally, I think in order to learn something and change, the protagonist has to give something up. It may be something tangible or something emotional, but some sacrifice has to be made for the lesson to have impact. Often in amateur fiction, you get wish-fulfillment endings, in which the protagonist basically gets everything he or she wants. Those ring hollow to me, because then the lesson doesn't seem valuable.

"When Harry Met Sally," a very good movie, had many people complaining about the ending. The happy ending in this case didn't feel realistic enough to them. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I can see the point. To some extent, it does feel forced. The characters don't really make any sacrifice or change to achieve their happiness.

How happy are your endings? What's an example of an ending that was too happy for you?

Get Paid to Write Wolf Stories

Over at Wyrdsmiths, there's an announcement for an upcoming anthology of wolf stories. Occurred to me that some folks here might be interested. :)

The Power of Four

I previously talked about the "rule of three." Today's post comes from a somewhat unusual source: ESPN's Sports Guy. I read his columns a fair amount, because he's an entertaining writer and offers a great mix of sports knowledge (historical and current) and pop culture.

Anyway, in a recent column about football studio shows, he brings up this theory about "the power of four":

Unless you're putting together a poker night or a group to play pickup hoops, in nearly every other conceivable scenario, you're better off with four people than five or more. Dinner always works better. Vegas works better. Cabs work better. Sporting events work better. Road trips work better. Local newscasts and morning shows work better. Rock bands work better. The most successful sitcom ever ("Seinfeld") centered around four friends, and the most popular female comedy series ("Sex and the City") did the same. If you keep the number at four, you'll always have enough people to make it interesting and everybody has a chance to shine.

Apart from the fact that I personally agree with him (especially about the dinner thing), this is an interesting concept to keep in mind when writing your scenes. Most of us tend to write scenes between two characters, sometimes branching out to three. I think you could reasonably go to four without confusing the reader. Beyond that, though, it gets difficult.

Depending on the length and genre of your work, four is probably the limit of major characters the reader can really care about, too. It's like he says: keep it interesting, and everyone has a chance to shine. If you're doing a big epic adventure fantasy where character development isn't so much an issue, then you can have a Fellowship of nine plus a bunch of supporting cast. But in Katharine Noel's Halfway House, for example, we have the protagonist, but her father and mother also have strong character arcs in the story. Her brother works as a secondary character, but doesn't get a lot of the focus. "Common and Precious" has two main characters and two major secondary characters, and that's about enough for that book as well (I did write a dialogue scene with four characters that was challenging, but a lot of fun to carry off).

When Do You Need A Good Dose Of Reality?

In trying to write a story for "New Fables", I found myself falling into my regular pattern of thinking through the reality and logic of the world, only I didn't (or may not have) done it quite enough. These worlds always have an underlying internal consistency to me, and I think the problem in this case is not that there's a big giant flaw in that consistency, but that I didn't give the reader enough of it to let them see it. So I need to work on that.

But it got me thinking about one of my limitations, which is that all of my worlds need to have a pretty strong underlying reality. I'm not so good with the wacky or surreal fantasy worlds, because I always start thinking "but where did the swarm of blue winged thockwarblers come from? And what do they eat when there aren't any yellow linen shirts around? What's their reproductive cycle?" and so forth. I can't even write fantasy stories with magic without thinking way too much in depth about how magic works. One of the things that always sort of bugged me about the Harry Potter books is that she never goes into depth about that. It seems like magic is basically a combination of an inherited ability to tap into it plus a long series of vocabulary lessons. As soon as you know the right words (and wand motions, yes) for a spell, you can do it. Harry learns the "Sectumsempra" spell from a few words in a book, for example, and carries it off pretty well the first time. Magic doesn't seem to take a lot out of the wizards, unless it's convenient for the plot to do so. Nor does it seem particularly hard to learn, unless the kids need to learn it for a plot point.

But here's the thing: none of that matters to the story. A quick Google of "harry potter theory of magic" turns up only one vaguely relevant link on the first page, which itself links to the really relevant article, a critique of Rowling's economics of magic by an economist (Megan McArdle). This is kind of how I feel as a trained engineer writing and reading fantasy. I think McArdle misses a point, however much she protests that "Children are great systemisers." Children are also able to discard systems and invent new ones. In the absence of Rowling giving us a consistent theory of magic, I'm sure most of the fans of the books have constructed some mechanism in their own minds that makes most of the facts fit.

Perhaps the spells are hardest early on, or some people just have a knack for them. Or some spells require a certain concentration component that isn't really described in detail. Maybe the DA (in book five) had an easier time with the Patronus charm than Harry did because they were able to practice it together en masse, and it's the kind of charm that requires confidence and positive thinking. Whatever your rationale, it's clear that the lack of a consistent magical system has not hurt the books.

And what I need to do, perhaps, is learn better what details can be left to the reader's imagination, and which I need to supply. There are certain things that are going to bother certain readers no matter what, but if you give the story a fabulist sort of feel, and make it work, people will be more willing to let the rest of it slide. The more realism you put into your world, the more people will demand from it. So that's what I'll try to do: give my story a bit more magic, and see if I can restrain my inner engineer long enough to let a few things slide.

"On Writing"

In our fiction workshop, one of our readings this week is a chapter from Stephen King's "On Writing." When I first read that book, a long time ago, I was impressed by how clear and helpful it was. The more I meet other writers, the more I find that people share that opinion. It doesn't matter whether they're genre writers, or graduate students, or biographers. Everyone seems to appreciate it.

I think it's pretty cool that someone whose books are so often derided as simply popular bestsellers could write a book that so many people find helpful in their writing career. Many people who wouldn't look twice at one of his novels nonetheless hold up "On Writing" as a great aid to their writing.

In this section, King talks about assembling the basic tools of writing. One of the things he stresses in talking about vocabulary is that you shouldn't force it. In other words, don't try to pretty it up by searching for a fancier word. Chances are the one you first thought of is the best one for the job. He says, let your vocabulary stretch on its own, as you read. The more naturally your words flow, the more natural they'll read to the reader. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't edit, but that's another story...)

Making Magical Realism Effective

The story we reviewed in our workshop last night, "Inheritance," by Jedediah Berry, has some elements of magical realism, falling under the mantle of fabulist fiction (a nice bridge from my last instructor-led writing workshop). One of the topics I found pretty interesting in our discussion was how to make the fabulist elements more effective.

This applies, granted, when you're introducing a few magical elements into a real world, rather than creating an entirely fabulist world (as I have been known to do). Our instructor's belief was that the magical elements are more effective when the characters in the story treat them as normal, or at least do not treat them as extraordinary or magical. In "Inheritance," the main character comes into possession of a mysterious beast, who has many human qualities and seems somewhat intelligent, though he can't speak. The beast is (of course) symbolic, and that works because the other people in the story don't say, "Wow, that's an amazing freak of nature!" They comment only on whether it will bite, or whether it will ruin the model ship it's looking at, as though it were just a particularly intelligent dog. There is some discussion at one point about where his father got it, but even that has the tone of "wonder what remote country he brought it back from" rather than "it's not of this world!"

As a result, the story is very effective in convincing you of the beast's reality. Just something to keep in mind if you're writing stories with small doses of magical realism: don't make the characters stand around and gawk at how magical your inventions are. They should be an accepted part of the world. If your characters accept them as such, your readers will too.

(Another excellent example, by the way, is in Philip Wylie's "The Answer" ... go read it if you never have, because it's pretty cool.)

New Class Starting Today!

I'm taking another Stanford Continuing Studies workshop this term. This one is "Fiction For Experienced Writers," which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. I'm pretty excited, as it's been over a year since my last fiction workshop (the wonderful "Fabulist Fiction" class). In the meantime, of course, I've been working with our New Fables group, so I haven't been lacking in workshoppy goodness, but it's always nice to be exposed to a new group of writers. We'll see how the fabulist/spec fic stuff goes over with this group.

By the way, if you're not in the area or can't spend the money/time to take a class on campus, you can download some classes from Stanford (and other universities) on iTunes U. I've very much enjoyed the lectures I've gotten from there--my favorites are the "why people do evil things" and the series on Benjamin Franklin (who might be in the running to be my new role model).

I'll keep updating as the class goes on. Meanwhile, I can't overstate the value of workshops in general to help develop both your writing and critiquing skills. Being part of a writerly community is a great way to spark your writing, and learning how to critique other people's work helps you think more critically about your own.

Review: The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature

The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, by Neal Pollack
7/10, with an asterisk, a parody of self-important American male writers

The problem with picking up a parody when you're unfamiliar with the source material, as I noted, is that it's often difficult to appreciate the humor. Hence the asterisk in the rating: the footnote would be that this is an audience-specific book, and the audience it is specific to does not include me.

That said, a funny thing happened as I read more of the book: I started enjoying it. There were points where it became so absurd that it didn't matter that I didn't know the source material. Pollack definitely has a good eye for description and detail, and if the ego-driven writing was tedious to start with, the repetition became more entertaining as the book went on. It might also be that in the essays at the end of the book, Pollack's persona is less gloriously successful, falling more into the pattern of the bumbler convinced of his own godhood than an actual accomplished writer who happens to be an egomaniac. That's inherently more amusing, and the essays reflected that.

I was tempted not to finish this book when I was about halfway through, but in the end I'm glad I did. The McSweeney's crowd has always intrigued me, and now I'm a little more familiar with their work and can feel cheerfully informed about staying away from it.

Sample Chapters Online!

You can now read the Intro/Prologue and a sample excerpt from my novel at furrag.com. If you're interested, please go take a look. It's eligible for an Ursa Major Award this year, so I'm putting the book online to try to get support for a nomination and, hopefully eventually, a win.

You can also let me know what you think in the comments here! Thanks for reading.

The Best Dead Humorist

If you're not familiar with the works of P.G. Wodehouse, you are missing out. Now, granted, I have a particular affection for British comedy, but based solely on shelf space in Borders, I have to believe that not only is Wodehouse popular here, but is becoming more so over the years. I saw about fifteen of his books in our local Borders today, when a couple years ago there were usually the standard four or five.

Wodehouse writes most often about class comedy, his most famous works being the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves stories. Wooster, who might be ensconced in Webster's next to the definition of "idle rich," is the smartest of his group of young British noble friends, which is not saying very much. Jeeves, his manservant, is much more competent, rescuing him from situations without ever stepping above his station. The interaction between Bertie and Jeeves would be entertaining enough on its own, but Wodehouse also manages to create the most delightfully convoluted and outrageous plots. There was a moment in reading one of his stories where I laughed out loud, but upon being asked what was so funny, I realized that I would have to recite most of the preceding book in order for the person to get the joke. The plot built perfectly to that point, and the payoff was expertly done.

My first exposure to Wodehouse, however, was in the lesser-known "Tales of St. Austin's," a collection of short stories about boys at British boarding schools. They are somewhat less accessible, being filled with cultural references and jargon like "fags" and "have an ice" and "Thucydides," but you can still get a great deal out of them. They also have the distinctive and wonderful Wodehouse voice.

Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can read many of Wodehouse's works for free online. "Tales of St. Austin's" is included in this crowd, as are a couple of the Jeeves stories. If you have an idle moment, instead of checking out CNN or YouTube, take half an hour and read a Wodehouse story. Whether or not you learn anything about writing humor, you'll at least be vastly entertained.

Bertie Wooster even has some advice for aspiring writers (from "Right Ho, Jeeves"). Look how clearly his voice comes across just in two paragraphs:

I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. It's a thing you don't want to go wrong over, because one false step and you're sunk. I mean, if you fool about too long at the start, trying to establish atmosphere, as they call it, and all that sort of rot, you fail to grip and the customers walk out on you.

Get off the mark, on the other hand, like a scalded cat, and your public is at a loss. It simply raises its eyebrows, and can't make out what you're talking about.

Words to live by, and laugh by.

How To Keep Your Resolution

If you're reading this blog, chances are that one of your resolutions for the new year is "write more."

If you're a human being living in the year 2008, chances are you're already behind on your resolution.

So here's a few tips to help you keep your resolution:

* Be more specific. Don't just say "write more." Say, "Finish 'A Time To Remember To Kill'" or "Write the novel about my father-figure hero in the fantasy universe."

* Break your resolution into mini-goals. Mini-goals are much easier to keep than big year-long resolutions. It's easy to say, "I'm going to write a novel this year," and then put it off 'til March, June, November, and then you're reduced to, "I resolve to resolve to write a novel next year." Break down your novel into defining your story, building your world, creating your characters, sketching your plot, outlining the novel, writing the first draft, editing the first draft, sending the edited MS out for critique, incorporating feedback and revision. If you set a small timeframe for each of those, then by April or May you should be well into a first draft, and the goal will be much more attainable. (This is the lesson learned from NaNoWriMo.)

* Track your progress. If you tend to let things slide, keep a spreadsheet or check off writing time on your calendar. Write down every day the number of hours spent writing. Then, when you get a whole week of zeroes, you notice it immediately and can tell yourself to buckle down, instead of having the vague feeling that it's been a while since you touched your outline and maybe you should get to it next week when the kids are back in school and that report at work is done...

* Use technology. Google Docs allows you to store your documents online to access from anywhere. Yahoo and Google and many others have online calendars: send yourself e-mail reminders to do writing.

* Enlist someone's help. Whether a supportive spouse or a writing buddy, have someone you can check in with to help keep you on track with your goal. Another person can not only help remind you to keep going, they become invested in your goal to a certain extent, so that when you meet it, you make them proud as well as making yourself proud.

If you have any other ideas, toss 'em into the comments, and let's get writing!

Review: That Old-Time Religion

That Old-Time Religion, by Will Sanborn
6/10, Creative story idea with too many unexplored possibilities.

Disclaimer: Will is a friend of mine, or was before I wrote this review, anyway. All criticism should be taken constructively.

In the anthropomorphic fandom, the ancient Egyptian god Anubis has become quite the popular figure through a combination of traits. I think the cachet attached to the "old god," along with the jackal totem (canids are probably the most popular single animal group in the fandom) and the dark, mysterious black color contributed to his popularity. He shows up a lot in art, but this is the first time I'm aware of him being used in a literary context.

The story of "That Old-Time Religion" is similar to Neil Gaiman's "American Gods": the old gods still walk the earth, less powerful now that their empires have collapsed, and one of them (the same one, actually, in both books) is plotting to unleash some cataclysmic event that will restore their former glory. The main character in "That Old-Time Religion" is Thomas, a rudderless young man who stumbles upon some strange characters in a carnival and gets caught up in the quest to save the world.

Anubis enters the scene a little later in the company of Thoth, fellow old god and sometime lover. They join Thomas's group's quest, during which time Anubis and Thomas grow closer, leading Thomas to explore his openness to a gay relationship. There are a few sexually explicit scenes in the book, both gay and straight (and, well, mixed).

While I liked the relationship component of the story, I think Will could have done a better job tying it in with the quest. When there are two storylines, often one slows to a crawl while the other takes center stage. Either a little more work could have been done to integrate them, or one could have been given clear priority over the other. In the end, neither felt fully developed to me. I thought that the quest could have been fleshed out earlier--it was a lot of "we know something is going on, but we don't know what" until the very end, when everything happened at once--and though the relationship aspect fared better, it still felt more like a stretched-out short story. Once the initial question of whether Thomas could sleep with a guy (or a male old jackal-headed god) was resolved, there were few conflicts.

In fact, I thought the story could've used more conflict in general. All five people in Thomas's party generally get along great (even when the carny walks in on Thomas sleeping with his wife, there's no conflict--"we have an arrangement"). Everyone is very caring and nice, which is a problem I have with my own characters at times. I would like to have seen more tension: there is some angst at Anubis and Thoth and the others losing their old dominion, but you get very little sense of what it meant for them to have those dominions, apart from a short section in which Anubis reminisces, which was a nice touch.

Thomas's big conflict in the story is "can I sleep with and care for this incredibly hot, nice, sweet, older person who likes me a lot and happens to be of the same gender?" So that sort of limits things right there. I thought it would be interesting to see some of Anubis's struggle when the plot is uncovered, that his longing for his glory days might translate into a yearning to join the other side. But he's too nice, and his friendship/relationship with Thomas is never in doubt.

Since this is self-published, it is worthwhile to take a moment to comment on the publication. Will typeset this book himself, with some lovely art by Heather Bruton, and I have to say the production looks very professional. In the text itself, another editing pass might have helped; I caught several misspellings, grammar issues, and so on. It definitely ranks in the upper tier of self-published works I've seen.

Will has a lot of creative ideas, and this story did keep me engaged and reading to the end. In the end, I felt it remained a "fan story"--the ending has that wish-fulfillment quality that is the hallmark of many fan works, and the ideas aren't as much developed in the service of the story as they are garnishes to a "wouldn't it be cool if a regular guy met and fell in love with Anubis" story. I'd like to see Will exercise his imagination a little more, to think about what it would really be like to have "exotics" in society (a facet unexplored save for some token racism), what the old gods would really be up to (though Neil Gaiman and Bill Willingham have set a rather high bar in that territory, there's no reason the rest of us can't have fun with it), and what pitfalls come about from every kind of relationship. This story shows a lot of potential, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Will comes up with next.

New Year, Fresh Start

The vacation really helped. I woke up this morning thinking about the projects I wrote out to accomplish this year and immediately had a pretty good insight into one of them. I did make some resolutions about this year, but you can pretty well guess what they are generically, so I won't bore you with them.

We had a good holiday, going to extremes of nature in Colorado and of "civilization" in Las Vegas. There was skiing and shopping and eating and drinking and family and lots of enjoyment of life. Vegas in particular is a great place to people-watch. Everyone has a story, but it seems like in Vegas we wear our stories much more visibly. Either that, or there are just more people around and so there are more with really interesting stories. Plus, you couldn't ask for a more stimulating setting. Looking for the guy spinning slots for his ten-year-old daughter? The drunk guy on his one vacation of the year yelling at the craps table? The wedding party, the school vacation, the girls who are having a girls' weekend out? Just sit by a bar and watch for an hour or two.

I'm looking forward to a productive 2008--may we all make good on our resolutions, whatever they are.

Dry Spells

Sometimes you just hit one of those times when nothing is calling to be written. I had three days off after Christmas, and I spent them running errands and watching TV. I have several stories waiting to be written, but I haven't been thinking about any of them. So when I sit down to write them, nothing flows.

I think the occasional dry spell is not too bad for you as long as you don't put yourself in the mindset that you have to be writing. It's a bit irritating to have all this time and not be using it, but it's also good to relax and take a break once in a while. I've actually been enjoying the time off from work and from writing, so I think it's been good. And the stories are percolating, it's just been a busy month and I haven't had a real chance to think about them.

What I'm going to do tonight is pull up a couple stories and just force myself to get back into the flow of them, now that my free time is almost over. After all, when I get busy again, I'm going to need some distractions, right?

I Totally Knew Where This Post Was Going

Those of you who've written stories and handed them off to friends are undoubtedly familiar with the feedback: "I figured out where it was going on page..."

It's easy to be annoyed by that, because it's often not phrased in a constructive form (e.g., "you tip your hand too early"). It's more of a boast: I was smart enough to figure out where the plot was going before it was revealed. The flip side is implicit: I'm smarter than the story is, and smarter than you.

That is, of course, not what they mean at all. And you do exactly the same thing when talking about books or movies. The point at which you figure out the story is where it all comes together, where you see the author's intent, and where the path becomes clear. It doesn't make too much of a difference if that's early or late in the story (with certain genre exceptions such as mystery and horror), as long as the story is well told. And indeed, if you hear the above statement, it's still a good review as long as it's followed by, "...but it still kept me hooked."

Really, it's not such a sin to be predictable (the dreaded p-word). We want our stories to be predictable, at least to the extent that the actions of the characters all make sense. But if that's good-p, then there's also bad-p: when the events of the story follow a pattern that's dictated by convention outside the story. Again, for certain genres, it's not a problem (would you object to reading "The Shining" if I told you it's a horror novel where a family slowly gets exposed to more and more terrifying events, until the climax when they face off against the big monster?), but when you're talking about the old "mysterious stranger turns out to be the villain/ancient hero" saw, it'd better be done right or else it'll feel like you're just doing that because all the other stories did.

And I think that is the real key to good-p versus bad-p. If a story follows certain conventions, but the plot and character actions all work well with the story, then it can be predictable to a certain extent, and you should be happy when people tell you they figured it out, unless you're William Tenn and you were deliberately trying to surprise them. If the story follows certain conventions for no other reason than that they're conventions, then it edges into bad-p, and a good critiquer will point that out. You just have to be able to separate the two, and when doing your own critiques, look at that point and see if it's harming the story or not.

Cadences and Rhythm

Short post today, but this deserves more attention and will probably get more later. One of the items in the David Foster Wallace English essay that I thought was really interesting was his admission that he uses incorrect language sometimes because it sounds better. His example was "Where's it at?" for "Where is it?" You can hear the difference between the two if you say them. I think this is also a reason for the prevalence of "ain't." We want a one-syllable negative, and "isn't" is just too bulky sometimes. Imagine Hank Hill saying, "That boy isn't right." (I think, by the way, that this relates to why it's a good idea to read your work aloud while editing--a good topic for another post.)

What favorite incorrect expressions do you have that sound better than their correct counterparts?

Setup, Buildup, Payoff

The "rule of three" is a pretty well-known one. I ran across this article today, talking about it broadly and then in a marketing context. Some of their examples are pretty entertaining (the Laura Kightlinger and Jon Stewart quotes); the whole article is worth reading. The interesting thing, I think, is that the rule applies on so many scales, from sentences all the way up to story structure.

Obviously, you don't want this in all your sentences, but there are places where it fits well. You can use the three-part sentence just for flow:

"Jamie's new car had power steering, a sun roof, and a V-6 engine that got her from her house to the office in ten minutes flat."

You can use the first two elements to set up something that you pay off with the third:

"Every day before he left for work, John brushed his teeth, ate a Pop-Tart, and wondered why he did the first two things in that order."

Notice how right the flow feels. Try adding one element, or taking one away:

"Jamie's new car had power steering and a V-6 engine that got her from her house to the office in ten minutes flat."

"Every day before he left for work, John brushed his teeth, ate a Pop-Tart, put on his shirt, and wondered why he did the first three things in that order."

At a higher level of story structure, the same patterns work, although they're harder to see. You'll recall old fairy tales in which there are often three brothers, or three sisters, or three tasks (yes, I know the five Chinese brothers story, and the importance of seven as well). The evil queen tries three times to kill Snow White. Red Riding Hood asks the wolf three questions ("Are we gonna sit here all day talkin' about how big I'm gettin'?!"). And if you get into screenwriting, you'll know that all screenplays (well, most) have three acts. As I heard it once: "In act one, you chase your character up a tree. In act two, you throw rocks at him. In act three, he figures out how to get down."

There's something about a sequence of three that we find flows well and makes a story work. Just something to keep in mind as you're doing your writing, outlining, and editing.

Writing for an audience

I'm reading Neal Pollack now (review forthcoming, eventually), because I got his book used for $4 and he's part of that McSweeney's crowd that I always thought were pretty good writers but never managed to capture my interest. Turns out this is no exception. Pollack writes from the point of view of a fictional persona who is an amalgam of every overprivileged, ego-driven white male writer, but he does it so well that unless you know the writers he's lampooning, he just comes off as, well, an overprivileged, ego-driven white male writer who has done so much drugs and alcohol that he is delusional.

The point of this post, I guess, is to go back and revisit something I'd written before about writing to your audience. Pollack has a particular audience in mind here: people who read the New Yorker and Harper's and who follow Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and who enjoy that style of writing, but find it a bit overblown. His parodies are interesting, but I'm left feeling like I've just read the punch line to a joke I didn't know. (Aside: there are several punch lines that have become divorced from their jokes, the most famous being "Twenty bucks, same as in town!" which it took me a little while to uncover on Google because I always wanted to know what the joke was. There's also "Wrecked 'em? It damn near killed 'em!" which was a big hit in my college days and is only funny if you say the first part fast enough to make it sound like one word. From these punch lines, it is possible to dimly intuit the joke, as opposed to the one I first read in King Kaufman's column a couple years ago: "Know it? Hell, lady, I wrote it!" All of these are funnier without their jokes than Neal Pollack's short pieces.)

Asides aside, I wouldn't suggest that Pollack take his brilliant skewering of writers I've never read and open it up to the mainstream. He's got his audience; it just doesn't include me. That's the risk you take when you tailor your writing that finely, and I'm well aware that were "NP" to pick up "Common and Precious," he would likely discard it within a couple chapters ("this book has a 'plot'...how common! how precious! ha ha! neal pollack provides his own amusement where none else can be found!" Yes, I picture him talking about himself in the third person. Yes, that's probably just from his first name being phonetically the same as the allegedly third-person-talking Neil Gaiman.). So I guess we'll continue to revolve in our separate spheres, him with his "book deals" and his fancy friends, and me with my blog, my small press, and all of you.

Doesn't seem fair to him, does it? ;)

Writing and the Holidays

The holidays for me, growing up, were always very much downtime. Sometimes we'd travel to one place or another to see relatives, but for the most part, they were a few days off with a nice family ceremony somewhere in the middle. So I always look forward to the holidays as a time when I can get some writing done in longer stretches than a few hours here and there.

I guess I've become a little more social in my middle age, because this December has just been non-stop. I think this week will slow down a little, and then when the actual holiday kicks in, there may be more time to catch up on some of the writing I've meant to get done.

I really do think the holidays are a rich vein of material for writing, beyond all the schmaltzy stuff that ends up in the theaters around this time of year. The concentrated interaction and stress makes for some great stories. Characters! That's what it's all about, right?

So, does anyone else look forward to the holidays as a time to power through some writing? Or is that when you take a break from it?