something blue

Trying a new blog template. Hoping it will be easier to read/more inviting. What do you think?

what readers want

The great thing about a blog like Evil Editor's is that it drives home the point that people read for a lot of different reasons. I mean, I'm sure most folks pick up a novel in hopes of getting a crackin' good yarn and being entertained for a few hours. Sure. But what I'm talking about is when you pick a book off the shelf and read those fabled first 150 words. What are you looking for then? What will make you keep turning the pages? This seems to vary wildly from person to person.

It seems that some folks want to be plunged directly into the action. These people I believe are most concerned with plot. They want an immediate hook into it and they don't want any extraneous prose getting in the way of that. They're here for the plot dagnabbit, and they don't want any fancy-schmancy writing coming between them and the next twist or cliffhanger.

There's another group that wants not plot but story, and yes there's a difference. They want all the particulars laid out nice and neatly right up front. Even though they're very concerned with what's going on, they do not like being dropped right into the action like the plot folks. They're willing to take some time to get all the necessary background. Introducing your main character and maybe giving a little background information won't hurt with these readers.

I think there's also a POV group although I really don't understand exactly what they're after. And there are probably other groups as well - maybe someone wants to meet a really memorable character as soon as they pick up a book or someone who wants to see a gorgeous piece of prose (these are people who smell their books instead of reading them). Of course, science fiction has a whole subset of readers who'd like a really clever idea right up front. The truth is there's probably a type of reader out there for almost anything.

For myself, being exposed to all these different tastes and comparing them with my own preferences, I've realized that what really catches my attention is voice. I want to hear the author's voice right up front, and I want it to be unique and different and interesting. "Voice" is one of those slightly intangible things, but a good part of it is style and another part is POV. Tone is in there too. Essentially voice is how the author approaches the reader.

Is the author telling me an old story, a fable, something that happened to them yesterday? Do they speak directly to me with sarcastic asides? Do they frequently wander off into amusing tangents? Are the margins of the book filled with footnotes? Are they long-winded and verbose, filling up their sentences with large and unusual words? Or are they terse and short and sharp, writing short and direct sentences, sometimes even sentence fragments? Stylistic choices aside, what unique perspective do they bring to the table?

To me, these are the most interesting questions when I'm picking up a book. If I immediately sense that the author has something different to say, I keep reading. The establishment of style and voice take priority over the establishment of plot. I don't like a poor plot anymore than anyone else, but I'm willing to take it on credit, at least for a little while, if the voice is good.

But hey, that's just me!

blog post

I have to confess, I still sneak a peak at Evil Editor's blog every now and then. But I've cut back! Way back. Really.

One of the things that really gets me is the titles people come up with. A recent example was "Dragon Sword". Dragon Sword?!? How do you not look at that and immediately say "this is the most generic title ever created"? I am picking on this recent author but a quick glance through the archives reveals plenty of others. "The Dark Legacy". "Dressed to Kill". My favorite are the obvious fantasy titles. "Forging the Soul Blade" may have sounded like a good idea at the time but the truth is that it was clearly assembled from The Big List of Generic Fantasy Words.

So many books, even published fantasy novels, suffer from this problem. It may be a good book. The title may scream the genre, which I guess is helpful if the maiden carrying a sword and wearing drapery on the cover doesn't sufficiently convey it. But the title is just instantly forgettable.

I recently picked up a SF book entitled "The Wreck of The River of Stars" which is a wonderful, memorable title. And I'm glad I did, because that book introduced me to an excellent new author. And I would have never have noticed or bought any of this author's excellent, earlier books otherwise because they all have incredibly generic sci-fi names like "Rogue Star".

In my mind, the title is a great place to have some fun and come up with something memorable. Even if it doesn't wind up being the published title, at least in the meantime you're not the dozenth manuscript in the slush pile entitled "Blood of the Dragon" or "Dark Sword". R. Scott Bakker's first novel is called "The Darkness that Comes Before". I saw that and I was like "Ohmygosh, I don't care how bad it is I have to have it." That's the reaction you want.

what not to study

I've known that I wanted to be a writer since I was a little boy, younger even than ten. By the time I was eleven I was writing elaborate fictions set in fantastic universes for friends and family. When I was about seventeen I started in on my epic fantasy novel, but didn't make much progress. Fortunately, all copies of this early effort have now been lost. At nineteen I decided to bite off something I could chew, a short story, and wound up penning a twenty-thousand word sci-fi novella. I have not lost the copies... yet.

So of course, when it came time for the great Life Event that is college, I majored in... Computer Science. Oh I know, an English or Lit major would have made so much sense, and I might have had a crack at being summa cum laude or some other silly Latin title, but no, I took comp-sci and got C's and slogged through several levels of Calculus and University Physics.

My rationale for not focusing on the language arts, even though that's technically what I want to "do", may have seemed hubristic: I didn't think that they had anything to teach me about writing. It would have been wonderful to really study the classics and read all those authors you know you should but never will and have valid opinions about Irish Poets and things like that. But it wouldn't have helped me write fiction. Critical essays, yes. Nuanced analyses, yes. Incandescent storytelling, not so much. Anyways, that was my opinion at the time and the years really haven't shaken it. As far as I can tell the only way to learn writing is to write, a lot, and that's what I've tried to do. My left brain recieved invaluable discipline in college, my right brain is ticking along as relentlessly as it ever did.

Anyways, it's not as if I've ever been wracked with doubt on the topic, but it is nice to see one's opinions validated occasionally: Author Crawford Kilian ruminates on what aspiring writers should NOT major in.

POP! BOOM! POW!

I love good storytelling in any medium. I may never write for TV or film, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate and even learn from writers working in those mediums.

Everything I need to know about suspense can be found in director M. Night Shyamalan's films. The TV show Lost is a study in how to keep the plot twists coming and the audience guessing. I picked up the trick of parallelism from Watchmen, one of Alan Moore's graphic novels. (NB: a great TV writer's blog is Jane Esperson's - she's written for Buffy, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and countless others)

I guess most fiction writers already know that TV and film are great sources for storytelling inspiration, but you may not be tuned into my third example, graphic novels. If you're not, you should be. They're not just for superheroes anymore, in fact they haven't been for about two decades. If you have never read or even heard of Alan Moore's Watchmen, Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Kurt Busiek's Astro City, you need to hit the bookstore (your chain stores should have ALL of these authors). There is a lot of cool stuff being done in "comics" (or "sequential art", for the pretentious) these days. Even those that still focus on the superhero tropes, like "Astro City", are doing so in ground-breaking ways. Kurt Busiek uses his superhuman characters as metaphors for everything from teenage disaffection to accepting old age to 70's malaise. These are stories with a lot less BOOM! POW! and a lot more heart and character.

Fans of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or the 'teens with special powers' genre in general) should enjoy a series I recently picked up, Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways. This is the story of a group of teens that discover that their parents are part of secretive cult of supervillains and run away from home. Of course they all have undeveloped super-powers which they will be exploring even as they evade the authorities and attempt to right their evil parents' wrongs. More importantly, they will also be navigating the treacherous terrain of relationships, teenage emotions and newfound independence. The premise of the series is killer, and the writing lives up to it. It actually impressed Joss Whedon so much that he is going to take over writing for it in the future. In the meantime, less than $25 will net you the hardcover of Volume 1, Pride and Joy, which you definitely want, since it contains 18 issues of the comic and hundreds of pages of glossy, full-color art. Superpowers as a metaphor for coming of age have never looked so good.

I know that some people worry that immersing themselves in writing that is too good will cause that author's voice to creep into their own. I find, however, that exposure to great storytelling inspires me, even in seemily unrelated ways. And if the inspiration comes in a medium other than fictional prose, it'll be that much harder to subconsciously crib from, hey?

read it and weep

Author John Scalzi explains why Star Wars is not entertainment. Don't freak out too much when you read it, Scalzi delights in tweaking his readers by taking up absurdly inflammatory positions. Actually, when he turns the snark on full force, as he does here, he reminds me why I read his blog in the first place (sometimes he comes off as a bit smug and smarmy, as he himself has on occasion admitted).

At any rate, I mainly take issue on three points - 1) that building mythologies is 'necrophilic storytelling' (a flammable opinion if I ever heard one, and ridiculously absurd to boot - I'm not going to get into it), 2) that the Star Wars prequels are not entertaining (they left me cold but I have lots of friends who genuinely liked them, especially the third) and 3) that whether or not something counts as entertainment is dependent on authorial intent.

This last seems like a lot of splitting hairs over semantics, and anyways I feel that it's wrong. So what if the storyteller has principles that they're adhering too above and beyond "entertainment"? By this argument nothing is ever pure entertainment - no author or scriptwriter or director or storyteller since the world began has ever come to a creative work totally unburdened of their personal values, agendas and interests, interested purely in entertaining some hypothetical audience.

As many of Scalzi's commentors pointed out, J.R.R. Tolkien made no bones about the fact that he was inventing mythology, essentially for himself. He created languages with derivations and relationships between each other, he wrote a massive unpublished backstory, he filled his story with irrelevant details. From the metric of entertainment, does any of this make sense? Yet surely he's very entertaining - he spawned a genre almost singlehandedly (and whether or not you appreciate fantasy books peopled with half-elven warriors is another conversation entirely), sold hundreds of millions of books over fifty years, and the inevitrable films were resounding successes. Tolkien was out mostly to entertain himself, but in doing so he entertained millions.

Most storytellers are out to entertain themselves first, and that's as it should be. When they happen to scratch us where we itch, we call them brilliant. When they fail to connect, we call them self-indulgent.

No self-respecting critic judges something by some objective paragon of entertainment. Well, I hope not. I can just imagine this person watching Scorcese's The Departed and going "Ninjas! Where are the ninjas? It is objectively verifiable that ninjas are entertaining! Also, sex." Rather, they judge the work by what the creator was apparently attempting to achieve. If that was a mythological space-opera, did it work for me as a mythological space-opera? If the aim was for a quiet, family drama, they judge it on those terms. Why? Because who can say what, if anything, will entertain all your readers, or your watchers, or your listeners. The best you can do is come up with something YOU would enjoy, and hope there are people who agree with you. The old adage that you should write what you know is off, but it's close to the truth: write what you love.

I'm afraid that the entertainment value of anything rests solely with the consumer, not the creator. And people are certainly entertained by some very strange things, much of it unintentional. It may be cool to hate Star Wars right now; I can hardly blame anyone who does, it is one of the most over-exposed media properties of the last three decades. At the same time, to chalk up the original trilogy's success to the fact that they came after a decade of dreary, dystopian sci-fi or that their entertainment value was imparted by people besides George Lucas is ridiculous. I'm young enough to have fallen in love with the movies as a kid without seeing all that other dreck and I can tell you that Lucas did, and probably still does, tap into something kids love. In my book, that's entertainment.

errata

First of all, whatever happened to my right-hand page navigation? Where did it go? Is it coming back? Did it step out for groceries or is it visiting relatives for the weekend? Did it run out of gas outside Atlanta? Life is full of such uncertainties.

Secondly, I am becoming annoyed by Amazon.com's book recommendations. Just because I once purchased a book by an author or on a topic does not mean I wish to purchase EVERY book that author has ever written, nor would I enjoy every book ever penned on said topic. So I once bought an "Anguished English" book. That certainly doesn't mean I want to purchase Richard Lederer's entire oeuvre. And yes, Amazon, I like Ursula LeGuin. But you would serve me better by recommending similar authors instead of all umpteen million of her short story collections.

in which I am 'in the market'

A small update:

First of all, what a difference an edit makes! After a weekend of tweaking and molding the rough draft I have something I am quite satisfied with and unashamed to show my beta readers. In fact, I'm very excited about this story once again, as I should be. It's amazing how much of it really came together in editing, in spite of the fact that the overall changes were comparatively minor.

Now a few close friends and relatives will get to take a whack at it. In the meantime, I sit here and wonder - what am I going to do with you, little story? This is often the question after I finish writing, and so often I don't have an answer. I don't write for markets. Sorry, I know, but it's a personal thing. I won't write for anyone but myself. If other people like it, that's great.

The question before me is simple - is there a market out there for a talky, slightly literary short story of just under 10,000 words set in a fictional coastal Georgia town? Your suggestions are welcome.

in praise of insecurity

Written Wyrdd has some excellent thoughts on the writing process on her blog, specifically the difference bewteen a "rough draft" and a "first draft." She says that the "rough draft" is something you don't show to anyone, because it represents a Work in Progress and won't make sense to anyone outside the author. I really feel this, at an emotional level right now. I've just completed the rough draft for a short story (the "character-driven" one, referred to in earlier posts). And my first reaction as I started editing last night was "Oh my gosh, this sucks!"

I would probably despair and burn the manuscript if I didn't know from experience that this is always my first reaction to something I've written, even if in retrospect I feel it's brilliant (subjective call, people!). But that first glance - when I have no distance from the WiP and it's still exists in all its raw, unedited splendour - virtually always plunges me into a miasma of despair. Later on, when the thing is polished and gleaming I'll feel quite the proud papa, if history is any guide. Right now my thoughts are more along the lines of "can it be saved? or should I just bury it?"

I left off editing earlier than I should last night because I couldn't figure out why it just wasn't working for me. As I lay in bed, I thought about what exactly it was that wasn't working for me and also what things I did like. I came up with a little mental list, something like this:

Don't like:
-The dialogue is too smugly clever
-The narrative is too syrupy and maudlin
-The whole thing comes off as navel-gazingly romanticized

Like:
-Quiet character 'moments'
-Spare, disinterested descriptive bits
-Places where their lead characters antagonism feels real and not cutesy

After some thought, these points resolved themselves into a clear editorial direction to take: I need to step back. Pull the camera away from the characters, out of their heads. This is possibly at the risk of confusing the reader, which is always my big issue when writing (I under-write in the sense that I try to communicate as little information as possible to get the job done, and often that's too little.), so I try to avoid it. This time, though, I think it might be better to go with my first instincts - let the characters be a little ambiguous, at first, and allow them to reveal themselves very gradually. Stick to spare, descriptive passages. Don't inject any more narratorial insight than is strictly necessary.

At the inception of a story, when I have that first germ of an idea, I usually have some sort of 'feel' that is part of my vision for the story. Often, between idea and execution, this idea can get lost in translation, or at least trampled underfoot a little bit. Now that I've got plot and setting and character all happily meshing in my sloppy little draft, it's time to make sure the whole thing is on track with the original idea, the one that got me excited about the story in the first place. I won't be happy with the story until it is.

What is it supposed to be? Just a day in the life, a window into about twelve hours of the lives of two people meeting for the first time who do not know that they are already deeply connected. A day that goes completely wrong in the sense of their plans for it, and completely right in a larger sense.

If I can capture that in a draft, I'll be very happy.