Categories
Progress report

Work in progress

Mathers is a wimp. He’s taken over from Scott in the wimp stakes and I’m not sure how to fix him.

All Sherylyn can say is “Really?” She is so surprised.

I think she should expect one wimp per novel. One wimp per draft, until the last draft. Maybe that’s how we’ll know when we have finished. When we know the characters are not wimps.

Categories
On writing

Is it enough to create well-rounded characters for your novel?

How important is it as a writer that you create likeable characters as protagonists for your novel? Is it better to create well-rounded characters who may not be very likeable, or is it better to create likeable stereotypes?

The only true-life hero I ever knew broke down the door of a burning building, raced inside and rescued the two occupants, both of whom were overcome by smoke inhalation. It was an incredibly brave thing to do, and it saved their lives.

This same man bashed his wife—frequently—and followed her around the country for ten years after she left him, making her life an absolute misery. No matter how far she ran, he always found her.

To people who didn’t know him well he was witty and good looking; a real charmer. Not to mention, a hero.

To those of us who did know him, he scared the hell out of us. I know I wasn’t the only one who genuinely wished him harm and there were days when I seriously contemplated doing something about it myself.

Had this man been in a book he would have been considered a ‘well-rounded’ character.

I recently finished Sara Douglass’ Hade’s Daughter, the first in the four-book Troy Game series. This is an excellent book. Well written and engaging, and I love the idea underpinning the story. However, as the Publisher’s Weekly blurb says on the back cover of my copy:

“Dazzling … full of seriously flawed characters both abhorrently evil and appallingly empathetic.”

Publishers Weekly

The thing about Hade’s Daughter is that it was a really good book, but I’m not going to race out and read the next three books in the series right away. I may do in future, I’m not sure. I need time away first, because sometimes the main characters were really not nice. Publisher’s Weekly really described them well.

For me, personally, no matter how good a book is, if I can’t like the characters I have trouble staying the whole book.

So does this mean that I prefer books with likeable stereotypical heroes rather than a truly good book with a truly flawed character? Obviously, it depends on the flaws, and one person’s idea of fatal flaws is not necessarily another’s. Some people will love Brutus, for example, in Hade’s Daughter.

I can definitely say that if you gave me a choice between:

  • A Pulitzer-quality novel about a charming, but flawed hero (who just happens to beat his wife) who investigates the arson of a house where he rescues the occupants, and
  • A lighthearted whodunnit about a (nicer) man who investigates the arson of a house where he rescues the occupants

I know which novel I am going to read, and it’s not the quality one.

In an ideal world, of course, the character would be rounded, flawed, and still likeable. That’s the type of book we all strive for.

Categories
On writing

Collapse: another world building book writers might find useful

I am currently reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

If you write fantasy or science fiction and want to build worlds, this is another book I recommend.

Collapse talks about the impact of climate change, environment, friendly/hostile neighbours and how society responds to these first four problems. The way it responds then determines whether that society survives or fails.

The world we created in Shared Memories was devastated by a war 40 years previously. In that war the people in our story lost their ability to produce energy, lost immediate access to major food supplies, and lost most of their healers.

The population crashed.

When we wrote it I wanted the population to drop by 80%. Sherylyn convinced me it would be more like 50%. I eventually came around to her way of thinking, but after reading Collapse I’m starting to think that an 80% drop in 40 years is still possible.

We’ll stick at 50% though, because to drop 80% the world would need to be a closed system, with no outside contact at all.

Our world—Roland’s world—did have external visitors and contact with others, albeit slowly.

The great thing about books like Collapse is that they show you how other factors, not just politics, influence a society, and make it survive or fail. As writers we often focus on the politics and omit the rest.

Categories
On writing

Ideas from science can help improve your writing, even if you are not writing science fiction

Novelists often look to history and geography to help with their writing, but they shouldn’t forget science, even if they’re not writing science fiction.

Some ideas stand the test of time, others come and go out of fashion, or are superseded by other ideas.

The idea of electrons in an atom orbiting in discrete paths around the nucleus like planets around a sun, for example, is now considered obsolete, replaced by the wave structure of matter.

Other ideas do stand the test of time. The Tragedy of the Commons, for example, is still as valid as when Garret Hardin proposed it back in 1968. Likewise, in her book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross came up with a model of the five stages of people go through to cope with death or terminal illness.

The stages are:

Denial – The “This can’t be real” stage.: “This is not happening to me. There must be a mistake.”

Anger – The “Why me?” stage.: “How dare you do this to me?!” (either referring to God, the deceased, or oneself)

Bargaining – The “If I do this, you’ll do that” stage.: “Just let me live to see my son graduate.”

Depression – The “Defeated” stage.: “I can’t bear to face going through this, putting my family through this.”

Acceptance – The “This is going to happen” stage.: “I’m ready, I don’t want to struggle anymore.”

Definition of Kubler-Ross model in Wikipedia

The model is as valid today as it was back in 1969 when Kubler-Ross proposed it.

I have to say that everyone I know, myself included, who has gone through a grieving process, goes through these five stages. No exceptions.

People move through the stages differently. One person may spend months grieving, another years. The stages also overlap. There is no, “I have stopped denying it, now I’m angry,” moment. It’s more a gradual realisation that you have moved from being alternately disbelieving/angry to angry/bargaining.

So how can we use this in our writing?

Any character who loses someone they love will go through this grieving process. Even your story characters.

Obviously, you don’t want to do grief-by-numbers scenes in your novel, but character-wise, you know some things will happen.

  • There will be a period of disbelief
  • At some stage the character is going to feel angry that their beloved has died
  • They should eventually come to accept it.

What you put into the story is up to you, but if your bereaved character doesn’t respond to the death in a manner the readers expect, then the readers will lose empathy for the character. You don’t have to be predictable. Let’s take the following (admittedly cliched) scenario.

Your heroine is the queen of a small country at war. Her husband, whom she loves very much, is mortally wounded in battle. She sits by him as he dies and they tell each other how much they love the other. The king asks her to finish the war. She vows to do so, for his sake.

The rest of the book covers her struggle to win the war.

If she doesn’t spend part of the book missing her beloved. If she doesn’t even get angry with him for going off and leaving it all for her to do, then I won’t think much of her as a protagonist.

“But,” you might say, “She hides her grief by concentrating on fighting, so she doesn’t have to think about it.”

For a whole book?

No way. That grief will spill over occasionally, and where she is in the grieving process at the time dictates how she will react.

Categories
On writing

When character types are copyright

We all know there is no copyright on ideas. You can take an idea —any idea —and turn it into a story.

How many books have been written about the search for the holy grail, for example? Or King Arthur and his knights? How many stories are based on myths and legends and folk stories from around the world? How many stories do you know about elves? Thousands.

At the other end of the spectrum you can’t create a fast action military man called Schofield with scarred eyes and nickname him Scarecrow. Matthew Reilly owns Scarecrow. Likewise untouchable is Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy’s military historian. Both these authors would probably sue you, and win.

It’s fairly clear at each end of the spectrum as to what is copyrightable, and what is not, but there is a big grey area in the middle.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s influence on fantasy is legendary. So many writers base their fantasy novels on the worlds Tolkien created, even if they have different names and different characters. Even the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons is based on fantasy novels

(The creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary) Gygax added a few of his own innovations as well. A long time fan of pulp sword & sorcery writers like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, and Jack Vance, Gygax shamelessly cribbed from the worlds that had been created by those authors. The most obvious inspiration was the “Vancian” magic system (sometimes called “fire and forget”), in which wizards have to re-learn their spells every time they use them. In an odd side note, though, Gygax himself claims that one of the biggest fantasy authors ever didn’t have much influence on the development of Dungeons & Dragons.
“I’m not a big J.R.R. Tolkien fan,” Gygax said, “though I really enjoyed the movies. I pretty much yawned my way through The Lord of the Rings.” Still, minimal as it might have been, the Middle-earth influence is certainly present, even at the beginning. Halflings were called Hobbits in the original rules—until Tolkien estate lawyers wielding +5 Notices of Copyright Infringement stepped in.
Magic & Memories: The Complete History of Dungeons & Dragons, GameSpy, August 2004

The other day I read the first pages of an unpublished novel. The story was set in a world similar to our own, with a few extras, like elves and halflings.

It was an excellent story, I’d like to have read more. I remember thinking at the time though, this sounds like something from Forgotten Realms. And it was true. If you discounted the modern setting, the elf and the halfling could have come straight from the pages of any Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) book (of which Forgotten Realms is a line).

I don’t know whether the story stayed true to the characterisation of these characters or whether they branched off into something a little different. I do recall thinking at the time that if I was writing this I would really want to check out the Forgotten Realms site to ensure that I wasn’t violating any of their copyrights.

When we start writing we often borrow from other books, even without realising it. The story I mentioned above was really good. I’m just not sure that if I was an editor I would touch it without a few fairly major changes.

Categories
On writing

Don’t write a fantasy novel just because fantasy films are big right now

I went to the movies today—we saw Ratatouille, which I enjoyed, but so many people had oohed and aahed over this movie that I went in with very high expectations.

At the theatre every second poster seemed to be advertising fantasy movies. Beowulf, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, The Golden Compass, Stardust.

I think most people would agree that this current rush of fantasy movies began with the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter. I think most of us would also agree that we’re probably at the end of the cycle. [By fantasy here I’m talking traditional fantasy that started with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and continued with through to the J. K. Rowlings, not the Shreks or the Toy Stories of Pixar.]

I’m enjoying it, going to every fantasy movie I can while the boom is on. I know that after the feast comes the famine. But at least there will always be books. Or I hope there will always be books, anyway.

One thing I do know is that after a run of films like this, a lot of people are going to be inspired to write fantasy novels.

Some of these people may even sell their books, but many of them will not. Some of these people may ‘discover’ fantasy from these films and go on to read and love it as a genre. Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot of people writing in the genre because it is popular, and they think that therefore it will be easier to sell their book.

That’s the wrong reason to be writing a novel, particularly if you are an unpublished author.

Fashions in films and novels come and go, but in most cases you are going to spend at least one year, maybe more, working on this thing. It shouldn’t be a chore. It should be enjoyable. We all know the stats. How many writers get published, how little most of them get paid.

Writing is one of the few things you choose to do. Okay, some of us might argue that we have to write, we can’t not, and I would be one of those. But that doesn’t mean that you should just write anything. If you are happy to write just anything to order, it’s smarter to become a technical writer or something similar—it’s a form of writing, even if it is writing to order, and compared to the income most novelist make, it’s well paid.

I can’t see any point in devoting all that time and all that effort to work on something you don’t truly love, just because you think you have a better chance of getting published.

Not only that, by the time most people realise that fantasy is a trend —i.e. when the films come out—the trend is waning.

Categories
Writing process

Could you write your novel using voice recognition software?

How much would your writing change if, instead of typing or writing it, you dictated it?

As a teenager all the science fiction stories I read agreed on one thing. Computers of the future would be voice operated.

The personal computer is 30 years old now, and voice recognition has come a long way, but most of us still communicate with our computer via the keyboard and mouse.

I believe I can see the future of the mouse—replaced by touch screens—but what about the keyboard? Will it ever be replaced by voice?

According to the Writer’s Blog, novelist Richard Powers claims to have dropped the keyboard in favour of dictating his novels into voice recognition software. (Original link from Lorelle on WordPress.)

Voice recognition is not without its problems, though.

I recall, during last November, Future Boy decided to try voice recognition to write his NaNoWriMo novel. I don’t know how he went.

The technology has certainly improved enough to make voice activated writing possible, but what about us? Do we actually want it?

I remember the work it took to train myself to type words straight onto the computer, rather than writing them on paper first, and then transcribing them. Even though I was a touch typist, and used to the PC from my coding days, it took months to train myself.

In the end I succeeded. So much so that now I find it more difficult to write longhand.

Will the same happen for voice recognition text?

I honestly don’t know.

As we writers know from our writing, people don’t speak in real life the way they do in books. I definitely don’t write like I speak.

I repeat myself when I talk. I use ‘um’ and ‘ah’ a lot. I waffle. I definitely cannot ‘tell’ a story anywhere near as well as I can write one. Other people I know, who can tell beautiful stories, can’t write them.

Most people can become competent at something with practise. Toastmasters is the perfect example of this. You may not be the world’s greatest speaker by the time you finish their sessions, but you will certainly be a better speaker than you were when you started.

Training is the same. I am a competent trainer, because I run regular training courses. I am not a ‘good’ trainer, though, in the way that someone with natural teaching skills is.

I suspect voice activated writing would be the same.

When, or if, voice activated input arrives in the mainstream, people will gradually switch over to it, the way we switched from pen-based writing to keyboard-based writing. It will take practise to get used to, but most of us will eventually become competent at it.

What might change, however, are the naturals at the top of the writing tree. Those who can ‘tell’ a good story, but not write it, will now have a natural advantage over those of us who can write a good story but not tell it.

Categories
On writing

When you write science fiction, don’t make your world exactly like this one

Why do so many writers of science fiction persist in creating worlds set far into the future and making it exactly like the one we have now?

One thousand years ago:

  • The once mighty Byzantine empire was falling apart
  • The Song Dynasty was unifying China, creating a central bureaucracy and paper money
  • The Vikings had raided and explored most of Europe, and parts of Asia, Africa and America
  • Western Europe was entering a period of rapid population growth in the middle ages
  • The Aztecs were searching for a home.

Life was considerably different, and a lot of things have happened in the intervening time. The great civilisations of that time no longer exist. As Hamish McRae says:

Go back 1000 years and Asia … accounted for two-thirds of world GDP. Africa accounted for nearly 12%, much more than western Europe …

Empires rise and fall while the economic wheel keeps turning. The last millennium saw the west gain ascendancy—but our decline is inevitable.

1000 years of globalisation, Hamish McRae, November 2001.

Why then, do some science fiction writers persist in setting their novels 1,000 years into the future, and then creating a world based on a Western civilisation almost exactly the same as we have today?

One thousand years has a nice ring to it. It’s far enough into the future to permit anything to happen, to allow all sorts of wondrous technology to be invented—genetic engineering, humans living forever, space travel. You name it, we can achieve it by then.

But don’t tell me the United Nations is the primary ‘peace keeping’ force in the world or the universe. Don’t tell me that the hero of the story, from the most technologically advanced race on the planet, is from one of the current ascendant western civilisations such as the United States of America or Western Europe.

Western civilisation will be history, the United Nations lucky if they make it as a footnote on the page.

Categories
On writing

Predicting the future of books

Over at the Rejecter’s blog she makes some interesting observations about the future of books.

She says Print on Demand (POD) is the way of the future. She believes that

  • Bookstores will still exist, but rather than warehousing immense numbers of books, the customer will buy the book and it will be printed in under an hour while the customer waits
  • Audio books will become more popular still
  • eBooks don’t really work (and implies that they’ve had their day, although she doesn’t explicitly state this).

I sort of agree with the first point, definitely agree with the second, and totally disagree with the last.

It made me think about the future, though, and it’s interesting to ponder the way things are going.

My first question is … is there a place for bookstores as we know them in the future? Many of the specialty bookshops have closed their doors already, and the proprietors work from home or warehouses. Slow Glass Books, the last of the specialty SFF bookshops I purchased books from by physically going into the store, closed its doors back in 2002, but I can still order books through mail order.

I also buy a lot of books from Amazon nowadays —not because I love Amazon (and the postage is a killer when you buy only one or two books) but because often it’s the only place I can buy specific books.

Print on demand in the format the Rejecter talks about would work well for these people. I imagine the cost of a decent printing press would be huge, but say Slow Glass Books gets an order over the internet (they use snail mail now) in the morning. They could forward this order on to a publisher in their area who prints the book for them and has it back to them in time to catch the post that night. Customer gets the book next day. Everyone’s happy. Customer gets an overnight delivery and the bookseller doesn’t store any more books than is ordered.

I could also see a big market here for personalising books this way.

What happens to the big bookstores though? I don’t see them going away, or not really. I think there will be less of them, and they will not hold as much stock. If they sell one book they might re-order the same (or might not), through POD to replace the one they sold.

Ebooks though … I think that as soon as you get a decent reader (and there are some good ones coming) ebooks will arrive with a vengance. There’s a whole generation now who are used to reading off the screen, and we’re a whole generation on more familiar with computers. I don’t think a non-paper format will bother as many people as it might have 10 or 15 years ago. Not only that, it’s instant. Instead of having to wait for a book to be printed, you can download it immediately.

No matter what happens, I think there is one positive thing about the future of publishing. It has to be better for mid-list authors than it is now, because so many of the high overheads that make midlist books so unprofitable will disappear.

Unfortunately, with that comes another burden. Marketing books. Authors can no longer rely on the publisher to do all their PR for them. It takes a different type of person to be new media savvy, and that might mean the difference between selling and not selling. Those of us who can network on the world wide web might have a better chance of doing something to sell our own stories.

Categories
Writing process

The mechanics of writing: Backups, revisions and how many documents

I thought it might be a good time to talk about some of the housekeeping tasks associated with writing. The most important of these, of course, is backups.

Backups

I know people who never back up their work. It sets my teeth on edge when I talk to a novelist who has been working on their book for two years and find they have not backed the file up once in that time. Not so much because they haven’t backed it up, but because knowing that if they lose that one file they lose two years work.

I would be absolutely shattered.

I know that back-ups are boring, and take time out of writing, but consider what you might lose if you don’t have them.

You need to back-up to cover:

  • A corrupted file—what if your word processor crashes in the middle of typing and you can’t get the novel back?
  • Computer failure—your computer dies, or your hard drive crashes, or your computer-savvy son decides to reformat the disc for you, or your computer gets stolen
  • Human error—you accidentally delete the file.

In an ideal world I would also include more dramatic scenarios here, like your house burning down. If that happens, then the least of your worries will be the novel you spent two years slaving over (at least initially). Any good back-up recommendation should include considering this as well. However, here we will just consider computer failure or human error.

How we back up our novel

Here’s what we do. You may find it excessive, but it works for us.

We have a folder named for the novel. In this case, Barrain. Underneath this we have the latest draft. It’s a word document. The document is named for the novel and the draft. For example, Barrain_Draft3.doc.

In the Barrain directory we have a sub-directory called Backup. Each night before we open the document, we copy the current Barrain_Draft3.doc into the Backup directory. We then rename it to include today’s date at the start of the file name. For example, 20070222_Barrain_Draft3.doc. We write the date in YYYYMMDD format so that the files are ordered.

Note that I said we do this before we open the document. The problem with doing it from within the word processing program is that you must do a ‘save as’, save the file into the backup directory with the new name, then close the file, and open the original again.

If you are anything like me, you’ll forget to do the second part and start typing in the backup file. Then the next day, when you open the Barrain_Draft3.doc file, all yesterday’s work is missing.

It may seem excessive, but this way we have a complete version of every day’s work.

Once a week I copy the latest version over onto one of the other network PCs (one of the advantages of having a home network), and every couple of months I copy it onto a flash drive instead.

For some people, this might be overkill, and it probably is, but it works for us. Disc space is cheap compared to two years lost work.

Most important for us though, is that it’s a habit.

Develop a habit of making regular back-ups.