Author: Karen

One thing science fiction and fantasy writers are famous for is giving characters unusual names.

I’m guilty of it myself. I love going through the baby name books, picking out names that are unusual or even, occasionally, making up my own. In this global, multi-cultural age I don’t even have to use the name books, I could use the phone list at my work and people would swear that my names were made up.

Many people say it’s a beginning writer’s thing, and as I gain experience writing I notice that my names are becoming less unique.

You do come across the occasional book loaded with unpronouncable names, and it does make the book harder to understand. Yet what most people complain about when they read a book full of unusual or made up name is not so much the pronunciation or spelling, but the way all the unfamiliar names run together, so that it becomes hard to tell which character is which.

Introduce one character with an unusual name and providing it’s pronounceable the reader will cope.

Introduce a second and the reader can still cope, provided the names are not too similar.

Introduce a third and the reader starts to founder.

Give every character in your book an unusual name and even you will have problems as you write it.

Give every character in your book a name and even you will have problems as you write it.

The other day I dusted off an old idea for the writing workshop I am taking this year. I wrote the first chapters years ago. The characters’ names are all … unique is probably a polite way to put it. The obvious solution, change the characters’ names. The problem is, these characters have lived in my bottom drawer for so long, and every so often I have thought about them, and added a little more to their story. Their names are embedded in my psyche. I can’t change the names.

There’s only one thing for it. Write the story using these names. Once the story is complete take a long, hard look at the names and see what I can do with them. If I need to replace them then, so be it. Search and replace in Word was built for times such as this.

The writing group I joined had our first meeting last week. We meet bi-monthly for the rest of this year and the aim of participants is that they each write a novel in that time.

It was fascinating to actually meet face to face other writers who are writing in the same genre. Sherylyn and I both know other writers, but no genre writers. Most of the ones we know are writing either memoirs or literary fiction. The only other genre writers either of us have met are online. Not only that, the only writing group experience I have ever had is Critters, an online critiquing group for science fiction, fantasy and horror. I have always been impressed with Critters, and recommend it highly.

Before the session we had to send around a synopsis and a thousand words. I should have picked Barrain—after all, the whole reason for joining this group in the first place is to get Barrain finished so that I can move on to something else —but I thought we had to start something new. My first misapprehension.

The coordinator sent around some critiquing guidelines. This was fascinating in itself—one of the rules was ‘no physical violence’. I wasn’t sure what I had let myself in for. We didn’t get anything else, so I assumed that we would get instructions on the day. My second misapprehension.

The night before the workshop I reviewed the Critting guidelines. Maybe I should be prepared, I thought, and scribbled some hasty notes about each of the other works.

I am glad I did, because pretty much from the moment we arrived we were right into it, critiquing each other’s work.

The group was mixed, roughly half men and half women. Age ranged from 15 years old to mid-fifties. Writing group experience ranged from those who had no experience whatsoever, to me, who had online critiquing experience, to others with face to face writing group experience and still others who had been in this same group the previous year (working on the same novel).

Two-thirds of the novels were science fiction, which really surprised me. I expected more fantasy. I don’t know if this is a trend, just this group, or due to the fact that our coordinator was a published science fiction writer. Many of these novels were past first draft, and some of them had been extensively work-shopped prior. Not surprisingly, the work-shopped novels were generally more ‘finished’, or if you like, more professional (although they weren’t always the stories that appealed to me most).

We spent the whole day critiquing each other’s thousand words, and still ran an hour overtime to finish it.

You don’t have much time. Those who had attended workshops before came prepared, with printouts of each work and notes on the printout. Once they had finished their critique they then passed the notes on to the author. I like this, because you certainly don’t have time to cover all the points you might like to make.

A thousand words isn’t much, however, and it’s hard to critique in isolation. Most people gave the first thousand words of their novel. Even so, there were still a lot of comments like “I don’t understand what’s happening here” to stories where I was perfectly happy to wait to understand. After all, by their very nature science fiction and fantasy are a little ambiguous at the start. If you write something like:

The spritzer blew 20 klicks out. We had to cannibalise the recycler to repair it, which meant no clean clothes for the next five klicks, which meant that Jenna was furious and spent those five clicks in sub-mode, which meant that I got into trouble because she didn’t calibrate the drive before she went under. No-one likes to take the blame for their gem-partner so naturally I …

I don’t care what the spritzer is. I don’t even care that I don’t know how long or what a klick is. It’s a time or distance unit of some sort, and the time period it covers (or takes to cover) is definitely longer than a day. I don’t even care what sub-modes and gem-partners are yet. It’s science fiction and I expect that in time I will come to know what these things are, if I need to. All I need to get from this is a sense of whose story it is, what’s going to happen next and whether or not I want to read more.

This type of critique—”I don’t get what’s happening. I don’t know what a spritzer is. I don’t get a feel of the story because I can’t visualise it”—came up a lot.

The most valuable critiques were the most specific. “I got confused when you did not start a new paragraph for each new character’s speech,” type thing. I think that was because of the restricted idea we have of each others’ stories at present.

We agreed that a thousand words is the limit that anyone can send through to be critiqued. There is no way we could do any more. It can be any thousand words they want critiqued. Unfortunately, I am the only one who wants to see the rest of the novel. There was a collective ‘no’ when I suggested people send the whole novel up to the thousand words so we could at least get an idea of what had gone on in the story prior.

I’m not sure how much value it is critiquing just that one small part. We’ll wait and see. I know that I will present in sequence, whether or not I think something else needs work-shopping, simply because I can’t see the sense in pulling something out of the middle of the book without my critiquers knowing what has gone on before.

Overall, it was a good day and I learned a lot about critiquing face to face. It will be interesting to see what happens as we get to know the stories and the people better.

Over at Bookends, LLC Jessica Faust talks about writing what you know in the context of writing in the genre you know.

As Jessica says, she

“… regularly receive(s) submissions from authors who tell me sheepishly that in a different time in life they were reading such-and-such genre and thought that they could easily write that genre.”

Writing What You Know, Jessica Faust

She later goes on to talk about attending a writing conference where everyone seemed to be working on their memoirs, even though few of them read memoirs.

I’m no saint. Back in my early 20s. I decided to write a romance. After all, how hard was it? Anyone could write romance, and I had all my mother’s old Mills and Boons I had devoured as a teenager.

Like most people, I stopped writing about five chapters in.

It has been a lot of years and hundreds of thousands of words since that first abortive romance. Most of those words have been science fiction, fantasy or mystery—the genres I read for pleasure.

Having finished (although still not published) a number of novels now, I cannot imagine even trying to write something I wouldn’t read myself. It takes a long time to write a novel, and there are a lot of rewrites involved. To spend that much time working on something I didn’t even like is mind-boggling. I doubt I could do it.

Writing is supposed to be enjoyable, not torture.

Do you ever find yourself taking on the mannerisms and habits of characters in the novel you are currently reading?

Yesterday I found myself biting the side of my thumbnail. It’s not something I normally do. I admit, I occasionally bite off a bit of broken nail if there is no emery board or scissors handy, but that’s as far as it goes—and never on the side of my thumb, where the flesh meets the nail. Bite too hard there and you break the flesh, ending up with a very sore nail.

Most habits are sub-conscious. You don’t know it’s a habit until someone else points it out (and then you don’t believe them anyway). But I noticed this one and couldn’t work out when it had started.

Later that day I picked up the novel I was part-way through reading. A few paragraphs into the chapter the protagonist’s friend starts biting his nail, on the side, at the base of this thumb. And then I noticed I was biting the nail at the side of of my thumb too.

Mystery solved.

I have finished the book now, so hopefully this is one habit I won’t keep up. (Except, as I write this, guess what I was doing.)

I’m a bit of a chameleon that way. While I read a book I will often take on characteristics mentioned in the story.

Although I do remember one point-of-view character doing a lot of shoulder rolling—I was quite flexible after reading that book—most of the time the characteristics I pick up are those of secondary characters, rather than the main character’s. After all, the protagonist doesn’t think, “Oh, I’m biting my nails again. I’d better stop it.” Or not in the books I read, anyway. It’s more like, “I wish she would stop biting the side of her nail like that,” or “She’s biting the side of her nail again. What’s got her so worried?”

Another thing I notice is that I don’t take bad guy habits—unless I like the bad guy, of course. I usually take the habits of the protagonist’s friends, often the people I like best in the story.

I don’t know whether I retain the habits after I finish the book, although they definitely linger for a week or two, depending on how strong an impression the character made on me.

I’ll have to check and see whether I am still biting the side of my nail in another month.

My writing partner, Sherylyn, and I both have different writing styles.

I would characterise her style as humorous, light and somewhat distant. She’s an easy read, and puts more description and more emotion into her stories. I am a little heavier —but still by no means heavy —with lots of dialogue but not much extraneous description. What description I do include is mostly about what the point-of-view character sees and feels. There is definitely less emotion.

Obviously, combining these styles gives us the best of both.

Added to this, neither of us is heavy on internal monologues. We both use the same type of language, simpler rather than dense. When we write we simply let the words flow and what comes out at the end needs editing to make it work.

Although we have written together for so long, we both have different things that need fixing in our first drafts. If I had to pick one thing for each of us I would say the for Sherylyn it’s cliches. Her writing is full of them. For me it’s unlikeable characters.

Sherylyn starts with good characters but her first drafts include a lot of unnecessary phrases. To use a really bad, made-up example, she would write something like, “And then they were gone, like puffs of dust on the wind,” when all she needs to say is, “And then they were gone.” Editing these is easy.

My problems are not so easy to fix. Often, when I do the first drafts, my characters are miserable, self-centred and downright unlikeable. Definitely not someone you would want to spend an entire book with.

Maybe it’s a reflection of my own personality. I hope not. The characters are generally wimps, and spend the whole book feeling sorry for themselves.

The thing is, I can’t see how bad they are until someone else points it out. Even then, it takes a lot of convincing and two or three more drafts before we have something we both like.

The end result depends on whether it’s something we are writing together or something that we are writing on our own. If it’s our own, we restrict our edits and comments to necessary changes (or what we think is necessary, at least). If we are writing a piece together, ideas come into the mix too, and we inject our own ideas into the other person’s writing. Once we do that we end up with a style that is neither one nor the other, but is generally something we are both happy with.