Category Archives: Ideas & Plotting

If you’ve spent any length of time in a fan fiction community, you’ll probably know what a “songfic” is. If you haven’t, a songfic can most easily be described as a story interspersed with the lyrics of a song. It’s the fan writing equivalent of a movie soundtrack.

You’ve seen scenes in movies, TV shows and even commercials where a song plays in tandem with visual images. Sometimes the lyrics of the song narrate the events on screen. Sometimes the music helps to create a certain mood or underline a theme. Or, sometimes, images and music that don’t seem to match can provide a striking and powerful contrast. (Examples include the “Mad World” commercial for the original Gears of War video game, or when “I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Ray Charles plays during the destructive climax of 2001’s anime film “Metropolis.”)

Songfics aren’t allowed on certain fan fiction web sites for copyright reasons. But it’s natural for people, as creators, to use music for inspiration: to imagine certain songs as the theme songs, soundtracks, or end themes for our novels, stories, or characters. And this impulse isn’t limited to fan fiction.

Carrie Vaughn’s urban fantasy Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio show, includes a playlist of songs at the beginning of each book that help set the “flavour” of the story to come. James Roberts, writer of IDW’s “Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye” comic series, tweets a selection of songs that inspire and inform the newest issue right before it comes out. Stephen King has used song lyrics as epigraphs in his novels or in the text of his fiction (with permission from the copyright holders).

If you’re not Stephen King, the legalities and potential fees involved in directly quoting songs might be prohibitive for you. Still, songs are excellent potential sources of inspiriation. Familiar music can help you get “in the zone” while you’re writing. Sometimes a song can help you imagine the kind of mood, emotion or situation you want to portray in your story. And sometimes a verse or even a line can spark the idea for a story.

The first story I published, “Blood Runs Thicker” in the ebook edition of “When the Hero Comes Home 2” by Dragon Moon Press, was inspired by a single line in a song.

Jim says some destinies should not be delivered…

The song is “In Thee” by Blue Oyster Cult.

Every time I heard this line – and I’ve been listening to this song for years – I wondered about this line. Why “shouldn’t” they? “Should” is a value judgment, compared to “are” or “are not” which are merely statements. The song goes on to suggest that these destines are delivered just the same as those that “should be.” What would be the difference? What would it mean to have this kind of destiny?

“Blood Runs Thicker” is the story of a reluctant war hero who became famous in the service of a cause she doesn’t believe in, in a failed attempt to save the person who mattered most to her. It’s also the story of her best friend, who finds himself forced into a choice of his own: helping his friend salvage what’s left of her life is going to come at a heavy cost. The hero has received one of those destinies that should not be delivered, and now the narrator finds himself pulled into the aftermath of that deliverance.

Songs can be excellent sources of inspiration. Songs can help form ideas for characters, moods, or as in the above example, even plot. But songs don’t have to be direct quotes to provide inspiriation. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the role of music in culture and how playing a certain kind of music helped me build a world for a story.

Commonalities in our Journey

July 4, 2015

fictorians

Abby Goldsmith Conventions Ideas & Plotting Interacting With Fans Interacting With Professionals Motivation Self-Motivation Starting a Career Storyline Submissions The Writing Life 1 Comment

A Guest Post by Abby Goldsmith

When Nathan Barra asked me to write a guest post about why I write fiction, I hesitated. It’s a good question, and one that I haven’t pondered in years. I’ve been stuck in a rut. Not writer’s block, but paralytic self-doubt, questioning everything about why I chose to pour so much of my life into a career as a novelist. I’ve watched others rise from amateur to best-seller within less than half the time I’ve been struggling to get my novel series published. I lag behind most of my peers, editing and rewriting and editing and rewriting. I’m in danger of becoming a bitter, grizzled veteran.

Self-doubt is a cornerstone of every novelist’s life, I think. When I talk to other aspiring novelists, I hear commonalities in our journey. Most of us grew up with a love of reading. Most of us received praise from readers who adored our stories. Most of us bashed our heads against the harsh realities of the publishing industry, which seems to be shrinking from corporate mergers. From there, our paths diverge in two directions. Either we give up and quit writing novels, or we get published and continue onwards.

My path feels like the most extreme version of that. Rather than hiking a trail towards success, I’m navigating a storm-tossed sea, hurled about by towering tidal waves. The praise I receive is enough for a lifetime. My failures are EPIC. As for the part where I either get published or quit . . . I’m sailing between those routes, unable to get my novels traditionally published, unable to give up and quit. I’m preparing to self-publish a completed six-book-series, and I’m nearly paralyzed with the fear that it will all go wrong.

Most people, even committed writers, don’t base every major decision of their life around the dream of becoming a bestselling author. I suspect that most of my peers would have quit after more than decade of setbacks. Why am I so driven?

Childhood. That’s surely where most addictions and personality disorders form, and I suspect it correlates with dysfunctional families. I won’t detail how troubled my childhood was. Suffice it to say, I needed an escape. So I walked for hours, listening to music, inwardly cheering as my characters delivered justice to their enemies, or proved their worth to those who doubted them. Stories were my only way to feel powerful and in control. That feeling was better than anything I could get elsewhere. I was addicted.

By the age of twelve, I’d completed two novels, a series of short stories, and a trilogy of comic books. A literary agent working with Random House, unaware that I was a child, read my first manuscript and sent a scathing rejection letter, including the phrase, “It sounds like a mentally challenged person wrote this.” Upon learning my age, she offered to edit my manuscript and promote me as a child author, but I’d already taken her first letter to heart. I decided that my stories were unfit to be shared with anyone. They collected dust in shoeboxes.

In college, two of my student films were selected out of hundreds for special recognition, and received high praise in international film festivals. I began a promising career as an animator. With my confidence boosted, I dared to share chapters of a potential novel with an online critique group. Their reactions astounded me. Everyone in the group wanted to read more. They tore each other’s work to shreds, and rightfully so, but my work was exceptional.

After years of being ashamed of my writing skill, I reversed direction all at once. A dam burst. Within the space of one year, I completed a 520,000 word manuscript, a 59,000 word manuscript between drafts of the big one, and an unfinished 70,000 word novel. My boyfriend thought they were amazing.

Still worried that my skill was amateur, I asked for readers with trepidation. Part of me expected scathing rejections. Instead, I received a flood of support and praise that changed my life, and affects me to this day.

A programmer in New Zealand read all my manuscripts, and said, “SEND MORE!” A teenager in Norway did the same, telling me that he’d missed classes to read them under his desk at school. A woman I never met emailed me to say, “Whatever gift for storytelling exists, you have it.” The artist of my favorite web comic offered to endorse my novels, after reading. A coworker at my office tentatively agreed to try the big one. He began reading it in his cubicle. The next day at work, he said, “I got no sleep. I stayed up all night turning pages! You’ll have no trouble getting published, so stop worrying.”

And I did. From that point forth, I’ve considered myself a talented storyteller, although my prose and craft needed seasoning, and there are always aspects where I can improve. Literary agencies and publishers rejected those early manuscripts due to the usual bouquet of amateur issues: Point of view head hopping, passive voice overused, weak verbiage, and other problems that are familiar to career-minded writers.

To improve my craft, I went to the Odyssey Writing Workshop. George R.R. Martin liked the first chapter of my big novel, Catherine Asaro privately praised my short story, and I felt as if my skill would leap ahead light years after all I learned from editor Jeanne Cavelos. Encouraged, I scrapped the 520,000 manuscript and rewrote it from scratch, as two separate novels. They’ve each been whittled down to the 90,000 to 105,000 word range.

I wish I could say that all that effort led to success. It hasn’t. At least, not yet. The massive rewrite deadened the beginning, and I’ve had a hellish time trying to get it to appeal to the traditional publishing industry. On top of that, I’m no longer the same person who wrote the original rough draft. Fifteen years have passed. I believe I understand why epic saga authors, such as Patrick Rothfuss, struggle to finish. When a story has the weight of a magnum opus … when it feels too massive to do it justice … when the task requires decades of your personal life … well, I can only speak for myself, but there’s a damned lot of pressure to get it right. A project that huge only happens once. Humans don’t live long enough, or have enough energy, to do it twice.

I will write other novels. I have other big stories to tell, after I publish this series (the first two books are the rewritten rough draft from fifteen years ago). But this epic will always be more special to me than any others. It’s the story that began in my teens, and spanned my twenties and thirties. It’s the one that shaped the course of my life.

I write because I believe in my power to tell stories that amaze people, and leave them to reevaluate their world-views.

About the Author:
Stories and articles by Abby Goldsmith are published in Escape Pod, Fantasy Magazine, Suddenly Lost in Words, and several anthologies. She’s sitting on six unpublished novels, preparing for an epic debut. http://abbygoldsmith.com

Turning Point – Where I Found my Confidence to Write

July 3, 2015

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Ideas & Plotting The Writing Life No Comments

Where did you learn to write? Where do your story ideas come from?

These are the two questions I get asked most often. And when I tell people where I learned and how that learning now gives me my ideas, they most often shake their heads and say, “Really?”

I always loved stories and the power of words to whisk me away to other realms and realities. I wanted to write them, to tell them but I felt too shy, too awkward, too inadequate, and too intimidated. To overcome this, I took a university degree in English, and instead of feeling my confidence soar, I was devastated. How could I, a lowly kid from the farm, ever be as perfect, so lauded, or garner so much depth and awesomeness in words? The bar was set high and everything I learned taking that degree didn’t set my creativity free – it only intimidated it.

Oh, I still dabbled with ideas but achieved nothing of substance. I just didn’t know how to make it work. The answer, oddly enough, was found by going back to University, but not in English Literature classes.

My great revelation came when I studied Food Science at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture. That meant I had to take a variety of classes including Agricultural Economics. I worked for a while in that department because I had a gift for understanding and telling the stories found in numbers. That was second nature to me, but still, that wasn’t where I learned to write fiction.

My fiction writing emerged from studying chemistry and microbiology. In microbiology, I had to observe and explain worlds – what creatures they were composed of, how they came to be, what their effects were on the systems they were found in and so on. In chemistry, I had to explain cause and effect, or stated in writing terms, to observe, document, explain the characters’ (substances and elements) actions, reactions, and the consequences of those actions and reactions. Both courses taught me to be an astute observer, to document, to ask the what-ifs, to understand and explore their worlds.

The formulas for writing and working in a scientific environment are all the same – observe, document, ask the what-ifs, hypothesize, understand and explore.

So hail to economics, microbiology, chemistry, and physics too! They’ve kept me in good stead because now I see the stories in the world around me. For example, I’ve found them in a creek near my house, looking out an airplane window and seeing the Canadian Shield below me, visiting henges in England, on a Moroccan shoreline, in ancient digs in Crete, on an island, in my back yard and in all the people I’d like to know about.

Now I explore the rich world of what-if around me. It bursts with ideas and possibilities and my writing life abounds with stories yet untold. I may never be as perfect as the masters who had once so intimidated me, but I don’t care. All I care about is the world I know and explore and I revel in the joy of sharing it. My world now is filled with What-If?, How Come?, and Why Not? – aren’t those the questions children so often ask? That sounds like another story, for another time…

Happy writing!

Researching it Old School and a Little New

May 14, 2015

Jace Killan

Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Jace Killan The Writing Life World-building Writing Tools 1 Comment

Louis L’Amour talked to every “old timer” he could find so that he could accurately portray how folks used to live in the old west. Nowadays most writers just turn to the Internet.

There are great, insightful websites that offer a virtual experience and allow us to get into the minds of our characters. For example, I was writing about a space station built on the planet Mercury. Using computer software I was able to visit Mercury and see what Earth looked like from her surface. In the right rotation, Earth and her moon looked like two bright stars. This detail added a nice level of authenticity to my story.

A couple years ago, I was researching my family history and came across a gentleman that I may or may not be related to (I still can’t figure that out) but his story is a great one. Commodore Joshua Barney fought in the American Revolution and was one of the first to serve in the continental navy.

I decided to write his amazing coming of age story (and am nearly complete with this endeavor). Though at the time, I hadn’t a clue about ships and sailing in the 18^th century. So I turned to the Internet.

Wikipedia is alright for double checking a reference, not hard fast research. But I perused its site first to get some direction.

YouTube offered some interesting videos on ship replicas from that era and I was able to glean some insights into sailing such a vessel. But even the replicas have been modified with gas engines and motorized rudders, so how authentic could that be? Most of the cabins have also been modified to accommodate the 18^th century luxuries we now consider necessities like running water and flushable toilets.

I gathered twenty or so books from Amazon on sailing in the 18^th century and other period pieces. The first thing I noticed is that folks back then didn’t talk like we do today. Keeping to the historic dialect would probably be more authentic, but I would most likely alienate my middle-grade readers in the process. So I drifted from authenticity in that area and hoped to make up for it in my research of the sailor life: food, sleep, hygiene, and so on.

I went to an antique mall and purchased a few model ships from the 18^th century so I could get a feel for their look, dimensions, and layouts. This helped me gain a better prospective than just looking at photographs.

After reading the Amazon books and playing with my model ships, my head was swimming in information, but I really had no way of knowing what was worthwhile and what was rubbish. So I booked a sailing expedition on an 18^th century tall ship replica (now referred to as a yacht). I was able to feel the experience, see it, smell it, and taste it. This made it easier to convey sailing in my writing. But I still lacked some aspects of the ship life.

My next research adventure came by surprise. I was visiting Collette Black’s Desolation book signing in Half Priced Books and wondered if they had anything on sailing. I was able to browse dozens of helpful books and elect the ones that were most specific to my project, at a great price. That is something you really can’t do on Amazon. I even found a book that discussed trekking through the Alps during summer in the late 1800s (something that my protagonist did at the age of fifteen in the late 1700s).

David Farland said that I needed to visit the Alps to convey the experience like I had with sailing. I’d love to, and don’t doubt that my writing that particular chapter would be much more convincing and insightful if I did, but I’m going to try writing the chapter from my research first and we’ll see how it goes.

So sure, researching has gotten much easier with the Internet, but researching it old school is still necessary to add levels of depth and authenticity that virtual experience has yet to duplicate. My experience on Mercury would no doubt be a drop in the bucket to what I might actually experience if I travelled to the planet (and lived to tell about it). Bottom line, there isn’t any short cuts. Even a fantasy novel on a made-up world still requires huge amounts of research to capture the reader. Good research facilitates better writing.

I live in Arizona with my family, wife and five kids and a little dog. I write fiction, thrillers and soft sci-fi with a little short horror on the side. I’ve got an MBA and work in finance for a biotechnology firm.I volunteer with the Boy Scouts, play and write music, and enjoy everything outdoors. I’m also a novice photographer.You can visit my author website at www.jacekillan.com, and you can read some of my works by visiting my Wattpad page.