Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 21

The Hammer and the Fall

In creative life, many do not appreciate the time taken between the hammer and the fall. Now I’m going to be all metal and talk about hammers and striking and forging, but the metaphor could just as easily be the time taken between the seed and the flower, and be about soil and water and nurturing, but I like the hammer metaphor better, while recognizing (I hope!) that not everything is indeed a nail.

So with that caveat made, what am I talking about, the hammer and the fall?

The time taken between the having of an idea, and the forging of it into shape.

For some this is short, the hammer falls quickly, repeatedly, and the idea is forged and tempered at speed, the artist in tune with their vision, the art ready to be produced. But for others, for many creative people, the hammer can sit on the ground, seen, waiting, and not picked up – but it is there. You have the idea, but you’re not yet ready to work on it. The reaching for the hammer can take a long time too, that’s when you toy with the idea, think it through, daydream about it, argue with it, whatever your process is: but the hammer is not yet in hand, the idea not yet pinned in place on the anvil, ready to be made into something new.

Even once you have a strong sense of an idea, and the hammer in hand, it may take a long time before you raise the hammer, get it ready to drop – you are waiting for the idea to be ready, or more likely (at least in my case) for you yourself to be ready to express it and then, only then, after potentially years of waiting, are you finally ready to drop the hammer on the idea, to start forging it into the thing you have so long dreamed of.

That is the time taken between the hammer and the fall. Sometimes everything fits and you can strike immediately, in other cases you or the idea or a combination of the two need time to get to a place where you can commit to the act of creation, and are ready to make something new. It cannot be rushed, but also should not be ignored.

And that is why the hammer waits to fall, it waits for the right time, the right moment, the right mode of expression. For magic to be made, the hammer must strike truly, and it is something that waits within us as writers or artists, gathering weight and momentum, life experience and time served, until its moment comes to fall, and strike.

And then it is glorious.

The hammer and the fall. Potential energy and kinetic. Harness both in your writing or art and you are, at that moment, become so much more. It does not matter if the heavens or the masses sing your name, in that moment you are realized. In that moment you are whole, as an artist. In that moment you are real.

And that is glorious.

Mystery Blogger Award

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I kept saying I’d do this, and finally I have got around to it! Thanks Mitch for my first ever blog award nomination!! I feel all grown up now!

The Rules:

Use the logo and list the rules
Thank whoever nominated you and provide a link to their blog
Tell your readers 3 things about yourself (see below)
Answer the questions you were asked (see belower)
Nominate other blogs and notify them (see belowerer)
Ask your nominees 5 questions of your choice, with one weird or funny question

 

Three things about me:

I like parties when they’re over, that’s when I can finally relax and enjoy them.

I’m a sucker for games with expansions. The more the merrier.

I just bought a new shaft for my pool cue. I didn’t need it, but it is my first indulgence since getting a new job, and it is 1 inch longer than the old one. I’m going to find out if size matters in a shaft. I’ve just realized that this too is a form of expansion for my pool game. I’ll be here all day…

The questions I was asked:

1) What moment or choice in your past do you wish you could undo? Mitch, this is a doozy! Never believe anyone who says I regret nothing, or I have no regrets. They will be lying, deluded, or dangerously incurious about their own lives as lived. Edith Piaf and Frank Sinatra may have sung prettily, but they have a lot to answer for in helping to promote a culture of no regrets. At least Frank (I believe) didn’t much like that line in his song. If I could turn back time (Cher) to undo moments and choices I’d break the dial. But I can’t, so am forced to go on, living with the things I cannot change, and vowing to do/be better. That’s Frank again, but I don’t hold that against him!

2) Funniest movie/s you ever saw? South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. There’s a lot of story behind it, with some regrets liberally sprinkled in, but it was an incredible release in a bad time. It isn’t as funny on a rewatch. You had to be there. I laughed until I cried and couldn’t breathe, regrouped for a while, then got hit by the next comic avalanche. The first Hangover movie was a hilarious breath of fresh air too, with no associated regrets! (Apart from watching the next two, and seeing the magic die…)

3) Greatest song/s you’ve ever heard? I’ve already mentioned this online and so will never use it as a security question or answer on anything. Gates of Babylon by Rainbow is simply the greatest song ever written or performed. It completely changed my twelve year old life. I do regret that it has led to my present day deafness though.

4) Greatest truth you’ve ever learned? That it’s a long way to the top, if you want to rock’n’roll.

5) What are the last words you want to hear before dying, and/or the first words you want to hear after dying? “Look away from the sea, I can take you anywhere…” OR “Wake up.” Before or after is fine.

Nominate Other Blogs:

These are folk with tales worth telling, perspectives worth sharing. There are so many more, but these will do for today!

JM Williams : http://jmwilliams.site/

Darkwood https://kaiyahartauthor.online/

Educated Unemployed Indian https://educatedunemployedindian.com/

Life of Chaz https://lifeofchaz.com/

The Lily Café https://thelilycafe.wordpress.com/

Choices in error https://erroneouschoices.wordpress.com/

Dirty Sci-fi Buddha  https://dirtyscifibuddha.com/

Jennifer M Zeiger https://jennifermzeiger.wordpress.com/

An Author’s Travails https://anauthorstravails.wordpress.com/

The Darkest Tunnel https://thedarkesttunnel.wordpress.com/

Itanndy https://itanndy.com/

Dread Poets Sobriety https://dreadpoetssobriety.com/

Unbolt Me https://unbolt.me/

Morgan Hazelwood https://morganhazelwood.com/

 

Five questions for my nominees:

1) What journey has made the longest lasting impression on you?

2) Which book, if any, has most completely transported you into another world, or another person’s experience?

3) What is your favourite thing about home?

4) What smell, if any, transports you back to childhood?

5) Do you put your pants on one leg at a time?

Why I Write Fantasy: To Write the Classic Non-Human Races, in Other Books, Later

 

In the fantasy of my youth non-human races were always part of the magical formula that took me from the mundane here, to the fantastical there. Talking animals, creatures from greek myth, folklore figures brought to life, all of them were part of that secret world just around the corner and over the hill that I kept on wanting to find, but never quite could.

The classic fantasy races of Tolkien soon came to dominate the landscape, followed by their fantasy role-playing equivalents and variants. It was expected, I thought, to write a fantasy with dwarves, and elves, and goblins/orcs. And humans of course. But not hobbits – I never wanted to write hobbits, perhaps because they were too familiar, or their story too well told by their creator, it was hard to imagine saying more about them. kender, on the other hand… nah, I couldn’t touch them either!

Funnily enough, the first books I wrote had none of the ‘classic’ fantasy races present. Nope, I tell a lie – goblins were there from the start, I even had a goblin character for a while – pretty ahead of my time in 1985! Maybe I was kicking against the expectation early, but I went out of my way to create different types of human, then two non-human races not derived from any other book or game I knew of, and then I weakened and threw a bunch of elves into the second one, haha! (I already had my Pern rip-off dragon, I’m ashamed to say!) I also had a thinly disguised balrog as potential hero in book two – things started to go decidedly into left field by that stage, and I was having fun throwing anything I wanted into the mix and seeing what stuck, as I had pantsed my way into a complete mess and couldn’t see a way to end book two, let alone fight my way to a coherent  five book series, so I think I kind of let myself go nuts with the plot twists as I was hoping I’d somehow find a new driver for the story that would help me work my way to the end. That didn’t quite work out.

The book that I spent many years on did have the classic trio of dwarves and elves and goblins, but written to a particular thematic purpose that let them be familiar, yet different in nature from the Tolkien or D&D versions I was by then so used to. I was being arch and full of ideas, so they had in some way to be archetypes and carry my ideas around, proclaiming their ‘not-Tolkienness’ to the world. It was a phase, what can I say, and in a few years you may get to check them out as I do intend to revamp that book now – there’s plenty of good story in there, and I’m no longer precious about every syllable, and divorced enough from it to gut it as necessary when the time comes. I quite look forward to that, in fact! (And so should you, honest!)

In creating The World Belt I decided that I didn’t want the classic races there, this was not the world for them. But demons and the undead are a-ok, you understand! The stories of The World Belt explore magic, and the influence of magic upon humanity, and having other races I felt would dilute the focus of the stories. Dwarves and elves are cool, but they don’t need to show up in Aranvail, at least not until that portal starts reaching to other worlds…

When I do eventually write a story with those classic fantasy races in it I plan to go full Tolkien, and be unashamed in exploring the tropes around each, while at the same time providing a good ‘why’ for each race’s culture, philosophy, and actions in the world. It isn’t enough for fantasy races to just be anymore for me, they also need to have a reason, and a purpose (as Tolkien’s did), or they are just window dressing to make the world you have created different, and I think they deserve more, which is maybe why I’m holding fire on producing those stories, because when I do those, I’ll have to work hard to do them right.

The Writing Life: Taking a Writing Holiday

So I had this plan (not for a giant wooden badger) to start writing the first draft of my next book while The Killer and The Dead is off getting developmentally edited. You know, use the time, maximize my word counts, get the first few chapters of The Slavegirl and the Traveller banged out and be ahead of the game for next year. I mean I have the story plotted out in quite a bit of (exhaustive) detail, so it wouldn’t be too hard to just jump into it, right? I even know what the opening line will be!

Yeah, well, the opening line can just wait. This last half year has been one long frantic rush, with July 2nd as its highly anticipated terminus. I reached it. It’s time to stop, for just a little while.

Time to not think about writing stories for a week or two. Time to recharge my batteries, to go out and experience life, nature, art, to refill the creative well with inspirational experiences. Mostly I’ll be in bed or in front of a screen, but you get my lofty ambitions.

I’m a little tired. I could do with a break. I mean I’d like to do extra writing if I could, but should I confuse my brain by jumping ahead onto a different project for three weeks, probably start getting right into it, only then to have to switch gears back to writing Stahl in TKATD? That seems like a strategy that could backfire. Better to write some nice blogs when not time crunching, including the ones I got nominated for (thanks again!), and to do some mundane book related work. Pay some more attention to my FB reading and writing groups again, catch up on Goodreads updates, add more keywords to my advertising campaigns. Do new ad copy and try other strategies. Watch more research videos and not feel like it is time taken away from writing, but time being spent usefully in service of writing. And maybe go to a museum, up a hill, into a gym. Lord am I lardy right now!

Watching TV and movies might be fun again – recently I always felt it was time taken away from writing (apart from watching The Expanse, which has just been awesome all the way) but now I can be mindless, not always thinking about plot and character, give my brain a break and let it come back to those ideas of its own accord, rather than forcing it there. It’s not as if I ever really stop thinking about story ideas – even when writing this draft of The Killer and The Dead I was daydreaming and writing down snippets for both The Slavegirl and The Traveller and the sequel to The Thief and The Demon. (When I write a series set on another world, the books will NOT be The X and The Y! But in The World Belt, that’s the way it’s going to be! Until it isn’t, of course.)

So taking a vacation from writing, from the pressure to produce, seems like a good idea right now. I have another five months to come of deadlines, and need to be refreshed and able to take them on. Burning the writing candle at both ends by trying to get a few chapters of the next project started now, while a good idea in the abstract, is perhaps setting myself up for writing burn out down the line, and I don’t want to go there! If writing stopped being fun, stopped being a useful expression of my creativity, a need that is only satisfied by doing, then it would be very hard for me to keep doing it, and I want to – I have so many plans for the future! To implement those plans I need to manage myself to get to that future refreshed and always eager to keep exploring new writing horizons, and that means, for now, putting down the composing pen.

Over there. Where I’m going to leave it. For a couple of weeks. Honest.

Why I Write Fantasy: To Submit Drafts at the Very Last Minute.

But it is in. With 2 minutes to spare MST.

I look forward to making it better, with help.

But hurrah! Phase one is done!

The Writing Life: Almost there…

The draft for my editor is almost ready. I’ll need the weekend to finish it, but we’re almost there.

As a result, I really don’t have anything to say here.

Other than this, haha!

Writing is a privilege. I am lucky in my life that I have the inclination, and the time, to write. Many others who would like to, have not been able to. Many stories have been lost, untold. I am grateful to have had the time, and the opportunity to write. To tell another story, and not leave it untold.

There is great pleasure in writing, great satisfaction. If I didn’t get a certain singular high from writing that I get from no other activity, then maybe I wouldn’t be so drawn to it. But crafting words to represent thoughts, and to sometimes feel that you have in fact lasso’d the moon, captured a thought entire, is an incredible rush. You may look later at that same sentence and feel like the moon slipped its mooring again and escaped you, but you still had that flash as you wrote, and sometimes, just sometimes, when you look back at what you put down on paper, you see the moon still there, glowing. Maybe only for you, maybe no-one else will get it, but even as a solipsistic exercise in expressing something to youself, it had worth, because it is bloody hard to make the ephemeral tangible. And that’s what writing is for me, and it is awesome in the real sense of that word.

I’m going on. Bed calls. Another long day tomorrow.

Fare you all very well.

Why I Write Fantasy: To Hit Deadlines

Yep, I have one week to deadline on getting my manuscript to my editor for the developmental pass.

This means I have a liquid eff ton of work to do in the next seven days, five of which I will be working. Oh yeah.

I got a lot done this past weekend, enough so I’m sure I’ll get there now, perhaps messily, perhaps sideways and with my wheels on fire, (I’m fond of that phrase, apologies for its reuse!) but I’m going to get there. I just won’t get there having written much in the way of an in depth blog this week!

Just like Comic Con before it, this task sucks all the air out of my other endeavours. There can only be one focus right now, get the writing done, review it, lick it into shape a little, let it go. There will be a lot more reworking after I get the developmental notes back. Or the developmental stack, as the case may be!

But I’m excited. This is a new process for me, trying to do things on a tight (for me) schedule, set well in advance, with a final product in mind by the end of this year. I’m accentuating the positive, enjoying being forced to work harder in shorter controlled bursts, (another phrase I’m fond of!) not having the luxury of procrastination, or of too much reflection. I’ve got to go, put it on the page, and move on. No time to agonise! Which I would, if I gave myself time. I’m curious to see how it turns out. I want it to turn out well: I have a lot of stories to write, and less time than I’d like to write them in, seeing as I waited until I was the wrong side of 45 before I published my first book!

So for now I’m embracing the rapid fire, trust your instincts, let your subconscious do the work style of creation. The careful planner and plotter in me is a litle horrified, but continuity can be fixed, right?? My main worry is the big picture continuity – the threads between the books, the set ups and links to later books, and making sure they are in place as I like them, and pointing the reader in the right anticipated direction. All while having the book function effectively as a stand alone, which it is. That is my biggest concern – will I overplay my hand too early, or not give enough hints of things to come? Will the book feel spontaneous, or rushed? I can’t know yet, it is always impossible to tell when you are in the midst of creating it, but I’m looking forward to finding out. Sometimes you just have to forge ahead and let the doubts trail behind you. I’ll  have time for review, analysis, and reflection later.

But that time isn’t now. Onward!

Good luck to all writers out there who are trying to get projects completed – it isn’t easy, but if you keep pushing, you’ll get there!

 

The Writing Life: Writing as an Exercise

Part of writing is persisting when you’re not feeling particularly up for it: you’re tired, distracted, unsure, stuck, maybe even bored and wanting to move on, but no, you’ve got to write that next page.

Sometimes I’ll just go to bed.

Other times I’ll get a cup of tea, play a few racks of pool, procrastinate.

And yet other times, like now, I’ll just sit down and type anyway, and see what falls out. It doesn’t have to be inspired, but it should at least be true. True to how you’re feeling at the time, anyway.

When I’m writing fiction that is harder – it is difficult to write a scene in which your character is supposed to be on fire with emotion when you the writer are feeling like a wrung out dishrag.

But amazingly, sometimes if you just start, your dishrag prose can start to smoulder, your brain light up, and the character can indeed catch fire once again. And no, I’ve never read the Hunger Games.

Make a game of it, decide that you’re going to make the next sentence run on far too long, just for the fun of it, knowing that later you’ll probably break it up because when you get to reading it out loud you might run out of breath, no matter how many strategic commas you put in there. Or decide to be deliberately repetitive, repeating words just to go against the rules you read that told you not to be repetitious. Repetition sometimes has its place. It can drive home a theme, or a message, or a feeling. Not here, but if you choose the right words in the correct context, it can do wonders, and be fun for the reader – when the page is a kaleidoscope of endless, continuous variation, sometimes it is nice for the mind to rest in a familiar spot here and there. Never repeating things can be as bad as overdoing it, to my mind. And only you, the writer (and then your editors, hahaha!) can be the judge of that.

A lot of writing is feel. What feels natural to you, what feels dramatic, what feels intimate, empty, powerful, sorrow filled. Your own natural timing for scenes, conversations, fights and more are all at least initially a matter of feel. Yes you can find rules, be taught best practices, be shown formulas, but ultimately each writer makes their own decisions about how to implement them. Learn well, but don’t be afraid to let your own personality shine through, because otherwise we’d just be writing algorithms, not writers.

So just start writing, make it a game, try to surprise yourself, insert an unlikely word and make it work. Puissance is a great word to try to slide into a scene unobtrusively. Doesn’t really manage not to stick out, but in thinking about that you may have written a bunch of other stuff as its set up that will actually be worthwhile later! Because yeah, writers recycle, and not all the stuff you write, even when you are rested, ready, and inspired, makes the cut. So if even your best material can be put aside as stuff that might find a use later, so the writing you do to dig yourself out of a funk doesn’t have to feel bad if large chunks of it get stuffed into the recycling bin for potential use either. It goes right in next to the pieces you thought were going to be awesome. Or to put it another way not involving recycling: when you know even your best first draft will always be edited into better shape, why worry about the somewhat sub-par stuff the first time around, as it will also inevitably be elevated through editing too? Just write, and let your later self pick the diamonds from the rough. They might be surprised and impressed by what you wrote when you didn’t feel 100% as you started typing!

And of course, any writing is better than none. If you can’t approach the subject you really want to, approach another, just to keep the words flowing.

And finally, remember that perhaps making the writing muscle work when it doesn’t want to is the best way of all of strengthening it. I like that idea. Now I’m off to bed!

Why I Write Fantasy: Morality, Culture, and Character Creation

So folks, while it is fresh in my mind I thought I’d reiterate what I thought was one of the central points discussed during our panel at Denver Comic Con. (Thank you once again to my fab panelists!)

And that is this: I feel that paying attention to the culture a character grows up in, and the moral values that culture may have instilled in the character, or that he or she may have chosen to rebel against, helps to integrate the character into the world the writer has created, and makes their actions and motivations more concrete, more real. I think that this lessens the occasional sense you get when reading fantasy that the protagonists, while living in a world of magical mcguffins very unlike our own, seem to be more like us in their values and beliefs than you would think they should be, given the world they have supposedly grown up in. (Of course this does not apply to a portal fantasy where characters from our world go into a fantastical one – but the challenge then is to make sure that the people that the lead characters meet are suitably alien in their viewpoints and not also thinly disguised early 21st century fellow travelers.)

This isn’t reinventing the wheel. I think many writers do this without consciously addressing it as they write the story, it is just part of building their characters, but I think that if you do think about it consciously, you have a chance to add real depth to your characters, and make them and the world they live in all the more real for the reader. It is an extra addition of awesome, not a whole new revelation that will change writing forever. I’m not so deluded as to think this is a hugely original idea, but it is one that I think is worth sharing.

And, to be honest, I came up with this idea after writing The Thief and The Demon, but found upon reflection and looking at the book I wrote, that I had done a lot of the work I had advised anyway – linking characters to the world through their upbringing, and the values they had adopted as most important to them. Could I have done it better? I think so, and had I been consciously doing it as I wrote I think I would have rounded out everyone that little bit better. It is all in the details.

But I did use songs, stories, sayings, attitudes of other characters to show what influenced the protagonists, and I think I also showed the characters’ moral positions crucially through their own attitudes and decision making. Some of these, particularly Fistmar’s, our hero, shifted through the book as he re-evaluated what he thought he knew about life and rejected some of the things he had always believed in as he discovered more and more about the ‘true’ nature of his world, and the society he grew up in. So I think I did pretty well, but would strive to do better next time.

In my current project, The Killer and The Dead, the issue of showing the protagonist’s moral center or viewpoint is made somewhat easier by the fact that the book is written in the first person. He is telling you what he thinks and why. But of course he may not be entirely honest with you, or himself, so there are gaps there that can be exploited to show that what he thinks, and how he actually acts, can be at odds, allowing the reader to see through his lies or self-deceptions and see another truth that is hidden from our narrator. That is an interesting new challenge that I am enjoying taking on.

So there you have it folks – when thinking about morality and culture in fantasy fiction, what I’d recommend is that you think about the morality and culture your characters were exposed to early, and how it would effect them throughout their lives. This, I believe, will add a extra layer of verisimilitude (I just wanted to use that word) to your characterization, and who doesn’t want that?

(Writers who are pursing novels of ideas, that’s who, but that’s a whole other discussion for next time!)

Thank you to Kat at the Lily Café for nominating me for a Liebster award! I now have two awards to do the blogs on! Some of those questions are tricky, and need time and consideration to answer, but I will get on it soon! (It may have to wait until after my July 2nd deadline though – I have a lot of writing to get done, and not a lot of time to do it in!)

The Writing Life: Go Team!

Now I’ve done a blog before about how it takes a team, but tonight I’m just saying, for the last time, that I and my companions on the panel will be at Denver Comic Con tomorrow at 12 midday, room 404, discussing Morality and Culture in Fantasy Fiction: a look at how grounding characters in the culture and morality of their world can improve characterisation, enhance drama and provide extra depth of motivation for heroes and villains alike.

Speaking of heroes and villains, we will also touch on alternatives to good versus evil as moral paradigms in fantasy worlds, and discuss how to present moral codes and behaviour for younger readers, as well as mature audiences!

There truly will be something for everyone, reader, writer, lost cosplayer alike! Come on down and enjoy the fun at Denver Comic Con 2018!!

(Normal service will resume next week – LOL!)