Author Archives: David Carrico

About David Carrico

David is a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. He has been writing since 1977, but made his first sale in 2004. Most of his work has been written in Eric Flint's Ring of Fire universe, and has either appeared in The Grantville Gazette electronic magazine (http://grantvillegazette.com) or in the anthologies Grantville Gazette III, Grantville Gazette IV, Ring of Fire II, Grantville Gazette V, and the forthcoming Grantville Gazette VI and Ring of Fire III.

Collaborative Projects: How to Write Well with Others

Authorial Trust Craft & Skills Editing First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Outlines Rewriting Storyline The Writing Process 1 Comment

I have written and sold one collaborative novel, and I’m in the middle of writing another, so I have some experience in this sub-specialty of our craft.

Once you’ve gotten past the “Let’s write a novel together!  It’ll be fun/great/a ball!” stage, reality sets in. First of all, forget the idea that it will be less work.  It will take more time and energy total between the two of you to write something than it would if one of you wrote it solo.  You’ll be fortunate if it only takes 150% as much time and energy as a solo work.  Second, this will be different from writing a solo work.  Trust me. Here are some of the practical matters you will need to deal with.  Some of the points are my own observations, and some are gleaned from other authors who do frequent collaborations.

1.  Check your egos at the door.  Really.  You are establishing a relationship here, and although you may or may not be equals in talent, knowledge, skill, and drive, you need to be on a personal basis of honesty, diligence, and compassion.  The old teaching of “Treat others the way you want them to treat you” comes into play.

2.  Determine your collaboration approach.  To steal from my May 28, 2012 Fictorians article “Anatomy of a Collaboration,” you need to settle on an approach like one of these:

  • If sections of the novel require certain knowledge or expertise, one author may write those parts while the other writes the remainder.  This approach seems to be most commonly used when both authors are of similar levels of skill.
  • More commonly, one author will write the first draft, while the other author will do the second pass.  If one author is newer to the craft, he will usually write the first draft while the more experienced/skilled writer will do the final polish/draft.
  • And sometimes one author will look at another and say, “You start,” and the story is built somewhat like a tennis match, with no prior planning to speak of and the authors volleying responses back and forth.  A lot of “letter” stories are actually written that way.

This step is where you agree on how the byline will be styled.  If it’s a senior/junior relationship, the senior author’s name almost always goes first.  This is also where you agree on how the revenue (and any expenses) will be shared.  And even if you’re friends, write it down.  It will save grief later, I promise.

3.  Decide who the tie-breaker will be.  If you arrive at a point where the two of you are in disagreement about something serious and you can’t continue until it is resolved, someone has to break the tie.  Determine who that person is at the beginning of the project.  It may be a senior author.  Or, if you’re writing in a universe created by one of you alone, then that person will probably be the tie-breaker.  But regardless of who it is and how you determined who it will be, if it ever has to be invoked, remember Rule 1 – check your egos at the door.

4.  Do any world-building that has to be done that will be foundational to the story.

5.  If both of you are outliners, you’ll need to write an outline.  If one of you is a pantser, you’ll need to write an outline.  If both of you are pantsers, you’ll really need to write an outline.  Seriously.  If for no other reason than to keep you both facing the same direction.  Especially if you’re doing the “you write this part and I’ll write that part at the same time” thing.

6.  Communicate, communicate, communicate.  Especially about the important stuff, but since it may be difficult to know what will be important twenty chapters down the line, it’s mostly going to be important stuff.

7.  Again, communicate, communicate, communicate.  If you’re the junior author or you’re working in someone else’s universe, don’t be afraid to ask questions.  And if you’re the senior author and/or the universe creator, don’t brush your partner off.

8.  Remember Rule 1.

9.  For the third time, communicate, communicate, communicate.  If there’s one area where collaborations can really be more difficult than solo work, it’s flexibility in dealing with change.  When you’re working on your own, if you get a brilliant idea when you’re 80% done with the work, backing up and rewriting twenty chapters is not so much of a much.  When you’re collaborating, however, especially if you’re using one of the parallel streams-of-creation methods, your idea may blow up your partner’s work in a big way.  So before you do anything with your Grand New Idea, talk about it-in-depth and in detail.  If the decision is Do It, you revise the outline.  You write it down so you can both be in agreement as to what the change is, what the effect is, and who’s doing what to implement it.  If the decision is No, you continue down the existing path with no looking back.

10.  Remember Rule 1.

11.  Set deadlines as to when milestones will be accomplished.  You may or may not attain them, but if you don’t set them, this thing could drag on for a seeming eternity.  As much as possible, hold each other accountable.

12.  Remember Rule 1.

13.  When the first draft is done, review it together.  Decide what needs fixing, and determine who will do it.  Execute the fixes.

14.  Determine early on who will do the final polish to smooth out the edges and establish a consistent voice.  This will usually be the senior author, the writer who owns the universe, the person who’s the better editor, or whoever won/lost the coin flip.

15.  And finally, remember Rule 1.

Okay, that’s probably not everything that needs to be thought about, but it covers the high points. Good luck!

The Devil’s Opera

Branding Craft & Skills Marketing Publishing The Writing Life The Writing Process 8 Comments

This is a combined public service announcement and post.

My first novel will be published in October by Baen Books.  The title is 1636: The Devil’s Opera, and it’s a collaboration with Eric Flint.

The cover-illustration by the great Tom Kidd-is here.

David CPre-order from Amazon here.

That concludes the public service announcement.  On to the post.

Several of my fellow Fictorians urged me to give some idea of the process by which the novel was written.  To do that I’ll first have to give you a bit of background on the 1632 series of which it is a part.

In 2000, Baen Books published a novel entitled 1632 by Eric Flint.  The elevator speech version of the plot is a cosmic space-time warp rips a small blue-collar town out of 2000 AD West Virginia and drops in it eastern Germany in the year 1631, which just happened to be in the middle of the Thirty Years War, possibly the bloodiest European war before WWI.  The resulting series is about how approximately 3,000 regular people from the future not only survive the event, but begin to change history.

This was the beginning of what has become one of the most successful alternate-history series in publishing history.  To date: over six million words; twelve novels (including the above) in hard copy; thirteen anthologies in hard copy; and forty-six  issues of an e-magazine called The Grantville Gazette.

I don’t have space here to give you the history of this phenomenon.  If you’re interested, go to http://1632.org/ and read.  The short version is that Eric did something very bold and potentially risky:  he opened the 1632 story universe up to fan writers, and offered to publish and pay for the best stories that were submitted.  That was the genesis of the e-magazine The Grantville Gazette.

GG, as we call it for short, will publish anything that is a well-told story that fits within the guidelines Eric has laid down for stories in the universe.  Current payment rates are 5¢/word, which is professional standard rate by SFWA guidelines.  (See http://1632.org/ again if you’re interested.)

I started writing stories in the universe in 2004.  Within a couple of years I was part of what Eric considered to be a core group that consistently turned out good stories for GG on a pretty regular basis.  (My fifteen published solo works total over 200,000 words and range from a 2,000 word short short to a 52,000 word short novel that was serialized.)  Nonetheless, I was astonished when Eric approached me via email one day and said we should do a book together.

You have to understand that Eric is always on the lookout for writers he can help develop and help get a foot in the door in the publishing industry. Of the twelve novels published to date, I believe ten of them were produced in collaboration with seven different authors, plus I know there is another one close to completion with an eighth partner.

This is not a writing factory scam where someone else does all the work and Eric slaps his name on it at the end and collects all the money.  In one partnership, I know that Eric worked with another professional writer and they divided the work.  In the rest, Eric was senior author and the other partners were junior.  I believe those all followed essentially the same model Eric used with me, so from this point on I’m just going to talk about my experience.

After the idea was broached, there was a certain amount of discussion as to what the book should be:  a combination of stories from both of us, or a novel.  Eric settled on a novel pretty quickly.  So then we talked about what the novel should be about.  I have two different series of stories going in GG with different but intersecting character groups in the same city.  Eric said we should use one or both of the character groups in the novel in order to tap into the fan base that already existed for them.  I had just finished a 27,000 word novella with one of the character sets, so I sent it to Eric.  He agreed we would use that as the center pole for the novel.

The next step was to build the outline.  That ended up taking a fair amount of time, because what worked best for me was to sit in the same room with Eric and talk everything out, ask a lot of questions, and make notes, and it took some work to get our schedules to intersect.

I wrote the first draft.  That is Eric’s standard practice with junior authors, for them to write all or most of the first draft.

Eric read the first draft, decided what changes needed to be made. He fixed some things himself, which produced the second draft.  Then he assigned some changes to me, and I produced the third draft.  Then he did the final polish, producing a fourth draft (approximately 169,000 words), which he then submitted to Toni Weisskopf, the publisher at Baen Books.  And as announced above, Baen will have it on the shelves on October 1.

Someone asked me what Eric got out of the deal.  Two things:  he got to pay forward to a friend, and he got a good novel in his series with his name on it with much less demand on his time.

What did I get out of it?  A novel in a good series with my name on it.  🙂  And by working with and under Eric, I learned things about outlining, plot development, mystery novel memes and tropes, chapter size and arrangement, proper levels of descriptive language and dialog, and on and on.

I also got to demonstrate to one of the best publishers in the business that I can write quality work and deliver a finished product without going through the slush process.  Priceless.

http://davidcarricofiction.com/

http://baen.com/

http://www.grantvillegazette.com/

http://1632.org/

Characters: A Writer’s Best Friends or Bêtes Noire?

Authorial Trust Character Craft & Skills Reader Investment & Empathy The Writing Process 4 Comments

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!”
–  Rudyard Kipling

Every writer does things a little bit differently, and that’s just as true of building/creating characters as it is of any other task in the writer’s list.  That being said, there are still some common elements that we as writers can talk about when it comes to the creatures of our minds that inhabit our stories.

So how do characters come to light?  To my mind, there are three basic paths you can take to create characters, none of which are mutually exclusive.

First, characters can grow out of world building.  If you’re a writer who spends much time creating a self-consistent story universe before you begin writing the story, you may well create the universe first, then ask yourself what kind of people would inhabit it.  I know of several authors for whom this would appear to be their favorite method, but probably the most well-known example of this would be J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.  Tolkien first invented the amazing languages in his stories, then tried to imagine what kind of people would speak them.  Out of that grew the stories that served as bedrock for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Second, characters can grow out of situations.  This tends to be very true of writers who tightly plot their stories, from what I can tell.  If you’ve got this great idea for a end of civilization as we know it story, what kind of character would tell it?

And third, sometimes the characters steps onto center stage in your mind, full-blown, full-grown, out of seemingly nowhere.  This tends to happen a lot with writers who are pantsers.  (Raises hand.  Happens to me a lot.)  The problem then is trying to figure out what story needs to be told for that character.

There’s going to be more posts later this month about specifics of characters and characterizations.  I’d like to spend the rest of this one dealing with one thing we as writers sometimes don’t think about very much.

I’ve often heard it said that one of the keys to successful story telling is having believable characters.  That’s true, as far as it goes.  But in today’s reading environment, it’s just as important-if not more so-that characters be ‘connectable’.  In other words, do the readers connect with them-do they feel what the characters feel?  If your readers don’t feel some kind of empathy for at least one of the characters in your story-preferably the hero-it’s not going to succeed.  But for your readers to connect with your characters, you have to connect with them first.

Case in point:  Marion Zimmer Bradley told an anecdote on herself in a story introduction she wrote for a story in The Best of Randall Garrett (edited by Robert Silverberg, Timescape Books, 1982).  She was talking about the friendship she had with Randall, and how many times and ways he had helped her.  At one point she tells of being five chapters into writing a new novel.  It wasn’t going well, and she could tell that it wasn’t going well, but she couldn’t figure out what the problem was.  It was driving her nuts.  So she drove over to Randall’s house, handed him the manuscript, and asked him to tell her what was wrong.  She waited while he read the five chapters.  His response after doing so was as follows:

“Honey, you know what’s wrong with this book?  It’s written very well and it’s a nice idea.  But your hero is a klutz.  Nobody wants to read about a klutz.”  (The Best of Randall Garrett, page 44.)

Marion concluded the anecdote by saying that she immediately recognized that his critique was valid, that she rewrote all five chapters to make the hero into a different person, and the rest of the writing went smoothly.

I told you that story to make the point that no reader is going to connect with a character that we as writers don’t connect with, that we don’t understand, that we don’t have some form of empathy for.  It doesn’t matter if they’re bad guys or good guys.  It doesn’t matter if we built the characters like Legos in the world building process, if we discovered them dealing with disaster, or if they sprang full-grown from our foreheads in search of a story like Athena from the brow of Zeus.  If we don’t feel them, if we don’t understand them, if we don’t connect with them, our readers won’t either, and the story will fail.

If you want your stories to work, you don’t necessarily have to like your characters, but you do need to understand them and feel something for them.  This will come through in your writing.

In the Spirit of the Season

Doing Good in the World Life Philosophies The Writing Life 2 Comments

This is a very different article than I had planned to post.  As I write this, it is the day after a very unsane (as opposed to insane) young man named Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and started shooting people.  By the time he was done, eight adults and twenty children were dead, including himself.  I have not been as horrified by one man’s actions since the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.  My stomach still churns in nausea.  What Lanza did was just evil.  No other word applies.

Yeah, I know, that’s kind of a heavy thought with which to begin a Christmas blog.

Christmas is associated with Jesus Christ.  The very name is a reference to him.  And regardless of your beliefs or feelings about the person of Jesus Christ, you have to admit that he was (and still is) one of the less than a handful of people who truly affected the lives of people and tribes and nations all over the world for well-nigh 2000 years.

And regardless of your beliefs or feelings about Jesus, you have to admit that his teachings on ethics are very powerful.

Jesus is credited with speaking what’s usually referred to as The Golden Rule:  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  That’s actually a paraphrase quote from Matthew 7:12.  A modern translation puts it this way:  “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you.”

There is no question that both history and modern society would be very different if everyone lived by that principle; if we-each one of us-treated everyone we met: rich or poor, literate or inarticulate, genius or mentally challenged, healthy or ill, complete or handicapped, regardless of race, creed, denomination, nationality, or political beliefs, with the same courtesy, care, and consideration we would like to receive; if their needs were of higher priority to us than our own.

We live in an imperfect world, comprised of imperfect societies and filled with imperfect people.  And to be honest, I see no hope of attaining perfection on this earth.  When I read the Bible carefully, I see people just like the people I work with and for; just like the people I live among; and, unfortunately, some people not much different from Adam Lanza.  Homo sapiens hasn’t appreciably improved in the last 2000 years, from my point of view.  Oh, we have more knowledge; we have more extravagant philosophies; and we certainly have a lot more toys with which to get into trouble.  But inside, at the core of us, we haven’t improved.  And that means that things like this tragedy will continue to occur.

Does that mean we give up?  Does that mean that we just let the evil that exists in the world today take control?  Does that mean that we allow acts such as Adam Lanza’s to occur in our world and in our lives without response?

I submit to you that the answer is a loud and resounding “No!”

Here’s another quote:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

No one really knows who first stated that in just those words.  It’s been attributed to Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mills, and Charles F. Aked.  But really, knowing the authorship doesn’t affect the truth of that sentence.  It is, by every standard I can apply, a true statement.  And from it we can draw a corollary that if good people want to resist the triumph of evil, they-we-must do something.

I submit to you that this is not a question of programs, or societies, or governments.  I submit to you that the only solution that will work is The Golden Rule.  Resistance to evil must begin with each one of us and how we relate to each other, whether it’s a co-worker, a neighbor, the barrista at the local Starbucks, the check-out clerk at Wal-Mart . . . you get the drift.

John Wesley, Christian evangelist and the founder of the Methodist denomination, I think expressed what our reaction should be as well as anyone.  He put it like this:  “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”

So in the true spirit of the Christmas season, and in the wake of the tragedy in Connecticut, here’s our challenge:

Do good to everyone you meet.  Be kind to everyone you meet.  Not just at Christmas season, but every day of every week of every year.  To do less is to give in.

Merry Christmas.