tooting my own horn

Sweet, this is my third continuation for a New Beginning to have been accepted so far! Having my continuation picked is more exciting to me than having a "Guess the Plot" suggestion make the cut (I've had several) since there can only be one continuation. Don't worry, I'm not 3/0 - I've seen several suggestions disappear into continuation oblivion so far.

Gee, maybe I should try my hand at getting some real writing accepted by real editors.

rule #1

And now ladies and gentlemen, my golden rule of writing fiction:

Don't write anything you don't absolutely love.

Writing, for me, represents a serious investment of time and energy, especially emotional energy. Life is short and writing is hard and I have decided that if a story idea doesn't make me as giddy as a schoolgirl just thinking about it then it's not worth wasting another second on.

Aside from such lofty philosophical considerations, I find that rule #1 is invaluable when it comes to the actual process of writing. Stuck on a scene? Not sure where to go next? Ask yourself the question: what don't I love about this scene? Maybe the scene seems like a necessary evil which you just have to paste a grin on your face and slog through.

Well let me tell you my friend, your readers will know instinctively which bits you slogged through and which bits you loved. You don't want that section that you phoned in to be the section where they put the book down. So maybe it's time to go back to the story, figure out what you do love about it, and approach the scene that way. Maybe you'll find that that scene doesn't belong at all and you need another approach entirely.

I find that writing only what you love is a great filter for unecessary fluff. It's a great indicator for what direction to go next. And I hope, in the long run, that it is going to make the stories that I write, whether short or long, meaningful to people.

Sometimes I think that maybe I should just bite the bullet and write a military sci-fi novel or some YA involving kids with magical powers, just so I can get published and make some money off my writing. But I wouldn't love it, and I think that that would come through in the writing. Even if such a book made it past agents and editors and was published, it wouldn't be memorable. I few people would pick it up as part of the year's latest book fad, then they'd put it down and forget about it.

I want to write memorable stories, books that move people in some way. How can I expect someone else to be passionate about my story if I'm not? So, I'm not going to write for anyone else but myself. Because if I don't love it, no one will.

And hey, at the very least I'll have one fan.

it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission

I've been enjoying the blogs of a handful of frequent commenters over at Evil Editor's. So I've taken the liberty of linking to you crazy kids, over there on the right. If nothing else, this is very convenient for me. And my convenience is paramount.

If this is problematic for anyone, just shoot me an email or comment and I'll take you off the list, no harm no foul.

a haiku for Pluto

I do not feel that
I have lost a planet but
Gained a planetoid

All Pluto haikus welcome here.

rattling the bars of the cage

Why am I here at work? Why am I not at home writing?

Oh, right. Money.

Sigh.

a matter of taste

Everybody has genres and styles of fiction that do and don't interest them. I'll tell you what kind of novel makes me yawn just hearing about the plot - the one about middle-aged women who meet some guy and after slowly, painfully working through their baggage and personal issues, fall in love. And I started thinking to myself, "Why is that?" Surely the best stories in any genre flow out of relationships between vivid characters. Why should a novel where that is the focus bore me to tears? "Hang on there," I said to myself, "Go back to that last sentence."

relationships between vivid characters.

Aye, there's the crux. If your entire story revolves around two characters and their developing relationship, I had better enjoy hearing about those characters. They should be interesting, no, fascinating people, people who I want to get to know. If they're not, why should I even begin to care about whether or not they're going to find true love with The Man With The Mysterious Past? I don't know you, I don't want to know you, your personal issues are a big yawn to me. The tricky thing is, that characters who are like you are automatically somewhat interesting. So, a middle-aged woman is by default somewhat interesting to other middle-aged women (and dogs butts are interesting to other dogs). But who doesn't want their writing to have broader appeal? Characters should be intrinsically interesting, without having to rely on bare self-identification.

Okay, so this seems fairly obvious. Make the characters interesting. But it seems that too many would-be writers think that "interesting" means "make a character just like me, but better looking, and with more intense personal baggage." But this is flat out wrong. A character is not just a name with a list of personal tragedies attached. Real people have personalities. The interesting thing about them is not the things that happen to them, but how they deal with those things in their own unique way. A good character is much the same.

If I am interested in the characters, if they feel as though they are living and breathing and I have an emotional investment in them, I'll gladly read about them arguing over their shopping list. By the same token, if the characters are flat, lifeless or cliched they can get in car wrecks, watch their house burn down, or get abducted by aliens and I'd just yawn.

It's a cliche to say it, but it's true: go read Jane Austen. Pay close attention to what makes her characters tick. She writes all kinds: feisty, bashful, arrogant, mouse-quiet, talkative, withdrawn, interfering, self-deluded, lovesick, home-sick, innocent, mature and more. They're all vividly drawn and engaging so that we'll gladly read an entire chapter about a conversation they had at dinner.

The acid test of a character: do I care enough about them that I'd enjoy sitting their and watching them chew?

new endings

I may be the only person who does this. Does anybody else do this? Actually, even I don't do it anymore. But when I was younger, when I picked up a book to find out if I thought I would like to read it or not I would of course read the beginning paragraph - but then I would flip to the back and read the ending one as well.

I'm not sure why I did it. I think I wanted to know not only if the book seemed interesting but if it ended up in a good place. I found that the last couple of paragraphs seldom gave away any specific information about the plot, but would give you a good idea of whether or not the good guys won or somebody died or if the ending was just generally a downer.

I really don't do that anymore. I've written a downer ending or two myself so I think I can face up to them at this point. But what I do like to do now, after perusing the shiny, engaging opening paragraph, is flip to a couple of places in media res and see how it's holding up. The idea being, the author naturally puts her best foot forward on the first page, but do we then settle into a by-the-numbers thriller? A cheesy romance? Is the dialogue clunky and awkward? Descriptive prose, especially, while much in evidence at the beginning may be all but vanished a couple chapters on.

Also, I think a lot of books tend to have one Big Idea that sets them apart, but once you get past that they're pretty much the same as every other book in their genre. The best authors, though, keep the ideas coming and you can flip to any part of the book and find something interesting. Or at least that's what I'd like.

the classics

So, ACD did me one better - she's posting classic openings, old and new, on her blog. Eat It Up. The entries so far really only have on thing in common - they're all brilliant.

There are so many ways to hook a reader. And maybe you can't hook every reader. But I think a good opening should more or less indicate what the reader is getting themselves into and why they should care. It's sort of like starting a relationship. If you misrepresent what you're all about, you may get more dates - but things will fall apart quickly after the first couple. If you let the real you shine through, though, you may find that the fact that you have fewer takers is made up for by the fact that the relationship goes a lot farther.

This metaphor brought to you by eHarmony. For true compatability!

stimulating and surprisingly amicable

One of the novel openings submitted to Evil Editor's blog has provoked some excellent discussion on the nature of openings, specifically whether or not tension should be immediately established in them. So far the discussion has been quite calm and thoughtful.

One of the posters brought up the idea of having people critique some openings of literary classics. I must admit, I've been tempted before now to submit one without telling anyone and see how people react. So far I've resisted the urge, though...

cracking the code

I've submitted several "continuations" for Evil Editor's "New Beginnings" recently but only one has made it through so far. I knew that one was a winner though, and sure enough, almost immediately after I posted it that entry was removed from the list.

How did I know I had a winner on my hands? Because it involved zombies.

Anyways, it's been interesting trying to crack the code as far as what EE is looking for in a continuation. It's pretty clear that he's looking for ones that are stylistically consistent with what came before. And I don't think just tacking "And then aliens attacked!" onto the end of an opening works either. I've tried that, no luck. Continuations that take the opening and then tweak it in an unexpected direction are obviously preferred, but I like to think I've sent in a few of those.

A little sex seems to sell it a lot of times, the more outrageous the implications the better. Likewise, a little bit of violence never hurt either. If both of those fail, imply that the protagonist of the opening is bat crazy.

I kind of wish we could see the runners-up for the continuations, on not just because I like to see my stuff in print (although there is that). You gotta figure a lot of stuff is submitted, and much like the Guess the Plots, is likely that more than one is funny.

the revised excerpt

I have revised the opening to my short story, The Shepherdess and the General. You can read the original version here. This is the new and improved version, plus several subsequent paragraphs for 'flavah'.

The only man the General killed during the course of the battle was one of his own. First he mounted the soldier's horse and tucked the man's gold-bound knife into his belt. Then he rode the soldier down as he fled, trampled him beneath iron-shod hooves, and thundered from the battlefield with the arrows of the enemy shrieking past. He rode east, driving the horse harder than any arrow it feared.

The General's forces had met the enemy in the gray shadows of the morning after marching all night. The invaders were not engaged as expected in taking the fortified town of Brindy. Instead they were entrenched and waiting in the hills south of town. There was a false dawn in the north and a smoldering stench in the air. Brindy was burning.

With quiet urgency the General marshaled his forces on the opposite hill and prepared for battle. He arrayed the archers on the flanks of the hill and his men-at-arms at the foot of the smooth face. Then he assembled his mounted knights on the crest to order their attack. Their mounts twitched nervously as he spoke. He tasted ash in his mouth.

The cavalry roared away down the hill in an avalanche of pebbles and loose shingle and passed between the ranks of the footmen at full gallop. Thundering, hammering, they swept across the little valley and broke in a gold-crested wave against the ranks of the enemy. But the enemy waited patiently behind their defenses with their shields and pikes like a fence and did not expose themselves, and the charge was thwarted. Then the General had the horns blown and there was another charge, and another, until he looked down on a field choked with the broken and flailing bodies of toy horses, often with their riders beneath them, dimpled armor winking in the sun.

So the General sent out the men-at-arms and arrows from both sides covered them like locusts, and the real, bloody and brutish business of battle commenced. As the sun climbed high in the sky, war ebbed and flowed in the little valley and around its hills, a sea of blood, mud and metal. Ash fell in a slow, silent rain, dimming bright mail.

When the day had worn itself out, spent in long lines of fire on the face of the hill; when the General's armies had exhausted themselves against the fence of shields and arms; when the enemy forces had finally surged out from behind their bulwarks and run through them like a spear; then the General called for a retreat. Those that could would run. The rest would surrender. The General sent his page and his heralds away to gather his remaining captains and set off down far side of the hill for his horse.

The first paragraph recieved the most substantial revisions. I wanted it to be clear that the horse and the knife belonged to the soldier, not the General. I also wanted to clarify how he killed the soldier. This could easily be accomplished by breaking things up, but I really liked the flow of the original - the act of killing the man, taking his knife and riding away from the battlefield was like a single fluid motion in the original second sentence and I wanted to keep that feeling. That proved harder to do. But this version, I think, mostly accomplishes these goals: clarity and flow.

The rhythm and flow of writing is very important to me. I'll sometimes read things I've written aloud, to see how they sound. It's always very instructive.

Anyways, let me know what you think.

the best defense

I'm not sure where the meme came from that I was 'offended' by the criticism of my story opening on Evil Editor's blog. Apparently I am egotistical and thin-skinned as well, or at least so the anonymous commentor who has been following me around over there tells me. In actual fact I think that if you read my responses to what were some pretty inane criticisms you'll be hard pressed to find anything offensive about them besides the point than that I did not immediately embrace all the commentors' suggestions.

In a later thread, and this seemed to raise even more hackles, I encouraged another writer to "ignore the inevitable nitpickers" and keep writing because I had enjoyed what this person had written and would like to see more. Well, it appears that "the inevitable nitpickers" do not like to be ignored. So, now I am thin-skinned, egotistical, easily-offended, etc. OK, fine.

But if I am to be easily offended, here's what really offends me: "writers" who, in lieu of success in their own writing, find pleasure in putting down the work of others, ignoring good writing and instead fretting about comma placement and preposition. Not only are these people missing the forest for the trees, they are doing so out of an attitude of immense condescension. Does that irritate me, does that get under my skin?

Hell yeah.

That's why I suggested Orson Scott Card's "wise reader" approach. It avoids the pitfalls of having Joe Writer try to play editor. It focuses on whether or not a story is clear and engaging and doesn't get hung up on grammar.

Grammar is easy. My word-processor automatically corrects gross grammar errors. For the more subtle stuff, I can run my manuscript by one of a couple of friends who are skilled at editing, or get out the trusty Chicago Manual of Style. Editors don't expect perfect manuscripts - that's why they're editors. What they expect is what I always harp on, competent writing and a good story. Sure, if your incompetence with the written word is glaring and eggregrious they will read no further, but this really hasn't been an issue on the large majority of the "New Beginnings" that have been submitted to Evil Editor. Like me, most of these writers passed high school English.

The funny thing is, even after saying all this I actually did make some substantial revisions to my own opening. Again, I didn't rewrite the entire thing so that it now takes place in first person or research horses and what scares them (news flash: arrows can make noise and scare horses). But I realized that I was trying to convey a lot of information in a couple sentences and that it might (and did) confuse readers. Clarity is something I always try to work towards in my writing. And yes, BuffySquirrel, you finally convinced me that there were to many had's in the second paragraph and I took steps to eliminate those.

Anyways, once I'm completely satisfied with my revisions I'm going to post them up (along with a lengthier excerpt) and you can decide for yourself if I'm on the right track here.

Peace.

on openings

Quite possibly my favorite opening to a novel:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

I'm not alone in my opinion of this opening, it is of course the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and is arguably one of the most famous first paragraphs in English literature.

I don't have The Hobbit here at my fingertips (I'm at work), but if memory serves, after describing the Hobbit hole in some detail, the author then starts to give the hobbit's geneology, interrupts himself, describes hobbits themselves in great detail, returns to the geneology, and finally gets to the initial scene of the plot some three pages on (the scene is a conversation about saying 'good morning' and an invitation to tea).

Without being sardonic or unnecessarily tongue-in-cheek, Tolkien was a poster-child for how not to write a novel. Both The Hobbit and its even more famous sequel trilogy feature an unwieldy amount of characters, all with odd names. As a narrator, he is not at all above breaking the fourth wall and editorializing. There are frequent (if subtle) changes in tone and style throughout the books. And Tolkien played fast and loose with his POVs, at one point famously slipping into the head of a fox who passes by the main characters in the night. And yet it worked - the man has been voted Author of the Century many times over, his books are bestsellers twenty-five years after his death, and the films based on them were blockbusters.

In my opinion, this casts "the rules" about writing fiction in a suspicious light.

Obviously, part of the reason Tolkien could "get away with it" was because he was a damn good storyteller. And that's a very important point - how good your story is ultimately trumps any stylistic considerations.

But while Tolkien was a brilliant storyteller, he was no novelist. He was an Oxford don, steeped in the traditions of ancient legendary cycles such as Beowulf. When he wrote in that casual, interfering narrative POV he was just going with what he knew. He had no preconceptions about what a novel was supposed to be like, and so he was able to move beyond them. He told his stories in the way that he felt they needed to be told. He certainly didn't worry about whether or not his work was publishable or whether any agent would take a second glance at it.

This approach to storytelling and writing fiction is definitely not for everyone. But it's one that I admire and would like to emulate. It offers a certain freedom too - to try new things without worrying about how it will be recieved. Success, fame and hardcover will come in time. Maybe. But for now, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to just do my best to keep writing, constantly, and learning and growing. I'm going to tell all kinds of stories and tell them the way I think they need to be told.

A good story and good writing. Those are the keys. Those are what I want to focus on. As far as I'm concerned, everything else is secondary.

looking for evil wise readers

You're probably here from Evil Editor's blog, right? Great, well sit down and let's talk for a moment.

Devoted readers of EE's blog (and what aspiring writer wouldn't be?) will quickly notice two things - one, that underneath EE's snide wit there's an editor that knows what he's doing, and two, that the same is not necessarily true of his "minions". Get your query or opening paragraphs posted and you'll find out that there's more than one editor at this house as your text is dissembled atom by atom by these busy little worker bees. Unfortunately, few to none of them are professional editors and their "advice" is as haphazard as it is destructive.

During the critique of a recent submission I was told, for example, that I should shy away from passive voice when there was no passive voice anywhere in my150 words. My use of possessives and capitalization were corrected - incorrectly. I was told I needed to hit the library to research horses - based on a throwaway line about one being scared of arrows. And I was informed in no uncertain terms that I Could Not Use certain styles and tenses.

This is not "critiquing" so much as it is buzzards circling the carcass. Do you know what I really wanted to hear? Well, yes, OMG that was awesome I want more more MORE! would be very nice, but more realistically a simple "That was interesting, I'd keep reading" or "That confused me" or "It didn't get my attention" would be helpful and informative.

If you've never read Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy you really should, whether or not you intend to do so, if only to read what Card has to say about a "wise reader". Card recommends that every writer have a Wise Reader. For one thing, they're much easier to come by than editors, professional, evil or otherwise. For another, they're much more likely to be able to see the big picture of your story.

What is a Wise Reader? Just someone who likes to read and knows what s/he does or doesn't like. What you want from your Wise Reader is not a backstop check on your punctuation or a second opinion on your stylistic choices. Per Card:

For this job, it's better if your Wise Reader is not trained in literature -- he'll be less likely to try to give you diagnoses ("The characterization was thin") or, heaven help us, prescriptions ("You need to cut out all this description"). The Wise Reader doesn't imagine for a moment that he can tell you how to fix your story. All he can tell you is what it feels like to read it.

Someday, if you are very lucky and your story is very interesting, you will have an editor who will give your manuscript the grammatical spit and polish it needs to shine. But to get to that point what you need, first and foremost, is interesting and readable prose. A Wise Reader can tell you if you have that. They can't tell you why, they can't tell you how, but they can point you in the right direction, and you the other stuff you can figure work out yourself. Editors do detail work - Wise Readers see the view at 20,000 ft.

Anyone who likes to read is qualified to be a Wise Reader. All it takes is knowing what you like, knowing when you're lost or bored, and being willing to say so. On the other hand, very few people are qualified to be editors.

Evil or otherwise.