Categories
On writing

Speech tags and other stuff

Today’s blog comes to you a little late, as we were traveling this weekend. We used to travel a lot, but since Mum died, not so much. As a result, we find we’re no longer in the habit of it.  It’s more exhausting, and we can’t to do a 500km (300mile) round-trip in one day now.

Especially not this weekend, where it took us six hours to go one way, because of roadworks. The car gives a ‘take a break’ warning when you’re been driving for two hours without stopping.  We hadn’t even made it a hundred kilometres from home by the time the warning light came on.

We’re out of the habit of traveling.  Took our bags into the motel, settled down to wash and freshen up.  “Where are the toothbrushes?”

“Ah.  Forgot them.”  It was my job to pack the travel toiletries.

“Okay.  We’ll sort that out later.  Where’d you put the hairbrush?”

“Ah.  Forgot that, too.”

And that was just the start, which culminated in the realization, as I got ready for bed last night, that I had also omitted to pack any nightwear.

I was so totally disorganized.

But, I digress.

What I really planned to talk about today was speech tags.  “She said, he mumbled, Jacob yelled.”

Over the years there’s been a real trend away from using any attribution other than said.

But that wasn’t always the case. Charles Dickens, for example, used a lot of saids, but he also used a lot of other attributions as well.  Take A Christmas Carol.

 

“A merry Christmas, uncle, may God save you,” cried a cheerful voice …

… “If I could work my will,” said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should be boiled in his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew,” returned his uncle, sternly …

… “What else can I be?” returned the uncle …

… “Because you fell in love,” growled Scrooge.

From A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

 

Dickens wrote such beautiful, evocative language, and he described how people said things. Uttered, growled, observed, returned, replied as well as said. He also used adverbs a lot—sternly, gaily—which are less popular nowadays, as they’re considered ‘telling’ rather than showing

Nowadays the commonly accepted attribution is ‘said’. If you use anything else, you’re likely to have a reviewer come back and say, “Do you need to use this word? Why don’t you just say ‘said’, it doesn’t jump out as much.  That same reviewer might also say, “You have a lot of ‘ly’ words, are they all necessary?”

There was an interesting thread on twitter the other night about the use of said, which summed it up well, I thought. Scott Pack (@meandybigmouth) said:

“Most of the time, just putting ‘she said’ after some speech will do the job.  When you are constantly mixing it up—she murmured, she argued, she added—it stands out, and not in a good way.”

Scott Pack, 27 July 2018.

Interestingly, a later tweet in the same thread by John Scalzi (@scalzi), pointed out that reading is not the same as listening, and that ‘he said’ stands out in audiobook narration. That while for a reader ‘he said’ blends into the background, it stands out when hearing the story narrated.

I agree.

That’s why it’s so helpful to read your novel aloud before you send it to the editor. It’s amazing how some things that are fine as read, really jar when read aloud.

As a general trend, though, as the audiobook audience grows as a percentage of total audience, I think we’ll see even less ‘he/she saids’ in stories and more working the dialogue around what else is happening in that paragraph, and the unique voice of that particular character.

Which can only be a good thing. Isn’t that what most writers aspire to? A story with characters so unique that you know immediately who is speaking just by how they say it.

Categories
Fun stuff

A musical interlude

I love Pachelbel’s Canon. We even have a CD at home, called Pachelbel’s Greatest Hit: Canon in D, which we play on occasion.  Although I do admit, while I can listen to soundtracks over and over again, the Canon album is usually a one-listen. Enough is enough.

Some of my favourite Canon pieces, though, are those where comedians get to do a take on it. I believe it can be quite boring if you are a cellist.

Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel rant was back in 2006, but I’ve always enjoyed it.

 

 

Or the Piano Guys ‘Rockelbel’s Canon’ (around 2013). You will need to click through to YouTube to see this one.

 

https://youtu.be/xV1mZ1BjKa8

 

And now we also Pachelbel’s Chicken.

 

 

The chickens are by an Australian classical duo known as Two Set Violins — Brett Yang and Eddy Chen—a classical comedy duo whose aim is (and I quote from their web site):

“Making Classical music relevant to the modern generation through fun, humor and simplicity.”

 

 

All these images are originally from YouTube.

Categories
Book news

Read chapter one of Stars Uncharted

Only four weeks until Stars Uncharted is published.  Eek. It feels like only yesterday that we tentatively sent off three sample novels to our agent to say, “Which one do you think we should work with?”

Her answer, “Well, that was easy.”

And that’s how Stars Uncharted came about.  If you’re interested, you can read the first chapter now on our website.

Categories
Progress report Writing process

A ragtag band of explorers …

My kind of spaceship. Not too many windows to space. Windows make a ship more vulnerable, and a lot more expensive to heat.
This is the sort of ship a ragtag band of explorers like Hammond Roystan and his crew might use. Image: Miguel Aguirre

Status today:  Ow.

I’ve had a lazy week, reading lots of books.  I’m a fast reader, I tend to open a book and read through to the end, stopping only for work, dinner and bed.  Maybe bed, if the book’s too good I’ll read through the night to finish. Bad me.  (The only day I ever took off work for reading happened because I stayed up till 6:00am reading Robin Hobb’s Fool’s Fate. I thought I’d snatch an hour’s sleep. Ahem.  By the time I woke up it was way, way past getting-to-work time.)

Anyway, I read three books yesterday, straight through, stopping only for lunch and dinner.  (I’m not going to name them, because the first book was so good I went and bought the second two, and by the end of book two I was going, ‘Huh’, and book three I just skimmed. In my skimming I thought I missed something important because the end I felt as the author had left a major plot-hole. I spent a couple of hours rereading book three, trying to work out if they had, or if in my skimming I couldn’t find where they covered it.  I still couldn’t find it.)

I sat in the same place all day. I’m getting old. My body can’t take that sort of punishment any more. Today I am sore.

 


 

There’s one month to go for the release of Stars Uncharted.  Release date is Tuesday, 14 August.

It’s funny how when you write a book you think it’s so unique, but it turns out that it’s not.

We’ve learned that a ‘ragtag’ crew is a thing. There are lots of books about people who join up as a team (a little bit of the found family we talked about last week), but I wasn’t aware that there was a word to describe them. It doesn’t feel that common in Australia—maybe it is, maybe we never noticed it—but since it was used in the blurb on Stars Uncharted we’ve noticed it everywhere.

Categories
Writing process

What are some things you like in stories?

A couple of days ago, on Twitter, Isabel Yap (@visyap) started a thread that asked,

“What are some things you like in stories (not tropes, necessarily), that you are always down for?”

I read all the comments, agree with a lot of them, and came up with my own list of things I particularly enjoy.

Deep platonic friendships

Friends who are there for each other. People enjoy each other’s company, can be honest to each other, tell them their thoughts and hopes and dreams. And of course, in the stories we like to read and write, can also trust that their friend will save them if they get into trouble, and knows that they will do likewise if their friend gets into trouble.

Found families

My family life was practically idyllic, so far as I can tell. Loved Mum and Dad, still get on well with my siblings.  I have no idea why I love found families so much, but I do. This is where a group of disparate people—usually lonely, often without family of their own—come together in a family group.  In fact, right now we’re toying with a story just like that.  An alien, a human down on his luck, and a kid whose own father was violent, so he ran away from home.

People have mentioned Stars Uncharted is a found family, too.

Happy endings

When I finish a book I like to finish feeling satisfied. That usually means a happy ending.

Bad guys who aren’t pure evil

I hate it when the bad guys are purely evil, with no redeeming features at all. The thugs are just thugs, the evil company is evil all the way through, and so on.

It’s easy to make people and organisations purely bad. The enemy in Stars Uncharted is a lot more simplistic than the enemies in the Linesman books.

Banter

Love the quick back and forth repartee between characters. It makes a story fun, shows that they’re friends (usually), and demonstrates character.  When we were younger, Ivan Southall’s Simon Black series was our favorite duo who talked back to each other.  (They’re kids’ SF books, love them still, but they haven’t aged well, except the first one, which wasn’t science fictional at all, but about World War II.)

I have, however, read books—which shall remain unnamed—where the banter didn’t work, so it’s not as easy to write as it looks.

Strong sentiment, lots of emotion

Laugh out loud moments, moments that make you cry, no matter whether you’re in public or not, even those lovely little bits of romance that thrill (not the sex, just the pieces where you go, ‘ooh’ and go back and reread all the time).

Happy endings

The world is depressing enough sometimes, particularly if you listen to the news, nowadays.  Of course there are good bits, but it’s nice to know when you escape to a book that you’re going to feel good at the end of it.

Strong women

I don’t need kick-ass women all the time, but I really don’t want women who have no control over their own lives.

Then again, I don’t like books where men have no control over their own lives, either, and I’ve read a few of them lately. There’s one author I love, but I refuse to read any more of her books because she’s done that to her main character (male) in two series now.

No, characters have to have some control over what they do and how they live their lives.

Science fiction and fantasy with gender and race equality

Which leads on to the next thing, which drives me crazy, particularly in fantasy. Books where the author has built an amazing world, plus an awesome magic system, and then they base a woman’s role on a quasi-medieval western Europe role, and a non-white person’s role on the same.  Women are chattels, owned by their husbands or fathers, colored people are slaves, or semi-human.

You’ve built a whole world, and you stop right there. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Non-perfect characters

Given that we wrote about Ean, who is a classic ‘special person’, you can see that we have no objection to a story about a chosen one, or a (technical or strategic) genius, or any of the—can I call them—tropes that are used in science fiction and fantasy. No, the real issue is when they’re perfect people with it.

They have to have some failings.  Because no one is perfect, and perfect people are difficult to like.

Stories with big ideas

Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice with a ship, the ancillaries and a single person all as one entity. Vernor Vinge—how to murder someone by leaving them to die in real time in Marooned in Real Time, or how not to pay call centre staff, in The Cookie Monster. Big ideas, science fiction that makes you think.

Fantasy, too. You can’t go past the bridge builders in Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of the Kings, or even the magic in Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son series. (Miserable books, those, but the last story ended on a high note. I reread the end quite a few times.)

Not-so-alpha males

I like to know how my male characters feel, and what they think, not just what they do. In many stories, that makes them less-than-alpha. So be it.  They’re the best.

And let’s face it, in real life, a true alpha male is not generally a really nice person. They tend to be arrogant, take-charge, think they know everything and refuse to listen to anyone else.

Strong family relationships

I know I said earlier that I like found families, but I do like books where people who are part of a blood family actually get on with each other, and love each other, and have contact with each other. So many characters in fantasy and science fiction seem to have no families at all.

Children’s books are often the same. Parents and siblings are totally out of the picture. Yet for some reason, when we get to young adult, the family is around all the time, causing the main character grief. (And isn’t it nice when you find a young-adult novel where the hero or heroine has a good relationship with both parents?)

Fun in a story

I love stories with a dash of humor. They don’t have to be laugh-out-loud funny, just make me smile.


So that’s my list. What’s yours?

 

(p.s. Today’s blog is a total mix of US and UK spelling, not even one or the other. Sorry. I just went with what worked for me, today.)

Categories
On writing

The same old themes crop up again and again — even when you don’t plan on it

I find that many of our favorite writers have themes, or story ideas, which they carry across from series to series.  I don’t know if themes are conscious or not.

For example, the female protagonists written by one author are always in formerly abusive relationships.

Our stories?  Well, we didn’t think they were alike, but then we thought about Alliance, where people are trying to kidnap Ean, and Confluence, where—even though it happens late in the book—Yu’s people sort of try to kidnap Ean too.

Or even with Stars Uncharted, which most of you haven’t read yet, where hopefully we’re not giving too much away by saying that one of our protagonists is on the run and that some of our antagonists want her to do something for them.  It gets even worse in Stars Beyond, the book we’ve just handed in to the editor, where they really are after her.  (A bit cryptic, but I’m trying not to give plotlines away.)

Hmm.  Pot calling kettle black?  Definitely.

At the moment we’re tossing up over which stories to send to our agent next.

There’s Acquard, of course, but series books aren’t flavour-of-the-month right now and while Acquard’s not an Ean Lambert story, everyone’s favorite(?) other linesman, Jordan Rossi, does get gig, so that may be a hard sell.  (There’s no guarantee she’ll like Acquard anyway, but we’ll see). We’re considering what else we can send her as well.

She wants space opera. So do we.  And we do write ahead a little.  Not much, but enough that we know whether it’s a story we can write or not.  Which means we need to have written ten or twenty thousand words, minimum, and know how the story is going to finish.  Enough to send samples and a synopsis.

“What about Arrax?” I suggest.  “It needs a major rewrite, but it’ll be a good space opera, and the science behind the story is neat.”

Except … as we propose it, Arrax starts off with someone being captured, and fairly early in the book someone else gets kidnapped.

Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it.

Not only that, the basic story is about some people going to a planet to look for some MacGuffin. Well, it’s not really a MacGuffin, but people will call it that.  A chase—in space and on planet—looking for some kind of treasure, fighting bad guys to get their prize, and so on.  Lots of fun.

Sound familiar?

Maybe not, but let me reproduce the Goodreads blurb for Stars Uncharted.  (My emphasis on the last paragraph.)

Three people who are not who they claim to be:

Nika Rik Terri, body modder extraordinaire, has devoted her life to redesigning people’s bodies right down to the molecular level. Give her a living body and a genemod machine, and she will turn out a work of art.

Josune Arriola is crew on the famous explorer ship the Hassim, whose memory banks contain records of unexplored worlds worth a fortune. But Josune and the rest of the crew are united in their single-minded pursuit of the most famous lost planet of all.

Hammond Roystan, the captain of the rival explorer ship, The Road, has many secrets. Some believe one of them is the key to finding the lost world.

Josune’s captain sends her to infiltrate Roystan’s ship, promising to follow. But when the Hassim exits nullspace close to Roystan’s ship, it’s out of control, the crew are dead, and unknown Company operatives are trying to take over. Narrowly escaping and wounded, Roystan and Josune come to Nika for treatment–and with problems of her own, she flees with them after the next Company attack.

Now they’re in a race to find the lost world…and stay alive long enough to claim the biggest prize in the galaxy.

Now does it sound familiar?

Yes, well.  Time for a rethink.  Let’s bring out another book we have on the back-burner.  Fergus Burns, with the best bad guy (girl) we’ve written to date.  Alis Mack Carroll.

Meantime, back to the drawing board to rethink why we have so much kidnapping and chasing people in our own stories.