Archive for July, 2012

Cuts Like Broken Glass: Using Setting

Posted: July 30, 2012 in writing
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Ashtray I

You mean you don’t evaluate all your surroundings based on the damage they could cause? Huh. (Photo credit: Domiriel)

Setting too often gets overlooked in discussions about writing. Plot and character get all the attention and the money and the women/men/transsexuals/others. Maybe because it’s hard to get excited about setting in the same way. It’s easier to tell people about this amazing character you’ve created, who is both a hobo* and a superhero, and rescues lost kittens and must drink the souls of the living to survive. The sewage outflow where he lives, on the other hand…

But setting can be powerful, so why give it half measure? Writing’s all about fighting the reader’s apathy, and if you’re not going to use every tool at your disposal, you’re probably going to lose. Think of setting as the glass ashtray in a bad bar fight: not the most obvious choice of weapon, but, goddamn, can it do some damage if you use it right.

And that’s the key: using it right. I’ve read books with exhaustive setting detail—a common sign that the writer was afflicted with World-Builder’s Disease—that actually made me skip past pages to get back to the story. And I’ve read others where everything might as well have been happening in the fucking white void I do all my rough sketches in when I can’t be arsed to draw a background. And, much like those drawings, the book feels lazy. Feels like the author couldn’t be arsed to write a setting.

The trick, in my utterly biased opinion, is to tie setting to emotion and plot. Not that obvious B-movie shit**, where fog mysteriously springs up whenever something bad is about to happen, or it rains when someone is depressed. Again, lazy. But spaces reflect the character’s feelings about both the plot events that have taken place there and the way they fit—or don’t—within those walls. A bright, spacious apartment that invokes feelings of rage because it was where the character’s ex-husband beat her so badly she had to paint the walls to cover the bloodstains so she could get the damage deposit back when she moved. The corner office that feels uncomfortably big, like when the new owner of it used to put on his now-deceased father’s coats as a kid. The rough, dingy backstreet bar, full of bikers and petty criminals and people that you don’t look at too hard, that feels like a haven because it’s one of only two places in the city she doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else.

Use it right, and setting gives you that broken glass edge, the one that cuts deep into your reader and makes them bleed for those characters. And, let’s face it, writers love to make people bleed.

*Does anyone use this word anymore? I just realized I haven’t heard it in some time except in my own head. Usually with The Littlest Hobo song playing in the background. Annnd now that’s in my head for the next week. Well done, brain.
**Not that I don’t love B-movies for their own somewhat dubious charms. But the overuse of the fog machine is not one of them.

The Day Off

Posted: July 27, 2012 in writing
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Roaring Lioness

Go ahead. Try it. I fucking dare you.  (Photo credit: Greencolander)

 

 

Last week, I talked about using music and iTunes playlists to develop character. Today, in honour of the coming weekend, I’m back to discuss another method: the day off.

No, not yours. I’m talking about your character’s day off. If you’ve created a protagonist—or an antagonist, for that matter—then you’ve probably got a physical description, a job, a place they live, maybe a car they drive, some hobbies, some preferences, a family, friends, all that stuff. You’ve got a good start.

But here’s an exercise for taking it a little further: what does that person do when they have a day off?

That’s right: a day with no work and no obligations. Do they sleep in? Do they get up early to go for a run? Are they so invested in their job that they make an excuse to go in anyway? Do they clean their house? Clean their weapons? Do they spend all day in bed? If so, who are they spending time there with?

Here’s an example from my own work to get you started:

 

Even on a day off, this woman still gets up early. It’s not really a choice; she’s got a two-year-old, and he’s an early riser. But while some days she’d really like more sleep, especially if the previous night was a rough one, she doesn’t mind. It’s hard to be mad at him when he looks so much like his father.
 Once they’re both up, she makes breakfast, a proper one, something she rarely has time for during the week. There’s usually too much to get done before she has to be at work for her to do anything but grab a bite on the way out the door. After breakfast, despite it being a day off, she’ll probably at least do the paperwork; the business is hers, so there’s always something to do. Later, if the weather’s nice, she’ll head to the park with her son. Some of her friends might meet her there, if they’ve got the day off, or it might just be the two of them enjoying the sunshine. When he gravitates to the playground with the other kids, she’ll read the book that always lurks in the bottom of her bag, right next to her well-loved Sig Sauer, the one she’s used so much it’s almost an extension of her hand. Even reading, she’ll keep a watchful eye out, looking for trouble; old habits die hard.
Most of the time, she enjoys days off now. She works at enjoying it. Once she couldn’t stand to step back for a whole day, but that was a hard time. Now she’s trying to remember how to be normal again, and some days it works. And the ones it doesn’t…well, tomorrow’s another try, right?

You get the idea. Go on. Take a look at your character, and think about what they’d do if they had a free day. Would they train? Would they relax? Would they get blind drunk? And then think about why they’re doing those things. Who are they in those moments of stillness? That’s when who they are comes out, apart from all the fucked up situations they find themselves in. That lady up above…she’s a lioness masquerading as a house cat. Some days it works. Others you can see the claws.

So, what are your characters doing this weekend?

 

Your Summer Writing Plan

Posted: July 25, 2012 in writing
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Don’t let the closed eyes fool you. I’m hard at work. Thinking. Of…story stuff.  (Picture Credit: Krys)

Summer will not linger.

I know this is an astronomical fact, but it always seems to surprise me. When the sun’s shining and the breeze is up, even I don’t want to sit under this increasingly warm laptop. All I want to do is change into my bikini, take my iPod and a couple of beer, and lie on my back deck in the sun, listening to music on my giant headphones and staring up into that heartbreak-blue sky.

And then fall asleep and wake up with a sunburn. But still. I’d take that hit most days.

I know I’m not the only one. Everyone needs a few weeks with sun and beer and beaches, a few weeks of water gun fights and BBQs and summer night stars. Fuck knows I did.

But here we are at the end of July. One more month, and then this summer’s gone, baby. And, just like that dress you lent to a ‘friend’ you haven’t seen since, it’s never coming back.*

So it’s time to get back to work.

I’m pretty sure I just heard a vast collective groan. But fret not, fellow writers. I have a plan. And it begins with a thrown gauntlet.**

I bet you’ve got a project you’ve been neglecting. Maybe a short story that’s lacking an ending, maybe a novel that needs a good edit, maybe an outline that needs research and fleshing out before November comes and NaNoWriMo is upon us once again. Something. Every writer’s got one. That project whose time never comes. All it needs is a little love, but somehow it keeps getting pushed back in favour of new things and shinier ideas. It lingers at the bottom on your drawer or a dump file somewhere on your computer, languishing like a plant out of the sun.

This is its time. Dig that thing out, take it out to the back deck or the beach or the patio with you, and get to work. Think of it like that little summer bikini: packed away for a while, but now it’s back and ready for fun. It’s going to have a few beers, dance to something embarrassing on the radio, and then cannonball into the pool. It’ll come back up refreshed and so will you.

So this is my challenge to you: take that thing out and finish it. Finish it like that last mouthful in a cold beer bottle on a hot summer’s day. Come back to the cooler days refreshed and ready for new action.

And then you can always look back on this summer with a twinkle in your eye. Because this was the summer you finished that story, that novel, that outline, that submission. And it was great.

*Well, until next year. But this summer will be gone. And, like that dress, the memories of it will always smell like cheap wine, body glitter, and failure.
**A lot of my plans start with this. Inherently confrontational? Nah.

Rewriting Classics, or Why I Will Be Murdered By Herman Melville’s Ghost

Posted: July 23, 2012 in life, lists, reading
Tags: , , ,
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English: Illustration from an early edition of...

I’ve got your white whale right here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So, my friend Kat, who blog over here, was reading Fifty Shades of Grey* and texting me some of the more hilarious lines.** And she mentioned that a friend of hers had jokingly told her to write Fifty Shades of Dorian Grey as her next writing project.

…You probably see where this is going.

So, purely as a creative exercise, we began coming up with titles for erotic versions of classic novels. And now I’ve come up with plots for some of them. Again, purely creative.

Stop judging me.

So here’s the highlights (and maybe your new summer reading list):

Moby’s Dick: Captain Ahab realizes his obsession with the ‘white whale’ is just a Freudian misdirect to avoid dealing with his dual attraction to the wandering sailor Ishmael and the handsome harpooner Queequag.*** When the boat is far out to sea, he begins his ‘hunt’…

The Caning of the Shrew: When his attempt at courtship fails, Petruchio must find a new way to woo the bad-tempered dominatrix Katerina. An introduction to the world of BDSM gives him a new plan: become her latest sub.

The Gropes of Wrath: On the road to California, Tom Joad encounters a frisky parole officer bent on returning him to Oklahoma. His only way to remain with his family is to give the officer something else to chase.

She Poops to Conquer: A comedy of manners, as a young woman posing as a house maid discovers her lover’s scatological fetish while cleaning the bathrooms.

The Hos of Kilimanjaro: This collection of short stories details the adventures of a group of loose women, from the bored socialite on safari with ‘interesting’ people to the young woman who was a man’s first lover and “did first what no one ever did better”.

Think you can do better? Tell me in the comments. Or, better yet, write it. And then submit**** it to the same publishers that did Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Clearly there’s a market here. We just need to tap it.

*Don’t judge her. She’s a librarian, so technically she was reading it for work. Or so she tells me.
**Seriously, there’s a shitload. Don’t mistake me: I like erotica. Hell, I did my master’s thesis on it. But I like well-written erotica, and this ain’t it.
***Man the harpoons. If you know what I mean.
****I just cannot get my mind out of the gutter now.

Can I Borrow Your Eyes?

Posted: July 20, 2012 in editing, writing
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English: Eyeball

Come on, you won’t even miss ‘em. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Had some questions after Wednesday’s post about first readers, so I did some Internet research on the idea. Apparently there’s a school of thought out there that says first readers are nice, but not essential. That you’re the best judge of your own writing. That you don’t need any one else’s opinion.

Pardon me while I snort derisively.*

Look, our opinion on our own writing is…how can I put this…skewed. We put a lot of work into this stuff, so it’s only understandable that we find it hard to be objective some of the time. Most writers are about as capable of coldly evaluating the shortcomings in their work as a parent is at admitting their kid is really kind of an asshole. Even when it’s staring you in the face, pushing other kids down and stealing their shoes, it’s just too hard to admit.

That’s what other people are for. They can point out the things you miss. And, trust me, you’re missing stuff. So am I. That’s why I have other readers. They’re fresh eyes when you need them most.

Here’s a list of things that first readers can do for you and your writing:

1. Catch Your Mistakes: You know the best way to find a spelling error? Let someone else read your work. You’ve read it so many times that your eye will skip over the place where you meant ‘bludgeon’ and instead wrote ‘bugger’, which raises questions if it’s a cause of death. But a first reader will catch it. And sometimes make fun of you for it.

2. Poke Holes in Your Plot: You might not think this is a benefit, but who would you rather notices a huge seeping plot wound: a first reader or a fucking submissions editor? First readers will tell you what makes sense, what doesn’t, and what is so out to lunch that it doesn’t make sense on this or any other planet.**

3. Turn the Knob to Eleven: I wrote a horror story once, and gave it to Snowman to read. And you know the first thing he said to me when he was finished? “Needs to be more fucked up.” And he was right. It was one of my first attempts at horror, and, frankly, it was less horror and more a mild case of the willies. But I rewrote it with that advice in mind, and now it’s horror. And it ended up getting published in Tesseracts Thirteen with some serious heavyweights in Canadian writing. “Needs te be more fucked up” was some solid advice.

4. End The Affair: We’re not supposed to, but all writers have their favourites. Characters, scenes, lines…we have ones that we really love. But sometimes they’re not as good or as clever as we think they are. And a first reader will catch that. General rule: if you love something, but one of your first readers doesn’t, give it another look and think about it. They might be wrong. But if all your first readers hate it, it probably needs to change or die.

5. Tell You Where You Rose To The Occasion: And, sometimes, you work on something so much you lose all sense of perspective. You think it’s shit, and you’d be better off flushing it before someone else notices the smell. First readers can reignite the good feelings for a story, point out where you did right. That’ll give you your swagger back. And we need swagger if we’re going to do this.

*All right, I didn’t quite manage derisive. I got as far as disbelieving and decided to stop before I sprained something.
**The end bit is especially important for sci-fi.

My Chair Is Made of Fire Ants

Posted: July 18, 2012 in writing
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English: Ferdinand Magellan Español: Herando d...

Like this guy, but you’re discovering new ways to misuse the semi-colon. (Picture Credit: Wikipedia)

God, is there any hell worse than being in the same room while other people read your work?*

That short story I mentioned the other day? I finally got a draft I was willing to let other people see, so I called in my usual first readers: Krys and the Husband. Both give me useful criticism and never hesitate to point out the places I fall short. What you want from first readers, really. I’m lucky to have both of them.

But fuck, being the same room as one of them while they read something of mine for the first time is like sitting on a chair made of fire-ants. Big ones. With herpes.

It’s the worst dance of insecurity ever. You finally manage to get someone to take a look at something you’ve painstakingly assembled from raw wordage, but you’re unable to leave the room while they do so. So you sit there and pretend to be all nonchalant and shit. You find something to do. You read, or at least remember to move your eyes occasionally over the page without taking in a goddamned word. You look in the television’s general direction. Or, like me, you pretend to be writing something else.**

And the whole fucking time, your brain is saying shit like, Man, that piece was crap. You totally lost it in the middle there. And that ending? Where the fuck did that come from? You somehow managed to find something that’s both cliched and totally out to lunch. No one ever thought it could be done, but leave it you to find hitherto-undiscovered pockets of bad writing. You are Magellan with a thesaurus.

And, crap, he’s going to know soon. Why didn’t you take another day to look it over? Why didn’t you do another draft? For fuck’s sake, why didn’t you check it for spelling mistakes again? You’d be better off just going over there, ripping it from his hands, and throwing it into the fireplace. Okay, you’ll have to light a fire first, and it’s July and fucking humid as the inside of Satan’s gym shorts, but—

Then he looks up and say something like, “Hey, I liked this part. It was good.”

And you mumble, “Thanks.”

And you think, hey, maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe I just have no distance from my work this soon after writing it. Maybe I should—oh, crap, he hasn’t read the part about the vampire pickaxe. fuckfuckfuckFUCKFUCK—

And then you’re back in your chair of fire-ants.

*Yes, people, I know there are worse hells. That one with the hyper-intelligent yet curiously unsympathetic rats, for example. But I’m not in those right now.
**Okay, technically, I amwriting something else. But it’s only a cover. And because I ran out of newsfeeds and other blogs to pretend to look at. I even ran through Memebase, for fuck’s sake. Do you know how many poorly written captions I looked at to make myself feel better?

Danger: Brain Goblins At Work

Posted: July 16, 2012 in submissions, writing
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Custard a-boiling

Mm. Needs more zombies. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sometimes it feels like I don’t really think of short story ideas. I write them, on occasion, but the ideas…they seem to come from somewhere else. Somewhere down in the dark parts of my hind brain.

I first heard about an anthology more than a month back. Very specific theme, but something not too far removed from what I tend to write. But I didn’t have anything for it right then and there so I put it aside while I worked on some other stuff: editing, rewrite notes, blog posts. I read a few things in the right vein, browsed a few articles, and then let it go.

And then, last week, while I was in the middle of making a vanilla bean custard for a pie, the idea came to me. That’s how it feels, too: it turned up out of the back of my brain like a stray cat. And, very much like a cat, once I made room for it, it promptly stretched out and made itself at home, scratching the couch and pissing in the corners. I thought about it while I whisked and heated and eyeballed the custard, daring it to break while my attention was elsewhere. By the time I had the custard poured into the crust and cooling, most of the story was fleshed out. All I had to do was sit down and write it.* Which I then did. Just a zero draft, but I got 4000 words out in about two and a half hours, so it was a good afternoon.

Sometimes they just turn up like that. My head is kind of a big, chaotic factory. Maybe like the Pits of Isengard, if you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings movies. From a distance it’s just smoke and noise; close up, it’s chaos and work and sweat and evil. And then some goblin** is coming up to me with a twisted new thing it made while I was busy doing other things.

I trust my Brain Goblins.*** They come up with some interesting things down there in the dark, while I’m cooking and reading and (rarely) cleaning and brushing my teeth and all the other crap that makes up a daily life. I throw them some raw materials, in the shape of myths and themes, and they come up with ideas. And, often, nightmares. But I consider that a by-product.

But I needed the prompt first, and the anthology listing was just that. Maybe it was the narrowness of the submission guidelines, or maybe it was the promise of payment. Either way, the story is done now, and soon it will be sent off to its (hopefully) new home.

And in the meantime, I’m going to go browse submission listings again, and see if the Brain Goblins have got anything else for me this week.

*I say that like it’s the easy part, but of course it’s not. Anyone can think of an idea; writing it is the real work.
**Yes, I’m enough of a geek to know that the workers in the Pits were orcs or, more rarely, uruk-hai. I just don’t like the way Brain Orcs reads. Consider this a lesson in editing: it works even in your own head.
***For stories, that is. Not so much with things like, say, talking to the mailman or getting groceries. It never goes well.

On Being The Lord of All Creation

Posted: July 13, 2012 in writing
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Shasta Dam under construction, California

“God, I hate building foundations. Let’s skip this shit and go straight to picking out paint colours.”(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let’s talk world building.

Most of what I write is speculative fiction, specifically fantasy and horror, or some mash-up of the two. I dabble a bit in science fiction as well. An important aspect of these genres is the world in which they are set. It’s different than ours in some notable way: magic, aliens, magical aliens, magical alien ghosts that come out of the walls and eat your face. Something.

So world building is necessary, in varying amounts of detail. An urban fantasy can be very close to our world; it just has a twist. Ditto for most horror. Science fiction and other world fantasy, on the other hand, often require more work.

And, man, is it fucking surprising how many authors don’t put in that work. I read more fantasy than sci-fi, and if I read about one more poorly developed pseudo-medieval England, I think I’ll develop a rage tumour.* There’s nothing wrong with those settings when they’re done well. But so often they’re not. They’re just the default setting for fantasy, and, frankly, lazy.

The problem is that too many writers look upon world building—that is, creating a solid foundation and setting in the midst of which your story takes place—as a fucking drag. Too much work, when what they really want to be doing is developing characters and refining the plot. And those things are important. But I invite those complainers to consider this question: what person, real or imagined, is so divorced from their world that it has no affect on them? No one, that’s who. Even a character who has made an effort to cut themselves off from their world must have a pretty goddamn compelling reason for it. Consider what that is, and you might just have yourself a whole new subplot.

See, that’s the key. If you really love your characters, and want to make them as real as possible, then you have to consider how they were shaped by their world. Did they grow up poor or wealthy? What does that mean in the context of this world? Born in the country? What country? Is it mountains, or forests, or desert? What kind of education did they receive out there? What’s the most dominant influence on a person’s status: family, religion, caste, ability, geography, or something else altogether?

And this is just the tip. Questions are like cockroaches: get one, and you know there’s a dozen others hiding somewhere, waiting for the lights to go off. But answering them will give your characters life, and new adventures.

Now, you can go too far. That’s when you get World Builder’s Disease, in which an author spends so much time on the world that they forget to make characters that don’t suck, or plots that aren’t crappy. But that’s a post for another day.

So stop looking on world building as a chore, and treat it like another form of character and plot development. Those people you’re making grew up there. They love it, or hate it, or treat it with a vague indifference for a reason. Their world view was shaped by the intricacies of their societies and their environments.

Just like yours.

(PS: for speculative writers, there’s an interesting resource called 30 Days To A World. It’s a series of exercises that helps you develop a world from the ground up**, no matter how far you are in the plot process. Try it. If nothing else, it’ll give you some new questions to ask.)

*Treatable these days, but the treatment involves a lot of cotton candy and kittens. And bourbon.

**You’re on your own for the ground down. I’ve yet to see a development plan for lava and mineral strata.

YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND ME, or Character Development Through iTunes

Posted: July 11, 2012 in writing
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Sad News

Cheer up, Emo Newspaper. I wouldn’t want you to paper-cut yourself. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Characters are contrary little bastards. They’re like imaginary friends*, except they never do what you want them to. You want to play catch? They want to stay inside and kill things on Halo. You want to read? They want to do the mental equivalent of that thing your little brother used to do, when he’d sit beside you and poke you for hours. Hell, sometimes you can’t even convince them to leave a fucking room. So, more like imaginary enemies than friends.

But, between you, you’ve got a story to tell. So how do you get them in line?

You need to get inside their head.** Sometimes they’re not listening because you don’t really understand them yet. Think of those characters as surly, emo teenagers: they want desperately to be understood, but will respond with sullen defiance should you attempt speaking to them or any other sort of normal human interaction. So you’ve got to try other methods. My current favourite has the benefit of working on characters as well as teenagers: listen to their music.

I create playlists. I pop open iTunes and start making a list for the character. It’s not always music that they would listen to, though that can be a part of it. Mostly, it’s songs that feel like them. Songs that capture a feeling in a scene, or an overall character note. That guy who always has one foot out the door. That girl who’s turned grief into a weapon. That guy who’ll try to put a good face on everything, no matter what.

Music is emotion, so use it connect to those character’s emotions.

There are complications, of course. Major characters change over the course of a story, so the music that captures their essence will change, too. Sometimes I create a folder and then different playlists. The ‘Michael’ folder might have lists marked ‘Prisoner’, ‘Ruins’, and ‘Clean’, depending on the stage of the story they stand for. I can click on the individual lists to capture a time, or the entire folder to get an idea of his character’s progression. Minor characters will probably only get one, but if they’re strong characters, one is enough. They’ll permeate the list once you make it. They’ll bleed through the notes.

Then all you have to do is get yourself a set of headphones and listen.

*My imaginary friend when I was a child was a six-inch-high vampire that lived in a shoebox. I used to bring the shoebox to school and leave it in my locker while I was in class. Never really thought of why. Only now do I realize that I must have been bringing him to school to feed.

**Which is inside your head. God help you if one of your characters is a writer. Sounds like the plot to Inception II: Mindfuck Boogaloo.

The Monster’s Eyebrows, Or How Not To Finish A Story

Posted: July 9, 2012 in editing, writing
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Eyebrows can also help portray empathy.

Just a few more…damn it! Now I need to start over again! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I fucking love editing.

Yeah, I know. Weird: I am it. But there’s something very…freeing about doing all that cutting. Like spring cleaning. It’s a chore in a way, but I love getting rid of all that junk and clutter. Emptying drawers, shredding old documents, dropping boxes off at the charity bins…It’s like casting off a weight I didn’t realize was holding me back. Once it’s gone, I’m lighter.

Editing is the same. Cutting out all the pieces that don’t fit, piecing together what’s left into a leaner, more dangerous whole, taking a piece from raw iron to a steel blade…there’s a very unique sort of pleasure to that. Different than the initial rush of writing, but just as rewarding.

But there’s a right time and a wrong time to edit. And the wrong time—at least for me—is before I finish the first, or zero, draft.

I know, it’s so tempting. All those little mistakes* are just sitting there, waiting for your loving correction.** They stare at you every time you open the damn document, mocking you with their sheer fucking wrongness. Oh, hi, they say. Remember that bad day you had a while back, when you couldn’t put two words together to save your life? When everything you wrote seemed clumsy and trite? Well, it was! And we’re the record of that! Isn’t that fun?

Assholes.

But if you go back and fix those, then you’ll fix something else. That character that wasn’t quite gelling, the dialogue that doesn’t work, something.

And then something else.

And then you do a complete rewrite of the first chapter.

And before you know it, you’ve lost the story. So you go back and rework the opening again. And again. Sooner or later, you get bored and move on, but it doesn’t matter, because the story is dead.

My friend Sherry (who blogs here) says that editing before you finish the zero draft is a great way to have a lot of really great beginnings. And nothing else.

So step away from the red pen. No one found that harder to do than me. I love editing. The red ink flows like the blood of my enemies. Tearing something apart, stripping it down to the bare bones, and then rebuilding it into a monster… Man, what a high. But do that before the first draft is done, and you’re not rebuilding. There’s nothing there to rebuild yet. You’re like Dr. Frankenstein getting caught up in making sure the monster’s eyebrows are straight*** without taking the time to lace all those bones and guts together right. You’ll end up with a perfect face and nothing to hang it on.

So remember: guts and bones first. Then you can go back and make it pretty.

*’Little’ being a loose term. Some of them just keep getting bigger, like The Dark in that Robert Munsch book.
**Yes, I did go to Catholic school. Why do you ask?
***And, if possible, one uninterrupted line.

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