As the Years Go By

Craft & Skills Kevin Cioffi The Writing Life World-building 3 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of finishing my reading of Brandon Sanderson’s latest Mistborn novel: The Alloy of Law.  It was fantastic, full of his snappiest dialogue to date, hilarious self referential jokes and a plot that moved forward with the stunning pace of a bullet train.  Taking place some hundreds of years after the conclusion of the original Mistborn trilogy, the world and setting had completely changed, and yet it was at once instantly familiar.

In fact, while the main and supporting characters were thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly hilarious with all of their requisite Sanderson corniness and wit, I found myself mostly intrigued with the setting itself.  I was stunned to realize: the setting of this book was just as much a character to me as Wax and Wayne and the rest of the cast.  What made that so?

I think, for me, it was the progress, the change and development to the setting since last time I had visited Scadrial in the original Mistborn trilogy.  Without throwing out too many spoilers, within the three hundred or so years between books technology had begun to modernize.  Trains now race through the city and branch out through the unsettled “Roughs”, criminal and lawman alike have dropped their blades and taken up potent firearms, main characters from the original story have faded into myth, legend and theology.  As I said, I found a new sense of conflict and development in the actual world building behind the story.  It had become a living, breathing character.

I tried to pin down how, exactly, Mr. Sanderson was able to achieve this, and I think it boils down to the most obvious aspect: the passage of time.  In a lot of fantasy stories and series, it is sometimes surprising how little time actually passes.  For example, in The Wheel of Time, after twelve exhaustive books, I’m pretty sure only 2-3 years have passed.   Sure, the setting might be growing and changing based on the actions of the characters, but profound change in technology, government and lifestyle usually takes decades, even centuries.

That is why after three hundred years or so “off screen” I was fascinated by my second trip to Mistborn‘s Scadrial, and I’m really interested in finding more stories or series in which time and generations can pass, and the setting is able to develop as a prominent character.  Another one I can think of off the top of my head is Kevin J. Anderson’s Terra Incognita series.  The stories move at a blistering pace and sometimes years pass a decade at a time.  The landscape and inhabiting cultures are scoured by war and the vast scope of the story really gives room for the world itself to develop.

Controversy and Consensus

Brandon M. Lindsay Publishing The Fictorians The Writing Life Writing Tools 3 Comments

Writing is a solitary business for a number of reasons, but there may be times when you want to collaborate. This blog is one such instance of writerly collaboration. The reasons for coming together to create it are numerous: we all have different things to say and different experiences to share, we can distribute the workload of maintaining such a site so that no one person has to do it all, etc. Doing so has allowed us to create a product that helps each of us individually and (we hope) provides a value to the writing community at large.

However, such a joint venture has some limitations. Our more astute readers will have noticed that a couple of recent posts were taken down from our site. They weren’t taken down for issues of quality or anything like that, but were taken down due to the controversial nature of the posts. They were, in essence, declaring a stance that not all of the blog’s contributors shared on a very sensitive topic.

Now, I’m all for taking a stand on hot-button issues. I have no problem with taking an unpopular position so long as it’s one I happen to believe in. In fact, I have a short political satire that I am purposefully not promoting on the Fictorian Era simply because I don’t want to suggest that any of the other contributors want to be even tangentially associated with it.

Which brings us to the heart of the issue. Each of us is an individual with individual views on a variety of topics. A shared project like our website cannot let each of its contributors express himself fully without potentially alienating some other member. That can be a severe limitation for a group of artists, whose main drive in their work is self-expression. This is something that anyone is going to have to consider before joining a group where the task of creation is shared.

However, while it may limit the scope of what the group can do, it certainly doesn’t limit the individuals comprising the group in any significant way. As I mentioned, I’m still writing my outrageous and inflammatory satire, but I’m just not making any of my fellow Fictorians inadvertently promote something with which they may violently disagree simply by promoting our blog. And at least one of the posts taken down has found a home on the author’s personal website.

Shared projects like this one can certainly have value. They may not be able to stir the pot as much as some people (like me) would like, but that’s not generally their purpose-and if it is, it must be understood by everyone involved from the very beginning. Though it may seem like such projects limit you in some way, keep in mind that you are not losing anything by doing it, but actually giving yourself an additional means of self-expression, narrow though it may seem at times. And if it ever seems to confining, you can always just take your own path and focus on the things that truly matter to you.

Pacing: A Literary Strip Tease

Craft & Skills Jason Michelsen 4 Comments

I love the way a good book will spoon feed me interesting tidbits, stringing me along like a drug addict flipping pages from fix to fix. Getting to the end of a chapter and realizing I can’t stop there, that I simply must continue reading, that my life will be a little poorer until I find out how the hero is going to free himself from the rock that has him pinned to that hard place there is an awesome feeling.

With epic fantasy and the cast of hundreds some of the successful series wield (i.e. A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time), it might actually be a chapter or two if not a hundred pages before you get back to said hero stuck in said predicament. The challenge the writer faces is making sure A: the continuation of the storyline you’re slavering over is worth the wait, and B: the intervening storylines and their characters are not only necessary, but interesting enough not to lose your attention in the meantime.

Of course, the pacing you use will vary depending on the format of what you’re writing. The pacing in a short story is quicker–for obvious reasons–than in a novel, and a 150k novel will have different pacing than one of the 450k word tomes Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss and George R. R. Martin publish. Likewise, it will vary depending on the genre. If you like writing YA, your story will definitely have a quicker pace than a story written for a more mature audience.

I aspire to write epic fantasy, and often find myself struggling with my own pacing. Like so many of you, I’m a product of this current age of instant gratification.  We want what we want, and we want it now! But with literature–as with just about any form of entertainment–a good percentage of the enjoyment we derive from it comes from sheer anticipation. How often do you see the monster in the horror movie before the second act? Very rarely.

And while I love that very same anticipation when reading a book or watching a movie, when I’m actually writing, I wish I could write ten times as fast. As the author, I know what’s going to happen next. I know how awesome I think it is, and how badly I want my readers to get to it so they can revel in its glory right there beside me.

Somewhere along the line in the writing process, I typically lose my sense of pacing and begin revealing things far too quickly. The big secret which is supposed to be revealed at the climax suddenly makes an appearance in the prologue. Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but this most definitely is one of my weaknesses as a writer. As such, it’s one of the things I always ask my alpha readers to focus on.

Anyone have any tricks for how they deal with pacing in different forms of fiction? Since I’m writing epic fantasy, it helps to tell myself it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Nostalgia

Evan Braun The Writing Life 6 Comments

Archives. Backlists. As writers, we’ve all got “em-at least for those of us who’ve been pounding away at our keyboards for untold years. These early projects have allowed us to grow as writers, and maybe even as people.

These projects do not, however, showcase our best work. Am I the only one who wrote a first novel while still in elementary school? Surely not.

My sixth-grade effort is pitiful in the extreme. To make it all the more embarrassing, it happens to be a spec Star Trek novel. A large part of me is eternally grateful I never got around to submitting it, since the safest place for this manuscript is most definitely a cobwebbed binder in the bottom of a box in the back of that storage compartment I never, ever visit.

Well, a few days ago I happened to be cleaning out some junk at the bottom of the storage compartment in question. The box was open in front of me, filled with all sorts of childhood knickknacks and old report cards (oddly enough, that “A” in fifth grade Language Arts still makes me proud). And at the bottom of that box was a bright red, doodle-ridden binder that made my heart leap out of my chest.

While I’m in admission mode, I should also reveal a second discovery at the bottom of that box. I had almost entirely forgotten about its existence, but stored in a taped-together cassette holder was a childhood project even more humiliating. At the age of twelve, apparently I thought it would be a good idea to record an audiobook version of that first novel. Miracle of miracles, I happen to still own a cassette player. What a trip it was to hear my own prepubescent voice stumble over those awkwardly written sentences! I have a bad feeling that if I don’t burn those tapes today, they might one day make an ominous appearance at a future wedding toast. (Note to self: Never get married.)

So why am I writing about all this? Nostalgia. Nowadays, I hem and haw over writing deadlines and daily word count minimums. I’ve been told countless times, by people who really know what they’re talking about, that the best way to pursue literary success is to treat writing with all the persistence and professionalism as my day job. Hence deadlines. Hence word count minimums.

But back in the day, when I wrote that Star Trek novel, I don’t remember being concerned about matters of productivity. I wrote because that’s what I felt like doing. Now, if I only ever wrote when I felt like it, I wouldn’t be very productive at all, and yet that first novel truly was the laudable result of a twelve-year-old burst of creative passion.

Nostalgia can be both a beautiful and ugly thing, but today it feels especially beautiful. The memory of that book caused me to write several thousand words this evening, words that flowed as quickly and effortlessly as the mighty Amazon.

A lot of the time, looking backwards results in regret and anguish, but every once in a while it reminds me of who I am and encourages me to keep going.

What kind of nostalgic efforts do the rest of you keep hidden away in your proverbial (or not so proverbial) abandoned storage lockers?