Posts Tagged ‘writing’

*SCENE NOT FOUND*

Posted: May 22, 2013 in writing
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0
Screen capture of a 404 message error on Wikip...

Well, damn. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It happens to the best of us. We’re cruising along, writing something, and you hit the queen bitch of all potholes. It’s not writer’s block; you can write quite well. But you find that one scene, that one conversation, that one moment, that you just can’t write for love or money or some combination of the two.

And you sit there, staring at the cursor, and think: What now?

1. Turn it around. Sometimes those scenes are like puzzle pieces or non-standard genitalia*: you have to turn them around and try them a few different ways before you figure out how it all fits together.
Maybe you’re starting in the wrong place. Maybe the scene should have come earlier, or later. Maybe it has the wrong characters. Try a few things and see if anything moves.

2. Give it a rest. Try not to hammer your head against the wall on this too long. Trust me, you will become mired in the frustration that it creates, which just makes it harder to dig your way out. Take a break. Go for a walk. Re-grout the bathroom. Whatever. Just do something else and see if your hindbrain can shake it loose.

3. Drink. No. Wait. *Checks piece of paper* Sorry, that’s my to do list for the day.

4. Switch it up. Sometimes I storyboard things. Or comic-book things, depending. Draw them out in a series of panels just to see how it goes. What expressions go where, what the body language should be. Or I write what doesn’t happen. Sounds ass-backwards, but think of it like Sherlock Holmes’ method: eliminate the impossible and what remains, however improbable, is the truth. Or as close as we need it to be for fiction, anyway.

5. Drop it like it’s hot. Put in a couple of asterisks and fill in the bare bones of what needs to happen. Then move on. For example, I came across this gem in my editing:
***SCENE WHERE CAS REALIZES LORD T. IS ONE OF THE DEBTS***

Solid gold writing, there.
But it was enough. I couldn’t get the scene right, so I figure out the basics and moved on. Otherwise I might still be stuck there and the manuscript would remain unfinished. As it is, I have a much better idea of how that scene will go in the rewrite.
And occasionally, upon a re-read, something else happens. Listen to John Steinbeck:

If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.**

And then aren’t you glad that you didn’t let that section sink the book?

*Which begs the question: is there such a thing as standard genitalia? Quick, someone Google it. I’ll wait here.
**From his interview in The Paris Review in 1975. For more tips, check out this article (via Brain Pickings).

Monday Challenge: Tools of the Trade

Posted: May 13, 2013 in monday challenge, random
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0
The Pensieve as seen in David Yates' Harry Pot...

The Pensieve, also known as ‘easiest way to do flashbacks ever’. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sometimes I read about an imaginary item and wish so hard it was real that I should rip the fabric of space-time and force it into being with the power of my brain.

Everyone knows about these things: the portable hole, the Pensieve*, the Tardis, the Phaser, all that cool shit. Magic and/or special items are an integral part of speculative fiction. Humans are tool using creatures, so it stands to reason that we’d give those tools a place of power in our own private fantasy worlds.

If I had to pick, it would probably either be a real Bag of Holding or the Green Lantern ring. Those of you who don’t play Dungeons and Dragons might be more familiar with the former as something similar to Hermione’s purse from the final Harry Potter book. Stores everything you want it to. And the Bag of Holding, unlike Hermione’s bag, always presents the thing you’re looking for when you reach in. Endless possibilities. And I’d never be short a pair of clean socks. As for the ring, who the hell doesn’t want to be able to create anything they can imagine? I’d even take being weak against the colour yellow and wood in exchange for that kind of thing.

Other contenders are John Scalzi’s BrainPal from Old Man’s War and Joe Hill’s Head Key from Locke and Key. But I figure I’ve got less chance of abusing the abilities of the Bag of Holding. If I had the Head Key, for example, I wouldn’t be able to resist seeing what would happen if I hooked my head directly to an ethernet cable and downloaded all the information in the world.

There are things out there that allow you to time travel, to teleport, to pass unnoticed through the most crowded room. Whatever people have ever wanted to do, a writer out there has created one to allow them to do it. It’s an incredible feat of imagination, and sometimes has hilarious results. But we think about this stuff because we want them to be real.**

So, your Monday Challenge? What fictional device would you want, and why? It can even be one you make up yourself.

What’s it going to be? Invisibility Cloak? Space-time knife? Bat-Mobile? And what would you do with it?

Choose wisely.
*I know a few people who could use an external storage place for their thoughts.
**And, thanks to technology, some of them are close. For example, the Invisibility Cloak from Harry Potter and the glasses from Transmetropolitan.

Dr. O’Cyborg’s Prescription for Writing: Leave It Undone

Posted: May 10, 2013 in writing
Tags: , , , , , ,
0
Cyborg Hunter

Dr. O’Cyborg’s people have endured much persecution. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Feeling sick today. I blame the change in the weather. We had five days of summery temperatures in a row, and then last night, an hour before I started coaching my beginning runner’s group, it started to rain.* And now it feels like the air pressure is going to squeeze my brain out my nose.

Human barometer: worst super power ever.

Anyway, before I take copious amounts of migraine medication and retire to hallucinate about sentient balloon animals for the rest of the day**, I’d like to pass on one of my writing tricks. Well, I call it mine, but I’ve heard it in so many different places over the years that, like a ret-conned superhero, I just can’t trace its origin anymore.

I have a minimum daily word count: 500. On average, I write about 2,000 words per day. Most times in one go, but other days by picking at it for five or ten minutes here and there.*** Either way, I usually get to that point somehow. And one of the ways I get there is by stopping the previous day’s writing before I’m done.

I know, sounds stupid, right? Leaving the act unfulfilled? Constant writing blue balls. Blue ovaries. Whatever. But I always end the day before I’ve come to the end of the ideas. And then I make a little note of what happens next somewhere, and close the program. I go do my other life stuff.

Then when I come back the next day, I have an idea of what comes next. Which means I do much less staring at the cursor, waiting for an idea to turn up. I waste less time. And, by the time I finish whatever was left over from the previous day, I usually have new ideas waiting for me. My hindbrain works on them while I’m finishing up yesterday’s work.

Of course I always reach the end of the writing day before I reach the end of the new ideas. So I repeat. And very rarely do I completely stall out. My days are vastly more productive because of this little trick.

Just like the old show business saying: leave ‘em wanting more.

*Which I wouldn’t mind so much, but every Thursday night for the last five weeks, the weather has been shit for the weekly group run. I don’t know what I did to offend the weather gods, but it must have been fucking dire.
**Just kidding. I’m not really going to do this. Because that would be crazy, right? RIGHT?
***Today feels like the latter. Sentences interspersed with conversations with Dr. Seamus O’Cyborg, my imaginary half-Irish, half-robot medication provider.

Backstory, or How To Avoid Boring Your Reader To Death

Posted: May 3, 2013 in writing
Tags: , , , , , , ,
3
Marmoset

I’m watching you. (Photo credit: Leszek.Leszczynski)

Fucking backstory. You’ve got your story cruising along, hitting points A to B to C, and all of a sudden someone does something unusual and we have to know why. Why do they get all weird at the idea of marriage? Why does the sight of a carnival carousal make them sad?* Why is the Tooth Fairy stalking them with a pair of pliers? And you have to answer those questions or the rest of the scene doesn’t make sense. Hell, the story might not even make sense. So you have to stop what you’re doing and drop in some backstory. Slows everything down if you don’t do it right.

But it’s necessary. It creates relationships, sets expectations, and makes it clear exactly why the protagonist is deathly afraid of marmosets. It makes the character a real person, with a past, and not just a place-filler because all this shit has to happen to someone.

So how does a writer deal with the absolutely necessary but sometimes pace-killing revelations about the character’s past?

1. Make it short. Seriously. I don’t need to know every detail. Just throw in what absolutely needs to be there for the reader to not get lost, and move on. You can write it out for your own benefit if you like. I do this a lot, just so I know what the details of the steroid-addicted marmoset attack on the protagonist’s childhood campsite actually were. To make damn sure there’s a reason they fear the furry little bastards.
And then I go back and cut. Ruthlessly.

2. Stick and move. This works especially well for the horrible shit we do to our characters. If someone’s choices are informed by something traumatic in their past, chances are they’re not going to sit around and dwell on every detail. No, those moments are going to smack them in the back of the head in times of stress—there and gone in a second. Chuck Wendig’s Bait Dog has a number of good examples of this technique. The main character, Atlanta, never deliberately thinks about what happened to her, but the reader gets flashes of it whenever she’s upset. Not much, either. Just enough to get a sense of what happened, and the emotional impact it had.

3. Do not info dump. If you make me stop in the middle of an interesting bit of story to go back and trudge through fifteen pages of the protagonist’s childhood, I will stop reading. And then I will mail you a steroid-jacked marmoset.

4.Be cautious of…. Using a diary, a dream, a conversation with a perfect stranger, a counseling session, a first date, or any other contrived way of showing backstory. Not saying they can’t be used, but for the love and honour of Velociraptor Jesus, make sure it’s part of the goddamn story. The main story, that is. It shouldn’t be an excuse to get the backstory out and in the open. Also, no one ever randomly tells all their secrets to a stranger at the bus station. Unless they’re crazy. Or drunk. Which are both options, but should once again be used with caution and common sense. When in doubt, don’t. Just don’t.

*I wrote this as a throw away, but now that I think about it, there is something melancholy about carousals.

What’s After Happening Now: Dialect and Operating Principles

Posted: May 1, 2013 in editing
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
1
Newfoundland Trip #24 - 'The Rock'

Ah, home sweet home. Don’t she look inviting? (Photo credit: dibytes)

I had an entirely new experience the other day: I read a screenplay.

Not just for my own amusement, though I did enjoy it. Kat Nicholson, a very talented friend of mine who blogs over here, had asked me to look over one of her screenplays for dialect. See, it is set on the east coast of Newfoundland, where I’m from, and that province has its own…distinctive accent.* Several of them, as a matter of fact. We mostly do it to confuse outsiders. It works very well.

Only a few of the characters, and none of the main ones, really have the strong form of the accent, but that’s enough. Kat knew that she wasn’t familiar enough with the dialect to reproduce it perfectly, so she made the smart decision: get someone who is familiar to check it for accuracy.** So I went through it and changed “where are you” to “where ye at” and so on. Even changed to curses to the pseudo-Catholic sacrilege that I grew up with. There weren’t many changes, and nothing that really affected the story at all, but they still make a difference. Especially if you run across any readers who know the area, or are from it. That’s when you’ll be happy you checked your sources.

You can do all the research you want, and sometimes that’s all you can do on a particular topic. But if you have the opportunity, get someone who knows what you’re talking about to check your facts, your turns of phrase, your basic operating principles. Otherwise you might have the embarrassing experience of being called out on that shit. Or you might just annoy your reader with an inaccurate depiction. Trust me, it happens. I’ve been seriously annoyed by it in the past. Everything from accents to basic physiology to omg that’s not how a goddamn gun works.

 

People make mistakes. I get it. But a smart person gets someone else to check their work so those mistakes don’t get further than they need to.

And now, if anyone gets pissed with Kat over her representation of the dialect, she can just point at me and say, “Her fault.”

*If you want to know how distinctive, check out this video from CBC’s The Hour. Slays me.
**The fact that I live across the street and can easily be bribed by butterscotch cookies is just a bonus.

 

Monday Challenge: Into the Mist

Posted: April 29, 2013 in monday challenge, setting
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
3

We went hiking on Saturday. The trail we went to is the Skyline, one of the most popular in the province because of its incredibly scenic views.

However, this was what we saw:

Behold the amazing panorama of the Skyline Trail!

Behold the amazing panorama of the Skyline Trail!

Amazing, right? Looks like the inside of a ping pong ball. The weather, which was supposed to clear well in advance of our trek, did not. Weather can be a dick like that. The whole world beyond those rocks had vanished, to the point where we couldn’t even see the cliff edge. Seemed like a good day to stay on the trail, I must say.  

But as we were sitting on the lookout in the middle of a cloud and eating lunch, we started talking about what we would say we saw when our friends asked us how the hike went. Because no one is going to admit they went on a ten kilometer hike known for its spectacular view and admit they saw nothing, right? But if you’re going to embroider the truth, you might as well spray paint the fuck out of it.

So we started passing ideas around. About what could be out there, just beyond sight. And, man, in that kind of fog, it could have been anything. Popular choices included sea monsters, space ships, mer-coyotes*, big ominous rocks, and Narnia.

So, here’s your Monday Challenge, writers: what’s out there?

*Predator of the deeps.

Do Better

Posted: April 24, 2013 in editing
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0
A standard ice pick

I need more of this. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The most common comment I leave for myself during the editing process consists of two words: do better.

You’ll spot that gem up and down the margins of the print out, scrawled in red ink. It’ll pop up in the digital bubbles of the comments function on the computer. Sometimes it just ends up printed in big ass block letters on a post-it and stuck on my desk.

Do. Better.

I slap this comment on every instance where I think I fell short. The parts it references aren’t spectacularly bad or anything. They’re just…meh. Nothing. Forgettable. Or worse, cliched. They’re all the places that I didn’t bring my A-game. I was going through the motions like an overpaid athlete with a bulletproof contract and a rabid badger of an agent. I did what I had to do, I moved the story along, but I can do better. And I know it.

Zero drafts are full of this shit, and they have to be. Zero drafts are about getting through the story, in part so I can find out what the hell it is. The prettiness comes later. But when I’m hacking my way through that first rough pass, I’m so busy trying to nail the story to the floor before it has a chance to get away that I fall back into the easy phrases, the lazy words. Nights are dark, people are constantly looking at things, and things are a little too on the nose. It gets the job done, it gets the reader—in this case, me—from one point to another, but it lacks artistry. More than that, it lacks impact. It falls through the brain without a ripple, let alone the ice-pick of revelation for which we’re aiming.

I read about a songwriter once who said that he threw out the first rhyme he thought of every fucking time. No light and sight for this guy. No heart and start. He always looked for something else. Something that wasn’t so goddamn obvious. It’s the same principle at play here. Don’t complicate for the sake of complicating, but learn to recognize the difference between simple and elegant and lazy and boring. The only way to recognize that difference, to train your brain’s nose to zero in on its unique stench, is to go through your own shit and find it. Because, trust me, it’s there.

And when you find it? Simple.

Do better.

Writing Rule #41: You Have To Do What Works

Posted: April 19, 2013 in writing
Tags: , , , , ,
4
20 sided dice

And then there are the days you roll seven ones in a row… (Photo credit: Konstantin Lazorkin)

If there are hidden cameras in my home, one, stop that you creepy bastard, and two, the footage contained therein would probably be acceptable grounds for psychiatric committal.*

Not every day, mind you. But some days…some days are harder than others. And that’s when the weird starts.

That’s when you’ll find me rolling a pair of d-20s, one black and one white, until they both come up as critical hits. Or when I’ll started shooting foam suction cup darts into the ceiling, the windows, and the occasional target I set up in the sunroom. Or doodling cartoon versions of myself on sticky notes and stick them on the walls so they look like they’re arguing with each other.

I’d say that’s when I start talking to myself, but I do that all. The. Fucking. Time.

And the other day, for no visible reason whatsoever, I stopped in the middle of a difficult paragraph, took off my shirt, and continued writing. Wasn’t warm; it was barely above freezing outside. I wasn’t uncomfortable. I wasn’t writing about someone walking shirtless around their living room. It just…seemed like the next thing to do. And, to be fair, the writing got easier after that. I don’t know why. I’ve stopped questioning it.

The point of this odd little list is not to provide evidence that may someday be used against me. It’s just to illustrate a single point: Writers are fucking weird. We are. Sorry. But although it might not seem that way, there is a method to this madness.

This is about ritual. I know people who play a game of Solitaire before writing every day, who have to clear out their email before starting, who need certain music playing, or total silence. Who write better at home, in their office, at a coffee shop, alone, with a group, hanging upside down wrapped in a cocoon of their own wings. It’s not really about the writing; it’s about the mindset we create. We’re no better than playoff-beard-growing hockey fans and students clutching rabbit appendages before a test. We want the magic.  And if something seems like a good idea at the time, hey, why not? It might be that one tiny thing that pushes us over the top into brilliance, or at least allows us to get to the end of the damn page before the deadline.

And, yeah, we know it’s superstition. But it might just get our minds working the right way.

So we do what we have to in order to appease whatever brain goblins are occupying our skulls these days. We have our rituals, our lucky tokens, our ceremonial cup of tea/cigarette/fifth of bourbon/monkey adrenal gland before we get down to work. We occupy ourselves in odd ways while we’re working because the alternative is not doing anything at all.

Some days are hard. And that’s when you have to do what works—whatever that is—to get it done.

*And this is without checking my Amazon recommendations. No fucking joke, the last list they sent me was a dozen books with ‘Evil Genius’ in the title.

Monday Challenge: A Few of My Favourite Things

Posted: April 15, 2013 in character, monday challenge
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
2

 

cardboard cut-out class room 3

You guys need some work. (Photo credit: wabbit42)

I’m stuck in the middle of editing the zero draft of The Patchwork King right now. It’s slow going; I can only desecrate so many pages in a sitting before my brain rolls out my ear. But it’s progress nonetheless.

One of the biggest things that I need to fix is some of the secondary characters. Those people that play a role, and an important one, but aren’t in the Inner Circle of Main Cast. Most of them are a little…cardboard-y. They need a spark of life. So I’ve been going back through most of the character exercises I’ve put up here in an attempt to give them the je ne sais quoi they badly need.

And, on that topic, I’ve got another one. This one was inspired by a character in the zero draft of the novel who appears to do nothing else but wait around to be relevant to the plot. Which is very helpful of her, but makes her feel like one of the NPCs in an adventure video game. I feel like if I come back and talk to her in five minutes, she’ll be saying the exact same shit.

The point is this woman should do other stuff. She needs to, or she’s just a plot device, not a character. Your characters have choices about what to do with their time. Everybody does, even if they’re the Dreaded Midday Assassin for the Panda Queen.* Sit down and riddle me this: what’s their favourite thing to do? And why?

For some, their favourite thing to do might be work, which says something about them.** Others play games, have hobbies, work on skills. They read, listen to music, crochet merkins for charity. They drink, smoke, fight, fuck, or sit around and do absolutely nothing. And, because we’re writers, sometimes our characters love to do terrible things, to themselves and others.

So your Monday Challenge this week is to decide what one of your characters loves to do more than anything else, and then to tell me why. I’ll be over here, going through an entire list of secondary characters, doing the same thing.

*Though their time might be taken up with getting a better assassination time slot. Midday assassin can’t be easy.
**Either they have a job they love or their life is very, very empty.

 

Twisted Mirror: The Bad Guy

Posted: April 12, 2013 in writing
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0
Broken mirror

Look with caution. (Photo credit: Anakronfilm)

I may have mentioned before that I like bad guys. No, not in that damn stupid pop-psychology ‘I can change him’ way. But in fiction, a good bad guy can make or break a story.

I was thinking about the idea of antagonists in the shower the other day*, and trying to sort out what I really like about some of them. Both ones I’ve read and ones I’ve written. I’ll spare you the long, meandering route my brain took to reach a conclusion and jump to the point: my favourites are antagonists that in some way mirror the protagonist.

They should have some key aspects in common: background, proclivities, something. The idea is that the antagonist should take some of those good or neutral qualities and twist them somehow. Maybe they go a step further down the road to hell than the protagonist, maybe they do things for fun that the protagonist has to do out of necessity, maybe take a good quality to such an extreme that it becomes something terrifying. But they should have a connection. Because if they don’t, then what the hell is the story about? Why are these two people** at odds? Why do they so desperately want to stop each other from achieving their goals?

I read somewhere once—can’t quite remember where, but I must have liked it—that real hate, the kind that fills you with fire and acid, doesn’t come from differences, but from similarities and differences paired. We can’t really hate someone completely different from us because we don’t know them. They are alien to us. But someone who is enough like us to highlight every flaw, every choice gone wrong, every might-have-been moment…maybe them we can really hate. Because they are, in some way, something we could have been. Or, worse, something we might still become. Which is why it’s so important to fight them.

I have to think in the shower more often.

*See? I follow my own advice.
**I am aware that not all antagonists need to be people, but most of mine are, and it makes the construction of the sentence simpler. If you prefer to be a pedant, read this sentence as, “Why is the protagonist at odds with this person/thing/force, natural or otherwise/social paradigm/whatever the hell else you feel like making the goddamn antagonist now leave me alone.”

Older Entries