Category: On writing

I recently critiqued a batch of stories written by a writing class.

The writers could be divided into two specific groups:

• Those who had just left secondary school and moved into tertiary education. Ages ranged from about eighteen to twenty, and

• Mature-age students who had been out in the workforce/world for some time. Their ages ranged from early thirties to mid-fifties.

The stories submitted by the mature-age students ranged from thrillers to fantasy to slice-of-life. Some were funny, some were racy. There was even one semi-horror. Even so, they were all relatively light in tone.

Every single person in the younger group, however, wrote black, bleak stories from real life where the protagonist ended up getting killed, or beaten up, or raped. Or all three. Without exception.

No wonder dystopian fiction is such a hit in the young adult genre nowadays.

Over at ProBlogger Jon Morrow, of Copyblogger, posted a motivational article called How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World.

It’s an emotional topic and not just because of the catchy title. It has garnered hundreds of comments. Read the article and you’ll see why. But I don’t want to talk about what caused the outpouring of support, I want to talk about the writing.

This is fact, not fiction, but if you study Morrow’s technique this is ideal for fiction.

More after the break, with major spoilers.

Overheard at a coffee shop near one of the big five publishing houses.

Smartly dressed girl, “I’m employed to edit manuscripts, but he hasn’t given me a single manuscript yet.”

Sympathetic noises from more casually dressed friend, who looks as if she has the day off and is meeting Girl for lunch.

More casual conversation, and I get the impression that Girl is working for ‘him’. Maybe as an assistant, but he’s definitely her boss.

Girl, “I waited and waited for him to give me some editing to do. He didn’t. Finally, I asked, and he came back with a whole pile of manuscripts and said, ‘Send these back. They’re rejects.’ ”

Horrified sympathetic noises from friend. “He’s treating you like a secretary.”

“Exactly. And I’m employed to edit manuscripts. Well, I gave it a few more days before I asked again. Do you know what he did? He gave me more manuscripts to return. I’m sick of it. I don’t want to do this job any more.”

Rest in peace Diana Wynne Jones, who passed away on 26 March 2011.

Two quotes from the Tor site say it best:

She was passionate about what children want and deserve from their literature. Adults would approach her at signings, wanting to know why she wrote such difficult books. In one case, when a woman protested, the woman’s young son spoke up and assured Diana, “Don’t worry. I understood it.”

Emma Bull, Remembering Diana Wynne Jones

and

… meanwhile Diana’s readers, children in 1973 when Wilkins’ Tooth came out, were grown up. It would be conventional to say here, “and had children of their own” but while that’s true too, what is fascinatingly true, is that many of them had books of their own. Diana had not just grown fans, she had grown writers.
Farah Mendelsohn, Diana Wynne Jones

You were the best, Diana.

I’m a conversation writer. I can do repartee with the best of them, and Sherylyn puts emotion and actions around it. So when our characters talk it’s a reasonable mix of talking versus description (we think anyway). Get them into a fight, however, and it’s a different story. We’re both hopeless at that.

Late last year we put Potion up on Authonomy*. Or rather, I convinced Sherylyn that she should put it up and do all the work promoting it and monitoring other people’s stories, which she did under our planned pen-name, Rowan Dai.

We got some excellent feedback which helped us improve the story a lot. One particular criticism that came up again and again was that the fight scene didn’t work. The thing was, we knew that we had glossed over it, but until so many people pointed out the same thing we—I won’t say we couldn’t see it as a major problem, because we knew it was—but we ignored it, and sort of hoped it would go away.

As all writers know, bad writing doesn’t go away. You have to fix it. We worked at it, and worked at it, and worked at it.

It took a lot of work just to get from:

“Hieyah,” Van Wallah yelled, and he charged the elf.

Blade jumped across, grabbed Van Wallah’s vest.

Van Wallah tried to wriggle free. Couldn’t. “Get him, men,” he ordered, and while Tegan watched, horrified, his men converged on Alun.

River charged forward to save him, but two of Van Wallah’s men jumped River.

Blade clubbed Van Wallah with the hilt of his sword. Tegan heard the crack. The bandit went down. Blade then grabbed a stool and bounded into the fight. Summer was close behind.

Katarina hesitated, looking around for somewhere to put her wine. Finally she handed it to Tegan and joined the fight. Tegan put the wine on the window ledge and started gathering a spell.

Her friend had turned into an impressive fighter. Showy too, not like Blade and Alun, who dispatched two men each while Katarina fought hers. River and Summer fought one each as well, but not as easily. Tegan’s holding spell kept another four on the edge until a blast of hatred distorted the spell and they converged on the elf.

She rebuilt the spell and Blade picked them off one by one.

A quick fight. Less than two minutes …

Potion (Not So Simple After All) by Rowan Dai Draft 3

to:

“Hieyah,” Van Wallah yelled, and he charged the elf.

Blade jumped across, grabbed Van Wallah’s vest.

Van Wallah tried to wriggle free. Couldn’t. “Get him, men,” he ordered, and while Tegan watched, horrified, his men converged on Alun.

River charged forward to save him, but two of Van Wallah’s men jumped River.

Blade clubbed Van Wallah with the hilt of his sword. Tegan heard the crack. The bandit went down. Blade then grabbed a stool and bounded into the fight. Summer was close behind.

Alun scrambled out from under the huddle of Van Wallah’s men and jumped at the two men attacking River. He dragged them off, raised a fist to one, who went down. Another fist.

Another man down.

The huddle of men suddenly realised Alun was no longer there. They turned to find him.

Katarina hesitated, looking around for somewhere to put her wine. Finally she handed it to Tegan and joined the fight. Tegan put the wine on the window ledge.

Her friend had turned into an impressive fighter. Showy too.

What spell could she use? If she was alone and was attacked she would use fire or fear, but if she used them here they would work against her own side. Maybe a holding spell, but it would have to work on individuals. She started forming the words.

Katarina used her long legs as weapons. She fought dirty too. Tegan winced at one kick.

One of Van Wallah’s men pulled out a sword.

Tegan didn’t think. It was instinctive to call the weapon to her. All the other swords came too and Tegan dived under the bench as they rattled down where she had been sitting.
The man whose sword it was lunged for it. Tegan gabbled a quick holding spell. He froze mid-lunge.

Blade clubbed another man with his stool. The man went down. Beside another Tegan hadn’t seen fall. Blade clubbed another. The stool broke. He tossed the stool away and followed through with his fists.

Tegan crawled out from under the bench, started composing her spell again.

Another two men were down over where Alun was fighting.

Blade hit another hard enough to push him back. Tegan’s holding spell caught him.

“Behind you,” Tegan said, as another man attacked him from behind. She’d lost track of the others.

Blade dropped low, and pulled the attacker over his shoulders. The man went crashing into the pile of swords.

One man was down near Katarina, who was fighting another. River and Summer fought one each as well, but not as easily. Tegan’s holding spell kept another four on the edge until a blast of hatred distorted the spell and they converged on the elf.

Tegan pulled the spell back into place and Blade finished them off two-by-two, by cracking their heads together.

A quick fight. Less than two minutes …

Potion (Not So Simple After All) by Rowan Dai, Draft 5

Obviously, we still have a long way to go to fix up our fight scene. But after we changed even this much we noticed one thing. In the critiques that followed, no-one commented that the fight scene needed fixing.

*I have seen a lot of writers ask about the value of Authonomy and lots of different answers from “It’s a sales job” to “absolutely brilliant” to “absolutely useless”. I’m definitely in the camp that says don’t expect to get published through it, but if you use it properly and work at it then it’s a great critique group. It helps not just with improving your own novel but also with seeing mistakes other people make. Analysing other writers’ work can really help you pinpoint the same mistakes in your own.

Or it used to be anyway. It changed a lot and for a while there it was a case of ‘you vote for me, I’ll vote for you’, and I stopped using it because of that. I know Authonomy was trying to fix this. I don’t know if they have. I haven’t been back to look.

There’s an interesting discussion over at Sarah Monette’s LiveJournal site Notes from the Labyrinth about food in fantasy. Sarah asked how writers go about inventing cuisines and delicacies and hawker food, especially when you don’t base it on a specific culture.

Read the comments. They’re interesting.

Most of those who commented agree on some basics. That food culture depends a lot on geography and climate. If your fantasy world is set near the sea the cuisine is likely to contain seafood. If it’s set in the tropics it won’t contain wheat, so no bread. It also depends on how settled your fantasy world is. A world of hunter-gatherers will eat differently to an agricultural society.

Other comments covered technology and culture. What type of technology does the world have to preserve food? Who does the cooking?

Opinions were divided as to how necessary food descriptions are to a story.

I confess that I put food into my own stories.

I also confess that I write a lot of stew. And a lot of inns. Many fantasy readers and writers would throw up their hands and groan on hearing that. “Not stew. Not inns,” they cry. “Cliche. Cliche.”

Inns in fantasy are to me the equivalent of modern-day fast-food places crossed with pubs. Nowadays when you want a quick bite to eat you go to McDonalds or KFC, or maybe even to your local noodle shop.

I also expect alcohol to be more freely available than it is in a world like ours.

Your average fantasy world is more mediaeval than ours, otherwise it would be science fiction.

Put these three things together and what do you have? A place where alcohol is served? An inn. Fast food? This can only be hawker style food or something that’s sitting on the side of the stove ready to serve.

That’s right. Soups and stews.

Sherylyn finished her children’s writing course subject by completing a 40,000 word middle-grade science fiction story.

Her tutor was a published author who wrote children’s books, and who has recently branched out into adult novels.

Sherylyn got marked well for the story, but possibly the best compliment was the note the tutor scrawled at the end.

This story is marketable.

For someone who wants to publish, that’s a nice compliment.

Sherylyn and I both did NaNoWriMo again this year. The blog—and everything else—suffered, but it’s been fun.

It was easier than both of us expected to make the 50,000 word count, even though Sherylyn missed most of the first week of writing because she was sick. She finished her story at 51,000 words and days to spare. I made the 50,000 words 29 November and then had to keep writing until 4 December and 59,000 words to finish mine.

Both of us ended up with stories we can continue with, which is good, and stories that the other writing partner is happy to work on, which is even better—because every once in a while one of us does write a story that doesn’t interest the other person. That’s never much fun.

Things we learned (or maybe things we knew that were reinforced)

• Sherylyn still writes much faster than I do
• Sherylyn’s story is more of an outline, while I tend to focus on one main character and follow his story through, knowing that I’ll go back and fill in the other characters stories post-NaNo
• We both have pet names that we use all the time, and pet letters that names start with
• We both have pet bad writing habits that we do all the time. I make my characters ‘jump’ around, for example, while Sherylyn always starts her first draft with conversation (usually gone by around the third draft, much to my relief, but that’s a whole other blog)
• There was a lot of cross-over in the stories, even though we didn’t let the other writing partner read our story until we were both finished. For example, we both had characters who got sick, both our main characters went on trips and so on. Maybe it shows we’re on the same wavelength when we write. At least we get the same story ideas around the same time.

Last year, after I finished my NaNoWriMo novel it took another six months to polish the story. I don’t know if this one will take as long. I do know there’s still a lot of work to do on it.

All the same, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done so far and looking forward to draft two.

It’s a long-standing joke that Fantasy writers make up names for characters. If you look on the internet you can find a dozen fantasy name generators. Nowadays almost every how-to on writing fantasy nowadays warns you not to do this, and books like Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide To Fantasyland poke fun at the names people create.

A weird array of names in your story is generally the sign of an amateur.

Because of this, I have always been very conscious of naming my characters. Early in the piece I, too, made my names up. Then I realised that it was a ‘bad thing’ and started using names from nature. Like River, and Blade. (In some people’s eyes this is another ‘very bad thing’, but when it’s done properly I love it. Robin Hobb does it well with Dutiful and Swift and Web and all the others.)

Even so, you can really only use this method in a small number of books—unless you’re writing a series, that is.

One thing I have always done is trawled the baby name books. I love them.

For a time there I tried to theme my names. In one story it would be Celtic names, so I’d choose Rhiannon and Grainne, say. In the next I’d use Scandinavian names, Axel and Britta.

No matter how I chose my names, I tried to keep within what I would call the current accepted practise for naming fantasy characters

• If you do make up names, make sure they’re pronounceable
• Don’t have too many weird and way-out names in the same book
• Don’t have too many names that sound similar
• Don’t give all your main protagonists names that start with the same letter
• Don’t mix your language of origin. For example, if you choose Greek-based names then all your characters should have Greek-based names.

It’s this last point I have some issues with.

Recently I’ve had a bit of an epiphany with names.

• Our last couple of books have been science fiction and in these I tried to make the names modern, not too way out, but still a little science-fictiony. I have thought a lot about how names might change over four of five hundred years.
• Names go in cycles. According to Behind the Name the top five boys names in the US today are Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua and Daniel. The top five girls names are Emma, Isabella, Emily, Madison and Ava. In the 1950s it was James, Michael, Robert, John and David, and Mary, Linda, Patricia, Susan and Deborah.   I know that when I went to school a name like Emily or Jacob was considered old-fashioned. We felt sorry for the poor kids saddled with such ‘old’ names. Recently I was speaking to a younger man (late teens or early twenties) and he was trying to guess my name and my sister’s name, just based on the initials. His first guesses were wide of the mark. “You’re a generation out,” I said. “Go back a generation before.” Interestingly enough, he then got both names on first try.So if I was choosing a name for a science fiction character I should probably think of old-fashioned names first and make a modernised take on that, rather than choosing a name that is currently trendy.
• I look at the phone list at work sometimes and I would love to use some of those names for my characters. Yet if I did—whether it be for science fiction or fantasy—many readers and critics would think it a hodgepodge of names. We’ve got English names, we’ve got Russian names, we’ve got Indian names, we’ve got Asian names. All mixed together in one glorious mix of people. Sangeeta sits next to Simon who sits next to Yu who sits close to Evgenyia.
• Choosing names based on a particular language or civilisation makes sense, but only up to a point. It makes for a cohesive story world, yes, but it also binds you into a pre-defined place in fantasy. Your readers expect it too. If I see names like Grainne and Rhiannon and Caitlin and Bree I am expecting a world based around Irish/Celtic myth. If I see Demi and Leonidas I’m expecting a world based on Greek mythology.Maybe that works for you. For me, I don’t want people to come to my fantasy with expectations of what it’s about. I don’t want people to come to my stories already knowing the background. I want them to find a whole new world that they haven’t seen before.

So I have decided. It’s back to just picking names I like, no matter what the name’s origins. If the name sounds interesting and fits my character, I’m going to use it. And if I end up with a phone list of names from all eras and all parts of the world, I’ll be happy, even if it does make me look like a rank amateur.

As writers, Sherylyn and I are both dialogue people. We can make words come out of our characters mouths with an ease that other writers we know struggle with. The hardest part, for us, is putting some emotion and colour around those words.

Because we’re such big conversationalists, we usually hit the story talking, as it were, and keep going from there. My first drafts always used to start with conversation, although I don’t do it as much now, while Sherylyn’s still do. By around the third draft we’ve usually managed to kick the habit.

Starting a story with conversation is not quite taboo, but it is frowned upon, and is something a beginning writer should avoid where possible. There are famous and popular exceptions to every writing rule and I’m sure we can all name at least three books we love where the story starts off with someone speaking. In general, however, it’s a good rule to be aware of.

Back when I didn’t have so many novels under the bed I used to think this was simply a bias of specific agents and editors. I could name books that did it. Books I enjoyed. Books that were popular.

Three things changed this.

• The first one is, obviously, experience. The more one writes the better one’s writing becomes. Or that’s how it works for most of us, anyway

The other two are connected, and they are both to do with the explosion of writing sites on the internet.

• Agent and publisher blogs which, in general, give you a better respect for agents and how they work. Or at least those whose blogs you follow. The agent becomes an authority and what they say helps you to understand and improve your own work. A number of agent bloggers I admire say that opening a novel with conversation is an automatic negative that the writer has to overcome. Best of all, they explain why it’s a negative.
• Lastly, online writing sites like Authonomy expose you to a huge range of writing from people whose work ranges from publishable now to first drafts that need a lot of work. I participate a lot in online writing communities and I see a lot of writing that doesn’t make it to the bookstore. Many of the stories that don’t work open with conversation. When you’re reading multiple stories like this you start to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. It works a lot like an agent’s slush pile. I imagine that prolific users of sites like Authonomy—can I say serious users, not those who are in there for the votes but those who are in it for the community and to better their own writing—plus say, Critters, would be better able to pick the promising stories out of the slush than they were before they started.

“Start in the middle of the story,” the experts tell you. You can’t get more middle than the middle of a conversation, surely.

So what makes stories starting with conversation so bad?

Another thing they tell you is that you only have a few lines to grab the reader’s attention.

They also tell you that the reader has to get the context of the story quickly. Lose the reader on the first page and you’ve lost them for the whole book.

I believe that one of the main reasons starting with conversation doesn’t work is because the reader has no context for that first line. They have no investment in the characters, they have no interest.

To use our own well-overdue-for-an-update novel in progress, Barrain:

I’m not sure how many revisions ago, but once we started the novel with:

“One man masterminded all of this.” In spite of her determination not to be, Taliah was impressed.

She might be talking about someone organising a barbeque for all we know. We have no idea who Taliah is, and we have no idea what the ‘one man who masterminded all this’ did to impress her, or why she didn’t want to be impressed. As yet we don’t even care.

In the latest re-write we put some context in first—before she speaks.

It wasn’t a battlefield, it was a slaughter yard.

Dead bodies lay everywhere amongst the smouldering ruins. Some of the bigger warehouses still burned, the flames unchecked. The enormous vultures that flickered in and out overhead were almost hidden by the choking black smoke that hung over everything.
In spite of her determination not to be, Taliah was impressed. “One man masterminded all of this.”
Barrain

We’ve added four sentences and moved one around. Now we have context.

We know where we are. We’re on a battlefield. We know—or we will when I fix the second paragraph—that we’re probably on a different world, because the vultures flicker in and out. We know what the man did that impressed Taliah so much. We don’t yet know why she didn’t want to be impressed, but that can come. We start to get an idea of who Taliah is.

We know now whether we want to spend a bit more time with her or whether it’s not our type of story.