Author: Karen

Over on Nathan Bransford’s blog he posed the question do you own your characters or do your characters own you? He says:

I … find it curious to hear authors so completely in thrall to their worlds and characters, and I start wondering, “Wait a second, who’s in charge here?”

Nathan Bransford – Do You Own Your Characters or Do Your Characters Own You?

The commenters on the post could be divided into two camps. One camp is authors who seem to write their story based around plot, while the other (larger) camp writes character-based stories. Plot-based authors definitely control what their characters do and keep them on track if they stray. Character-based authors give their characters some degree of control.

As many of the commenters to the post said, if a character refuses to follow the storyline it is often a sign that something is wrong with the story.

I am very much a character-based person myself. Story always come second to character, particularly in the first draft. My characters do and say things I could never have envisaged when I start of the story.

It’s nice to know that so many people out there work the same way.

In a previous article, Developing the science fiction reading skillset, I talked about an article written by Jo Walton over at Tor.com. The article was on SF reading protocols and how science fiction readers develop a skillset to read science fiction.

In the same article Jo also covered the opposite of this. The mindset (or skillset if you like) that literary readers bring to their reading. The expectation that if it’s written it must have some form of metaphor associated with it.

Sherylyn, my writing partner, is part-way through a writing course. Last year she completed a subject called Myths and Symbols. One thing her lecturer kept telling the class was that ‘all stories have hidden symbolism’. I disagreed with this because I know that when I write—and I think Sherylyn would probably say the same about her writing—I am definitely not trying for symbols. I am telling a story, and it’s not usually a story fraught with symbolism, it’s a story about a person or persons and what happens to them. But … according to the lecturer, symbology is always there, even if you, the author, don’t know that you are writing it in.

While I agree that themes do creep into some stories—and sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes it’s subconscious—I do not, consciously or sub-consciously, lace my stories with the type of symbolism the lecturer was talking about. If my main character wears a red dress it does not mean she is a slut or a sinful woman, which is one of the commonly accepted symbologies associated with a red dress. Nor does it automatically mean she that she is strong and fiery, another commonly accepted symbol. If I say, in my book that she liked the colour, or that she wore it because her (now-deceased) husband said it suited her then that’s why she’s wearing it.

Jo has some good points to make about how literary readers expect a story to have symbolism and metaphors; that they go looking for them, even when they are not there.

Over at Tor.com Jo Walton has an interesting article on SF reading protocols and how regular readers of science fiction know how to read without getting hung up on the detail that’s not important. She uses the example of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and how you don’t need to know what a tachyon drive is to enjoy the novel, you just need to know that it allows you to travel faster than light and what impact that has for the story.

One of the things that I find when non-SF readers read any of our stories is that they always want more detail. They always want to know more back story.

I used to think that maybe we do jump into a story too quickly sometimes. In Not So Simple After All (aka Potion), for example, we start the story when our adventurers start their journey together, not when they first meet their prospective boss. We had quite a few people say they would like to see how the characters are offered the job and how they decide to take the work. We tried to write earlier chapters showing Blade bored and unhappy at his school for fighters and River coming to the school to offer him the job, but it was boring and didn’t add anything to the story except that the reader had to read at least two more chapters before they got into the story proper. So we cut them again.

I think now that what these people—many of them non-regular SFF readers—really wanted was for us to make a world that they understood at the start, rather than have that world unfold for them as they read.

I have always been a reader who is happy to learn things as the book goes on. Myself, I call it a willing suspension of disbelief. Provided the author is telling a good tale and has empathetic characters I’m happy to go along with his/her story and let the facts settle in throughout the story. I don’t need to understand everything straight away.

Jo Walton calls this the SF reading skillset.

In my latest story my character has a noise inside his head. It’s continual, and he doesn’t know what it is.

I know exactly what it sounds like. It’s the noise that you get when you sit next to someone who has their iPod up too loud and you are swamped with a white noise that’s half static, half beat, beat, beat.

I can describe it well enough using today’s terms, but my character lives in a pre-technological society. He’s never heard of static. He’s never heard of iPods. I have to describe it in natural terms.

I’d been stumped for days, but then I started writing this post and suddenly, for no reason at all, natural analogies just popped up.

For the underlying noise I might start with the sound of a seashell when you hold it up to your ear, or the wind whistling around the shutters on a stormy night. Or even the sea itself.

For the static, add the crackling of resinous logs on the fire.

And the beat? It’s a rhythm like the drums of the distant watchers, or the seasoned pounding of the butcher chopping up meat on his slab.

I’m sure I can come up with more.

The thing is, once I stopped trying to describe it and let it percolate in the background, my subconscious came up with a whole stack of ideas.

Well, we did it. NaNoWriMo.

50,000 words (in Sherylyn’s case, 60,000) of two novels that have some promise.

Both of us did it easier than we expected. It was mostly a case of bums-on-seats and don’t talk to anyone until we had finished our allocated words. Due to other commitments on the first weekend we both got behind. Sherylyn took a little over a week to catch up, and I took most of the month but, even so, it wasn’t too hard. If we were writing full-time we figure we could both manage 50,000 words a month on a first draft without any stress.

This is the first time we have ever done any real writing together that wasn’t on the same manuscript. Our writing styles turn out to be quite similar in that neither of us do much planning, we let the story take us where we want to go and let our subconscious work on it when we’re not at the keyboard. (Although I have to say my consciousness was not as sub as Sherylyn’s. I did envision scenarios more rather than just let the whole story percolate the way she did.)

Sherylyn turned out to be a much faster writer than me, which surprised both of us. I don’t know why, but we both expected me to be the one to waltz through the process with ease. It physically takes me longer to write the same amount of words.

I got one story out of it which I like a lot, although it’s nowhere near finished at 50,000 words. Sherylyn got a story which she’s busy revising now, plus she also got an idea for a second story (which I love) which she’s writing in between polishing bits of her NaNo novel.

All up, it’s been fun and tremendously productive.

November is nearly here and that means NaNoWriMo.

Write a novel in a month. 50,000 words. It’s a big job.

For the last few years work deadlines have stopped me entering NaNoWriMo. November for my company is always a busy month as major projects go live then, trying to get them out the door before everything slows down for the summer break. We spend long hours at work, working weekends and late into the night if necessary.

This year August, September and October have been hectic, but November looks to be quietening down. I may be able to fit in a novel.

I’m going to try, anyway.

Sherylyn’s going to do it too. She also starts a new job in November.

I suspect we’ll both be highly stressed and hardly have time to talk about our other works in progress, including Barrain, which is coming along fine, although this draft will not be finished before November.

And to all you other Wrimos out there—may the words come swiftly, may the plot unfold without effort and may your writing time be plentiful. Chookas.

In the first instance, we try to sell our novels to the American market.

Why would we do this when the Australian market for fantasy is so good at the moment?

The Australian market is extremely difficult to break into. I’m not saying it’s impossible—we’re still trying—but it’s a very small market. Once you have pitched to the small number of agents who accept submissions, and to the even smaller number of publishers who do, you have nothing left.

As Australian writers though, just how much should we change our work to suit the American market?

I’m not talking tone here, but the little things that are different between countries that may make an American reader go, ‘Huh?’. Or the spelling, or even the size of the paper we submit on.

In Barrain Melissa goes around to the boot of the car to get the backpack Scott takes on the hike with him.

If we pitch this story to US agents and publishers, should we make this a trunk?

What about spelling. Australian spelling favours English spelling rather than American. Colour rather than colour, grey rather than gray, and so on. Or as jeeagle-ga, one poster on the google answers site puts it, “gray is a color, grey is a colour”.

I also tend to favour ‘ise’ endings, rather than ‘ize’.

Even that paper size is a question. If I am trying to sell to a US market, how much do I damage my chances by using A4 paper?

I don’t know.

I don’t know how much difference any of these things make to trying to make a sale.

We don’t bother worrying about these things when we write. Before we submit something to the US market we run it through a US spell checker, but that’s about all we do.

If I found out that the paper size really harmed our chances, I might order in some letter size paper, but haven’t done so to date.

As for words like ‘trunk’. I’d probably leave them for the agent or editor to tell us to change before we touched them.