S. K. Dunstall

Carrying on the theme of a recent post … sites for writers seems to be a common subject at present.

Jessica Faust, over at Bookends LLC – A Literary Agency, gives the following advice about web sites for unpublished writers. She recommends getting a web site now, before you are published, as you need the site ready for any prospective agents or other readers who may be able to help you with your career.

Jessica also suggests that posting a chapter of your novel is a good idea.

Some of the people who commented on her blog thought this was a good idea, others were a little wary. I confess to being one of the wary ones. Yes, we are posting Barrain here on this blog, as unpolished in its early drafts as it possibly can be, but I’m not sure about posting any of the work we are currently trying to sell.

There is a practical issue here as well. The first chapter that you write is probably the last one that you finish. We occasionally still polish the first chapter of Potion as it arrives back from yet another agent. When would we post this chapter? Timing is everything.

Site design was discussed—by Jessica and the people who commented. The general consensus is that you need a simple, basic site that looks okay. You don’t have to pay a professional to design the site, but it doesn’t hurt if you do.

One thing that wasn’t discussed on Jessica’s post was blogs.

A web site is not a blog, although you can have a blog associated with your site, or even set up as the whole site. In an ideal world you would have both, a la Neil Gaiman, say. If you had the choice, though, and could only do one, which would you do?

I think that would depend on the type of writer you are, and how comfortable you are with the web.

Me. I think I would go for the blog.

People write blogs for different reasons.

As writers, I would say that some of the major reasons would be:

• For writing practise
• To maintain enthusiasm
• To showcase our talent.

This last is important. Some agents (e.g. Miss Snark) mention that if they are interested in an author’s submission they will check out their web site. I know, as a reader, if I find a writer I like, the first thing I do is look up their web site on the internet.

Which leads to the question—how much should we polish what we put in there?

When we write novels they go through a few major drafts, plus numerous minor ones, and every draft is reviewed by both of us. We take time between the drafts. Yet this blog gets one draft and one revision, by the person who wrote it. Not only that, it is generally reviewed on the same day it is written, so there is not even the distance of time between the initial writing and the revision. I still find mistakes in earlier posts, months after I posted them.

What does that say about me (or about us, really) as a writer if you come to this site and see first draft material?

How much should we worry about what people see?

In an ideal world we would polish our blogs until they are as sparkling as our other writing (or at least, as sparkling as our other writing aspires to be), but for a basic return on investment, wouldn’t we be better polishing our novel instead?

Time we spend writing blogs is time we aren’t writing the novel.

It takes me around two hours to write a post and review it.

My aim was to post two articles a week each for this blog and two for my technical writing blog.

Four posts, eight hours.

That is eight hours per week of novel writing I have voluntarily given up. One full working day.

If I wrote novels for a living that might be reasonable time out, but it’s actually time out of the few precious fiction writing hours I can scrape out of a full working week and other life. It’s quite a sacrifice.

I’m not complaining, by the way, it’s my choice to do it. However, should I be worrying that anyone who visits our site sees writing that is not particularly polished, or are my priorities right?

I don’t know. I don’t know that I will ever know.

One thing is certain. The impact of your blog is not just in the writing. It’s also in the design. If your web site looks good then people are predisposed to think of you as a better writer, unless your writing is appalling.

I am no web designer, and I have come to the conclusion over the years that you don’t have to be a brilliant graphic artist to create a functional web site. You just have to be competent. You may not end up with the ‘wow’ factor (to quote that advertisement currently doing the rounds) but at least you end up with something that doesn’t prejudice people immediately.

I think writing a blog is a bit like that too.

While we would all like to put up dazzling prose, mostly it just has to be competent.

For those of us who write novels but are unpublished as yet, we’re far better off spending the extra time writing them, than polishing our blog posts to that final 10% brilliance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.