Tag Archives: Writing

NaNoWriMo and Me

For those not in the know NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and it started today November 1. It runs through the 30th and the people participating are attempting to write 50,000 during those 30 days.

Now that sounds like a lot and it is, but it is a doable goal with dedication and the willingness to chain your inner editor in the basement and let the words flow unimpeded. I have a number of writing friends taking part and I hope each and every one of them wins, hitting and exceeding their goal.

I am not taking part. I tried it once several years ago and it did not agree with my style of writing. That’s not to say it is bad, anything that gets the words on paper is generally a good thing. For me it really comes down to two things.

1) I have already gotten my self-discipline down where I can produce as needed. I have just finished my 8th novel and frankly it wasn’t hard. It has been more than 10 years since I started a novel without completing it. (That doesn’t mean the novels written in those ten years were all good. They weren’t, but they were all finished.)

2) My day-job hits it insane busy period right now. Luckily it is not retail sales who are also starting to see more and more work. (Hopefully) This is when the most applications come to my company and for me that means 10 hours a day 4 or 5 days a week and often half days on Saturday.

No tears. I get paid well and I am very happy doing it. But I am also happy that I finished my latest novel a few weeks ago and I have no writing pressure on me.

So good luck to those flying at the keyboards, I salute you.

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Elements of an Ideal Scene

So last night there was no Halloween Horror Movie and instead I and my wife entertained friends as we played board ands card game. The film series will return as I have several more films that I plan to watch before Halloween.

Today I want to talk briefly about scenes in fiction and from a writer’s view what are the elements of an ideal scene. An ideal scene in my opinion would have all the elements discussed below and an ideal story would be composed of nearly all idealized scenes, but ideal and perfections are goals rarely obtained.

Advance The Narrative:

One critical purpose of a scene is to move to story along. The tale has a beginning and progresses to an end and each scene should move the reader and the events in a logical and satisfying way towards that conclusion.

Reveal Character:

Stories are about people. Even when those people come shaped like aliens, fey, and monster, they are meant to be relatable and that means they are still at heart people. When we finish reading a scene we should understand something about the character that we didn’t before the scene began.

Present Conflict:

A strong scene is one in which there is conflict with stakes on the table. That is not to say you need to have a fist fight or such in every scene that would be far too exhausting the experience and write. All a conflict really means is that there is a character who has a goal and there is an obstacle preventing the easy achievement of that goal. It can be as simple as the character need to get on a particular metro bus and is already running late. Will they reach the bus stop before the bus? That is conflict.

Raise the Stakes:

Each scene with its own conflict has its own stakes, but the story overall has its level of stakes and one powerful purpose of a scene is to increase the potential loss from failure. What may have started out as a mild trouble if it came to pass can be amplified by a scene and that process can be repeated until a loss becomes intolerable. This is the process of building towards climax.

Amplify the Atmosphere:

Each story has a mood it is trying to build for the reader and an ideal scene builds on the mood. A horror story is comprised of scenes that unsettle and a comedy has scenes that produce mirth.

Illustrate the Theme:

I usually discover the theme of my story as I write it, and that’s even after I have produced an extensive outline but still it is an element that is critical to a powerful tale, the theme. The story should have an overall theme and the best scene illuminate the theme or themes often with different and subtle ways. It’s generally bad to whack the reader over the head with your theme, then you have a lecture not a story.

Establish People, Places and Things:

Exposition is often treated as a dirty word, but it is an indispensable part of story telling. However a scene that does nothing but establish is often critiqued as being expository. More than any other element this is one that must be combined with some other purpose.

So off the top of my head here are the things I think scenes need to do and the more of these your scene can do simultaneously the better the scene will play.

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Very Nearly Done

So my YA SF adventure novel is nearly ready for the beta readers. My lovely sweetie-wife is proofing the final chapter and I have gone through and retitled most of the chapters.

If you know me you know titles and character names bedevil me, but I wanted the final chapter to have a particular title and that means all of them need titles. Oh well, it’s good to work where you are weak.

In other news I ran my first 5th Edition D&D games this past weekend. I have run a 3.5 games for quite a number of years but the system soured for me and I was happy to bring that campaign to a close. At first I was just going to use the free material to start a new game and experiment with the 5th edition rules, but I changed my mind, took the plunge, and bought the core rulebooks. (And That is ALL I will buy. One of the things that burned me for 3.5 was the endless splat books and the exponential complexity they introduced.)

The game we went, I think people had fun, and the ease of the new rules is better suited to my style of play.

I also have an essay in mind about genetics and epigenetics. I think I have found an analogy that makes the distinction very clear and illustrates why something can be inherent and not genetic.

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A General Update

 

So life has been – interesting of late and it has kept me away from my blog.

The principle issue is that ‘minor’ sprain I suffered at World Con in Kansas City. Well I had it x-rayed and while there are no broken bones the doctor pronounced it a serious sprain. I am wearing a brace on my dominant hand and that makes everything a challenge. I can type – poorly and slowly – so I am not out of work at my day job. I am working on my novel — nearly finished — but beyond those items I have little endurance at the keyboard.

However the convention was wonderful. There were events every hour and often more then one that I wanted to attend. I met old friends and new ones. I had a great time and came away from new idea and new energy.

Soon, next week, I will loose the brace and get back to my usual self.

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Should a woman play James Bond?

That may look like an easy question, but I think it is the wrong question. There are deeper levels and assumptions that need to be teased out to find the right questions. The next level question is really:

Can a woman play James Bond, for is the answer to that is no, the ‘should’ never comes into it.

Clearly ‘can’ does not refer if a female actor has the ability to learn the lines, the blocking and such because only a fool would think otherwise. No, the can in that question pertains to the nature of gender and the character, and thus leads us deeper to another question that requires answering first.

Can the character of James Bond be a woman?

In the strictest cannon sense one would think the answer is no, but that same sense you could never remove Bond from an immediate post WWII setting. therefore I reject a strict cannon based answer. That hardly means the answer is an automatic yes. What we’re closing on is:

Can the essential characteristics that make James Bond who he is be also present if the character was a woman?

Ahh now we are getting into the meat. I know there are people who feel that a male author can never justly write a female character and there are those who disagree and believe that men can write believable and credible female characters. This divide and where you fall on it is the real answer to the question of casting a female actor to play the role of James Bond. (But I suspect that some will not follow through to the logical conclusions of their stand on men writing women.)

Start with the assumption that Men and have core characteristics they derive from their sex. (That is a highly debatable to assumption and not one I am putting forth as necessarily true, but it is essential to this discussion.) You can think of it as a Venn diagram, a red circle for men a blue one for women (or vice versa, the colors are meaningless.)

In your mind how much do the circles overlap?

Not at all? are Men from Mars and Women from Venus and they are so different in core characteristics that no man can credible get into the head space of any woman? If that is the case and the circles do not overlap then James Bond could not possible be a woman as the core characteristics of the character would not be found in a woman. But if that answer makes you happy it also means that if you are a man you can’t write women. They are alien to you as any being from a distant star.

Perhaps the circles overlap a bit. That there are characteristics found in both men and women, but by and large the defining characteristics are unique to each sex. If that is the case James Bond can be woman, and played by a woman, but only if his characteristics are found in that sliver of overlap between the circles.

Maybe you think the circles overlap a great deal and that differences between the sexes are primarily culturally generated. That at heart men and women are human beings sharing more in common with each other than not. If that is the case than certain the character of James Bond could be credibly written as either sex and could therefore the portrayed by an actor of either sex.

What I find curious in the thought experiment are the people I think who lis ikely to be dead-set on one answer or another. Many of the people I know who that insist that men cannot write women I suspect would jump at a female portrayed James Bond, and yet I don’t see how you square that circle about the core characteristics to make it plausible. Conversely those who would insist that James Bond must be a man, no women allowed at all in the job, would also be insistent that they can get into a woman’s mind-set easily and as such work from an assumption that there is no real difference.

It is a curious thing to ponder.

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Politics and Prose

Over the last few years, though certainly not only those years, there’s been a marked debate about politics in the SF/Fantasy/Horror genre. It is understandable people are passionate about what they believe in and the is reflected in their genre tastes and their politics. In the midst of this you can often hear the plea to please just make good stuff and leave the politics out of the story.

While I am sympathetic to that viewpoint it is a futile. Politics is baked into the creation of any art and doubly so where you consider stories that fall into the SF/Fantasy/Horror genre. Politics is about social conflict and how it is resolved. When someone crafts a new story their engage in world-building, and that entails much more than the placement of rivers, forests, mountains, and mythological backgrounds. When as an author you create a story you draw upon your understanding of how the world works, what makes people and cultures tick, and those ideas are usually the core concepts in your political views. It is not more possible to remove political viewpoints from a piece than it is to remove the concepts of what is right and what is wrong.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not talking about soap-boxing where the author often creates straw-men to knock down and prove the validity if their cherished ideals. The blatantly political, written to score points is certainly an obviously political piece and they can be good and they can be terrible, but their existence, glaring and garish, does not eradicate the political in every other piece.

Like bias the political is always there and like bias the best course is not to pretend that it doesn’t exist in a false quest of objectivity, but to seek it out, recognize it, and manage it.

Be aware of the underlying assumptions about people, about governments, and about reality that inform your world building. This is not an easy process and like the quest for perfection in prose it is an unending quest. However once you start seeing your own assumptions you can then use them to create a wider array of stories. Unshackled from your default settings you are more free to use the assumptions that better serve the plot, the characters, and the story.

For example I have a military SF project currently being shopped by my agents. The underlying assumptions in this setting are, from an American perspective, center-right. This is the best way to create the world, cultures, and conflicts that inform these characters. My current work in progress works primarily from a left perspective. Again by using a different set of base assumptions of what works and how people react to them I create a different set of cultures and different characters. (Or at least that is my objective, in the end only readers can tell me if I succeeded.)

No one can be truly unbiased and not work of fiction can be truly apolitical. Instead it is best to really try to dig down deep, find those underlying assumptions you have about how things really work and turn them to your advantage.

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I’m back

 

Well, the last couple of weeks were less than fun. A week ago Thursday my sweetie-wife dropped me off at the curb for my day-job. This is all very routine but what followed was not. I swung the car door closed with my left hand. My wife, thinking I had released the door, put the car into motion. The motion jerked my fingers, partially wrapped at the window frame of the passenger window. She stopped at once and I did not think that I had suffered any injury, waved her off and went to work.

Ahh, the lovely delayed action of soft tissue damage.

By the time I reached my desk pain, sharp and deep, pierced some of my finger joints. Within fifteen minutes the swelling grew prominent and it was clear that there had been some sort of injury. I soldiered on for a few more minutes but I was forced to admit I needed to seek medical help.

I logged out and caught on Uber to a nearby medical facility. A couple of hours and an X-ray later I was home with the 3rd and 4th fingers of my left hands strapped to splint, putting me out commission for typing.

The doctors diagnosed the injury as pulled tendons and predicted I would need to wear the splint for 1-2 weeks. Seeing as I type at the day-job for a living the doctors put me on limited duty and I was sent home. I watched a lot of videos, movies, and T.V. shows frustrated that I could not work at either job. My novel had reached 73,000 and my assessment of it was rosy.

Luckily I healed on the faster side of the range and a week later the medics cleared the removal of the splint.

I am back at work at the day-job and back on the novel. Where I had hoped to complete the first draft by this week it now looks like another two weeks before I’ll get there. (There was the one-week down and the book is running a bit long. I think it will land between 85,000 and 90,000 words instead of 80,000.)

Still, it is good to be back.

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The 5 Rules of Writing

Robert A. Heinlein famously set forth his 5 rules for success as a writer. If you go to a SF convention and they are brought up at a writing panel there is almost always contentious disagreement on exactly how good and how much you should implement the various rules. Since I have a shortage of humility here are my thoughts on the 5 rules.

Rule 1: You Must Write.

Okay this is a very good rule and usually one that doesn’t promote arguments. Clearly if you do not write you can not be a writer, but I find the rule too vague on how much and how often you should write. Some author prescribe that you must write every day, but that’s too much for me. I personally write 5 days a week. Monday through Friday, leaving my weekends for fun and relaxation. This schedule of writing has been very beneficial for me and I believe that you should have a schedule to your writing. maybe 7 days a week is right for you, maybe three days a week, maybe even just 1 day a week. Whatever it is I think you should have one and you should stick to it. If you rely on inspiration and mood you’ll spend more time dreaming and less time composing. It is the act of actually composing where you practice your craft and you have to do it to get better. Screw waiting for the muse, get out there and write. We go to our day job without the muse’s help writing is the same way.

Rule 2: You Must Finish What You Write.

I have a whole essay on my thoughts that the most important skill a writer can master is completing the tale; this is the same thought. An unfinished piece is no good to anyone, not even the writer. Mind you not all pieces can be completed, but you need to avoid quitting because it got hard or you got lost. that can be a habit and a very bad one. It’s been more then ten years since i started a novel and not finished writing it. Some of those I did finish were garbage and you will never see them, but they were completed.

Rule 3: You Must Refrain From Rewriting; except to editorial order.

Oh, this is the rule everyone fights over. Let me give you my take on it. This rule is not an excuse to avoid proofreading and corrections. This rule is an excuse to avoid polishing your prose and tightening your plot. This rule in my opinion is not about revision but about rewriting. It is about second guess that voice inside you that has something to say. It is about letting fear take out the thing you think really matters because you’re afraid how people will take it. It’s about making your stuff dull and lifeless and like everything else out there because a million voices are yelling that you’re doing it wrong. Trust that your vision, your idea, your voice is worth the time and don’t back down from what you want to say. (The editorial order is a concession that checks in hand beat art and principle and may have been more of his public image than hi actual practice.)

Rule 4: You must put the work on the market.

Well, you want to be a professional and paid writer, yeah you gotta do that. If you want it on your blog, something that didn’t exist in 1947 when these rules were drafted, knock yourself out. The point is get coin for your words you must overcome the quite common fear of rejection. Strangely enough this has been the least problematic rule for me. I send it out, I get rejections, and move on, rarely worrying about that rejection for more than a moment.

Rule 5: You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

Don’t surrender on the first rejection. Really if you’ve survived the first, the second stings far less. The truth of the matter is a single rejection tells you nothing except that the piece did not work for that editor on that day. You need to send it back out, again and again until either you sell or there are no market left. Now perhaps no markets left means – no paying markets, no markets you’d care to be seen dead in, that doesn’t matter. As long as there is a market where the piece might work, send it out. It is your job to write it it is the editor’s job to rejection and never do the editor’s job for them.

 

Well that’s my thoughts on the five famous formulations.

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The most important skill to a writer

Here is a quick post about what you need to focus on as a writer. There are plenty of important skills to master good fiction writing. Crafting complex interesting plot, creating compelling characters, dazzling prose, strong important themes, having a distinct point of view or voice, all of these are important.

But.

I think we can all recall novels and short stories where one of these elements was less than stellar. Books that are massively successful despite some poorly drawn characters, tired cliched plots, or that they brought nothing new to light. (Mind you I don’t think aside from self-published material – and only some of them not all by any measure – do you find all these faults in one work. But many works survived with one or two of them.)

There is a skill that every published author has mastered no matter the material.

They finished.

The story didn;t end up in a forgotten drawer, on in an uncompleted file on their hard drive. The author stuck with it, did not give up and chase a new shiny idea, but did the work and wrote to the end.

This is the most important skill, learning to finish. Because if you can’t, none of the other things will matter.

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Why I Write What I Write

No one has asked for this post, but then again no one asks for any post and that has never stopped me.

Writing short stories and novels is a curious thing, particularly when you do it without a contract in hand. There’s no assurance that it will be published or that anyone other than the author will see it, so why take that risk? Why write?

I write for many reasons, other authors may share some of these reasons, some may value them differently. That’s neither right nor wrong, as with cars, your mileage may vary. These are my objectives when I start putting words in a row.

  1. Entertainment. I write the sort of stories that if I read them would entertain me. Be they dark or light, happy endings or death and gloom, all the stories have elements that thrill and engage me.
  2. Show me a world I don’t know. That can be cultures that are new to me, viewpoints that illuminate others’ lives, or a whole new way of thinking about things. I love a good novel that take me into the a headspace unlike my own.
  3. Moral Thought Experiments. I am far less interested in plots than I am stories about difficult choices. If the only issue is stopping the bad guy from doing a bad thing, that itself is of limited appeal to me. It can be exciting to read or watch but upon reflection it proves empty. I like it much more when a character is torn between what they want and what they think is right or just.

Those are the biggies for me, but the list is representative not exclusive.

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