Category Archives: The Writing Process

Passion vs Marketability

Kylie Quillinan Rewriting The Writing Life 5 Comments

Now that I’ve finished the first draft of MUSE, this manuscript will go into hibernation for a while. So I’ve spent the last few weeks wondering what I should move on to. It’s a battle between a call of the heart or market sensibility.

I can go back to a previous manuscript, a story I dearly love and which has garnered some attention from agents, but not enough for a contract. Clearly, there are problems with it that I’ve not yet identified. I can spend the next six months in a familiar world, with characters I know well and adore, and try to fix the problems with this manuscript. I’ve invested many years in this story — there’s even a first draft for the sequel — and I’m not ready to give up on it yet.

Another possibility is an urban fantasy I started early last year. I came close to the end of that draft and lost both momentum and interest in the story. Yet the idea had been rattling around in my head for several years before I was finally in the right place to write it. I’m sure I will eventually regain my passion for this story but it’s not calling to me just now.

I could start something new. I’ve been playing around with a number of ideas. One has a post-apocalyptic setting, something I’ve always wanted to try.  Think Dan Brown but with more grit. Another is an urban fantasy in which the faerie world still exists side-by-side with the modern world. Human sacrifices, immortality, Pandora’s box. There are so many things I want to write about. The post-apocalyptic story is the one I suspect would be the most sensible to write. It’s controversial and, I think, eminently saleable. It would, if done right, be a gripping read. But it’s not calling to me either. At least, not yet.

I started writing this post about eight weeks ago, at a time when finishing the first draft of MUSE seemed very far off indeed, and over the last few weeks, no matter which idea I try out, it’s that first one, the story I’ve already spent ten years on, that draws me to it. In fact, it seems my subconscious has decided for me because last weekend, without ever making a conscious decision to return to this project, I went to the copy shop and had the manuscript printed and bound, all 585 pages. It’s sitting on the desk in my study now, along with new packs of pens and highlighters. And it’s calling me. For better or worse, this is what I’ll be spending the next few months on. Only time will tell whether it’s a wise use of my time or just another round of edits on a project that will never sell.

How do you decide between projects?  Do you analyse the market and write what you think has the best chance of selling?  Or do you let your heart make the decision?

 

 

To Infodump, or Not to Infodump-that is the question

Craft & Skills First Drafts Narrative Voice Reader Investment & Empathy Setting and Milieu The Writing Process 3 Comments

Actually, every writer with any experience at all will tell you that the question is not whether or not to infodump.  The answer to that question is automatically yes.  Yes, yes yes.  The need to provide mass quantities of data to the reader is almost universal.  Especially in longer works.  Most especially in longer works laid in milieus that are outside the reader’s common experience.

No, the real question-questions, rather-is how/when/where/how much to infodump?

And as much as I would like to be able to give the One True Answer to those questions, there is no such critter.

If you were to put three authors in a room and asked them one of those questions, you’d get probably get somewhere between five and nine opinions.

Actually, I misspoke.  There is one answer, but it is not an answer.  (And no, I’m not going all zen on you.)  The answer is . . .

It Depends.

Seriously.

That’s the only answer there can be.

Okay, setting aside the foolishness, here’s the hard core.

Yes, as a writer you have to be able to fill the void of ignorance each reader faces when he/she picks up a new work by you.  My experience is that writers attempt to do this in one of three ways.

1.      The Bulk Transfer Method

Wherein the writer attempts to stuff everything the reader might possibly need to know down the reader’s throat at once.  Two common forms of this are:

The dreaded “As you know, Bob…” conversation, in which one character will recount the history of the universe from the Big Bang all the way through to the ultimate death of heat, coincidentally along the way sprinkling the conversation with little nuggets of data that the reader might find useful somewhere around page 397.

The ubiquitous conference, wherein various talking heads sit around a table and explain to each other things that they already know but are needful for the reader’s understanding.

The problem is that, especially when attempted by new writers, these usually result in large indigestible blocks of verbiage sitting right athwart the plot line, and contact with said block all too often bounces the reader right out of his/her reader’s trance.  This is Not A Good Thing.

2.      The Teasing Method

Wherein the writer attempts to provide subtle hints-a word here, a phrase there-expecting the reader to not only read the written page but also the authorial mind, and somehow pull out of the aether the missing context needed to understand what the author is desiring to communicate.

The bad news here is that telepathy doesn’t work any better between authors and readers than it does between husbands and wives (which, based on personal experience, I’d have to say is not at all), and readers quit in frustration.

3.      The Pay As You Go Method

This is the one that most authors eventually develop, where they learn to tell the reader as much as the reader needs to know at that point in the story.  The trick is developing first the awareness of just what out of the entire back story and world building framework the reader needs at just that moment in the narrative; and second, the skill to add that to the narrative in the right spots and the right proportions.

The frustrating thing is that, like a lot of guidelines, we have all seen successful writers produce successful books that ignore them.  Well, just because they can get away with doesn’t mean we can.

Case in point:  two or three years ago I turned in a draft of a longish story to my editor.  Not long thereafter I got a note back:  “You have committed a staff meeting.”  Translation:  I had a ubiquitous conference in my story, and she didn’t like it.  “You know better than that.  Fix it, and I’ll buy the story.”  I attempted to justify what I had done by pointing to a recent novel by a well-known popular author that had a conference scene that ran for page after page after page.  Her response:  “You’re not him.  Fix it.”  I fixed it.

To summarize:  Option 2 just doesn’t work.  Option 1 doesn’t work well . . . except when it does.  Option 3 is preferred, except for those rare occasions when Option 1 is the best way to go.

In other words, It Depends.

Final word:  whatever technique is used to provide information, it can’t be just a static dump of data.  Somehow, in some way, the presentation of the data must advance the story.  If it doesn’t, we’re just building walls instead of roads to the end of the story.

Faith

Character Craft & Skills The Writing Life The Writing Process 6 Comments

I am a Christian of a conservative evangelical stripe.  (If it matters to you, I lean to the Calvinist end of the Christian theological spectrum.)  I am not ashamed of this.

I also love to read and write science fiction and fantasy.  I am not ashamed of this.

This is not a contradiction in terms, or an oxymoron, or a paradox, or an antinomy, or any other such condition.  Sorry, it’s not.  This is, however, leading me to scratch a particular itch that has been bugging me for a loooooong time.

No, I’m not going to indulge in a theological rant.  Not my purpose here.  Nor do I intend to delve into issues of morality, ethics, doctrine, or comparative theology.  (Contact me off line if you want to have that kind of discussion.)  I’m not even going to discuss whether or not religion should be a part of whatever cultural world building you do.  (Although that would be an interesting discussion in its own right.)  What I do want to do is raise a few points about how religion is portrayed in fiction-or more specifically, how people of faith are portrayed in fiction.

As I have admitted, I read mostly science fiction and fantasy.  In the last (mumble) years, I have noticed a trend.  It’s more prevalent, I believe, in science fiction and modern urban and paranormal fantasy than it is in more general or high/epic/quest fantasies.

There has always been a tendency for science fiction as a genre to treat religion as if it is irrelevant.  But increasingly of late, I see stories where characters who are people of strong religious faith are consistently described as if they are either congenital idiots who are so stupid that they willfully believe in things that are patent falsehoods, or they are amoral connivers and hucksters, or they are amoral religious fanatics whose most fervent desire is to destroy anyone and everything that does not fit their very narrow viewpoint of what is right and proper.  I as a reader am left with the implication that the only reasonable people around are those who are not religious.

Granted, religion has from time immemorial been a haven for con-men to take advantage of their credulous neighbors.

Granted, a lot of people today go through the religious motions just so they can find social or business or political advantages.

Granted, institutionalized religion has been involved in a good many wrongs over the centuries.

This does not mean, however, that all people who are truly believers in whatever they profess must necessarily fall into those categories.  The majority of people of faith are good people, moral people, who care about what’s right and wrong and care about other people.  That’s been true throughout history, and is still true today.  To consistently portray them as a whole as mentally deficient, as power-hungry despots, or as wolves preying on sheep is unrealistic.  An individual character can be credulous, or venal, or fanatical as the story demands, but an entire class of characters shouldn’t be.  It’s sloppy world building.  It makes for cardboard cutout two-dimensional characters, which in turn makes for sloppy writing and two-dimensional stories.

It’s not dishonest to write stories about characters whose beliefs are different from your own.  Eric Flint makes no secret that he’s an atheist, yet many of his characters in the 1632 series are accurately and warmly portrayed in their religious beliefs.  I’ve read that David Weber is a lay Methodist speaker, and I know from personal correspondence that he is a man of Christian faith of some depth, yet he has skillfully portrayed characters in several of his Honor Harrington novels of a level of religious or political fanaticism that would rival the worst we’ve seen in real life in the last twenty years.  And personally, I wrote a story in which the bad guy was totally amoral and a rapist.  (And yes, I was very glad to get that story done so I could get him out of my head!)  Yet I promise you that his nature and beliefs were not consonant with mine.

It is dishonest, however, to write stories about characters and not portray them fully.  It is dishonest to craft characters and tar them with the brush of all the excesses and sins committed by others under a particular banner (be it Baptist, Catholic, Muslim, Republican, Democrat, atheist) but not give them credit for their virtues.  Even out and out villains have some virtues-how much more should regular people have?

And in the end, it makes for boring reading.  Really.

Is the same thing happening in other genres?

World-building – Oops!

Craft & Skills The Writing Process World-building No Comments

I’ve been a reader for over 50 years.  I’ve read a lot of good books, and some not so good.  And I’ve heard other writers talk about the craft and about books in general.  From all of that, following are some common missteps in the area of world-building.  (And yes, I’ve been guilty of most of them at one time or another.)  All identifying logos have been removed and serial numbers have been filed off or otherwise obfuscated.

* * *

If I’m going to write in contemporary Earth settings, if I’m using a city for my setting du jour, I’d best know its geography well.  For example:

  • If I’m going to lay a story in Sacramento, California, or Denver, Colorado, or Anchorage, Alaska, I’d better know which sides of the cities have mountains near them, and which mountains they are.  Same story with rivers:  what are they named and where do they run in the city?
  • If I’m writing in New York City, I’d better know which streets are on Manhattan Island and which are in Brooklyn, I’d better know which direction they run, and I’d better know which streets the major landmarks are on.
  • If my character is standing in a certain location in downtown Chicago and looking west, I’d better know which major buildings he’s going to see, and just as importantly, which buildings he won’t see.
  • Ditto for London, and Paris, and Moscow, and Beijing, and Oslo, and Tokyo, etc.

* * *

Animals are not machines.  Yes, an ox or a donkey or a horse can work all day, much as a human can.  However, a hard-working animal needs rest and water and food on a regular basis, just like a hard-working human does.

Although I am not a horse person, I know some, and I am reliably informed that, despite what Hollywood shows us, a horse cannot gallop for hours and hours on end.  Oh, a willing horse might attempt it at the urging of his rider, but if pushed to the limit the horse will drop, exhausted, and will most likely die.  I mean, after all, can you sprint all out for six hours at a time?  Neither can a horse.

And it might surprise you that a horse, traveling at a reasonable pace, doesn’t really travel that much farther than a man over the course of a day.

* * *

As remarked back up the chain somewhere, major characters should not have similar names, especially if they are also very similar characters.  (The thought bears repeating.)  It might be considered a characterization issue, but I’m more of the opinion that it’s one of world-building.  Wherever you pigeonhole it, it is confusing to the reader.  I recently “awoke” in the middle of the novel I’m currently working on and realized I had two major characters named Thomas and five characters (three major) named George or Georg.  I was getting confused; never mind what this was going to do to my prospective readers!  So unless that confusion is something you need for the story, you might find another name for one of them.

* * *

Western European culture is considered by many to be an aberration in the history of culture in the world.  (I’m not too sure but what I don’t agree with them.)  Because of this, we need to be very careful about projecting our 21st century Western cultural mores (political, religious, sexual or otherwise) on earlier periods and places of history.

* * *

Cloth  (This last one may be less an “Oops” moment and more a chunk of “trivial” data that you may find useful.)  I must stipulate that I am not a Clothing Expert.  These are just a few things I’ve picked up along the way, mostly from writing in the 1632 universe.

Pre-industrial societies did not have an abundance of cloth, and what they did have was not for the most part very brightly colored, or at least, not for very long.

  • Without powered spinning machines and powered looms, cloth is very labor intensive to produce and turn into clothing.  (Check into how long it takes a hand weaver to weave a three-inch width of cloth.)  In 1996-7 I saw the exhibit of royal Chinese artifacts that toured the US.  They had a suit of clothing (tunic and trousers) that had been produced for a (short) member of the royal family.  I didn’t think it was all that much to look at, but according to the program notes it took over two man years to produce that suit.
  • Vegetable/biological dyes didn’t produce very rich colors for the most part.  Even when they did (imperial purple, for example), they faded fairly quickly, so most people ended up wearing dull or pastel hues of blue or brown or sometimes red.  Bright or deep/rich hue dyes were usually scarce, and correspondingly expensive.  I’m told by a fabric maven that producing a good black dye that would hold fast was particularly difficult, so it was very expensive.  Only the wealthiest people would wear black.  (Explains all those Renaissance and Baroque era portraits, doesn’t it?)
  • And unless a family was very well off, each member of the family would be fortunate to have two or three suits of clothes.  (Remember the size of pre-industrial families.)
  • Variety was sometimes served by making the clothing modular:  detachable sleeves and collars, combined with different bodices or vests, sashes, belts, etc.
  • In most pre-industrial societies there was probably a good market for used clothing, possibly even removed from corpses before burial.  (Think of the old cleaning lady’s scene in Scrooge’s vision of the future in A Christmas Carol.)
  • This explains a lot about accounts in the Bible and other ancient literature where gifts of clothing were given to a guest or to someone who was favored.  (Joseph’s “coat of many colors” ring a bell?)

Cloth and clothing after the industrialization and mechanization of the cloth industry is a very different topic.  Someone (not me) should do a post on that some time.