Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 24

Why I Write Fantasy: To be an Original, Baby

I’ve talked about various inspirations and influences that led me to writing fantasy, an urge that has stuck with me since childhood, but it seems to me that at times I am endlessly circling around the central question of this series without ever answering it. I think in part because I’m answering it piecemeal, a long form puzzle to put together on a rainy day.

But today I think why not try to put my finger on one prime mover in my desire to write.

Beyond the things that inspired me, that influenced me, that shaped the course of my imagination, beyond the things that drive the particular form of my fiction and alongside the primal urge to simply speak and tell stories is the desire to say something new. In my youth I wanted to shout huge NEW things that were mindblowing (at least to me). The first paragraph of this blog was a major thesis of my first unpublished novel. The need to try to explain, to encapsulate, to know (a moment, an emotion, the universe – what it is that needs to be explained, encapsulated, understood is almost secondary to the pathological desire to capture it in words, so another may also know this thing, the butterfly of rarity that you have magically managed to pin down, without killing. (If you kill it, it won’t live in the minds of others. Mangled writing represents the corpses of thoughts that writers tried to capture, but didn’t quite manage to keep alive. This could well be a classic exemplar of the form.)) The desire to do this runs up against the sense that thought is fleeting and can rarely be caught, however much we want to capture and crystallize it into something beautiful. And of course the feeling lingers that capturing something free and fleeting is to alter its nature and rob it of its beauty – the Schrödinger’s cat of creativity – if you record a moment perfectly, have you also somehow destroyed what made it special?

I cannot deny that simple ego plays its part in the desire to be an ‘original’. I think that most modern writers write, or started writing to record parts of themselves, however shadowed, hidden, or obscured by image and subject. There is a certain sense of wanting to leave our smudged fingerprints behind us, to at least be regarded, if only briefly, by another, one mind to another. I woz ‘ere, ‘ere I woz, woz I ‘ere? I used to insert ‘ere woz I! (Superfluously) to that little ditty, until I realized it added very little, and in fact ruined the simplicity of the three line scheme. I was trying to be different, but marring the original.

In writing fantasy I do want to write something different, perhaps a style, or a subject not necessarily seen a hundred times before. Of course there are elements and tropes seen many times already: use the word wizard and you tap into oceans of association by now. Every story written by every writer is in a sense original no matter how derivative it may appear, because nobody (I believe) can erase their own voice: a perfect stylistic mimic will create their own content, a copier of content will have their own stylistic tics. In trying to be as others, still they betray themselves. In trying to be different, we are drowned in how we are just the same as everyone else, all those voices that came before us and staked out the ground of the genre or subject we wish to discuss.

This is why genres get expanded, why new forms are created – the restless desire to find a new way of expressing old ideas for new generations, as conceived by single minds who just had to speak.

It is so easy to be jaded. I get the message in Sheryl’s song. Or Cypress Hill’s. But damn me, I still want to write my stories, and I (perhaps foolishly) still think they are new, and say things just a little differently to those that came before. The urge to say “this was my voice, this was my song”, is strong, and no matter what the genre, I think when you look at a writer’s work closely, you will see the desire there to be noted as something original in some way – maybe in the engine block, maybe in the fairing, maybe just in the way the story rides.

So there you have it: this week’s confession – not surprising I think. I write fantasy because it is a mainline to being original – if everything in the world of your creation is your choice, then it is hard not to imagine that the expression of your choices will be original. That is the baseline. If from there you want to write the stories you never read, but wanted to, there is an extra dollop of possible originality – but of course all of your fellow generational cohort who grew up reading those same books are also kicking against those traditions, many in ways very similar to your own. If your writing is not a reaction to anything you read, but an expression of newly synthesized ideas in a unique environment, well, don’t be surprised if it reads to others like a strange mix of Aristotle, Molière, and Tolstoy. Many restless minds before you have tried to capture the ineffable too. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try though.

It ain’t easy, being an original. But we all are. So just write.

The Writing Life: Doubts Part 5: How I Made My Peace with Doubt (Or: How I Reduced Doubt to the Guerilla War Option Only. Or: Be The Shark)

That’s a lengthly title. But for me an accurate one. I have not defeated doubt, I have not cast it into the outer darkness to lie impotent and weeping. I have, like the demon in my book, cut it down to a manageable size, and reduced it to fighting me at the page by page level, a guerilla in the word jungle, ambushing my paragraphs and sentences, but scattering before me when I bring my full focus to bear on the same territory.

Does this make sense for you, dear reader?

Once I was locked in total war with doubt, and for a long time it held the field and it was I who waged the guerilla war: scratching out words and phrases, stitching together paragraphs and pages before the doubt shock troops rolled in and halted all progress. Sometimes the troops didn’t have to be employed, the long range barrage from the doubt cannon simply kept my writing self crouched in its bunker, unable to escape or write at all. I would retreat from the front lines, go on furlough and pretend all was right with the world, attend parties, go to work and ignore the distant conflict for months at a time. I would say I was recharging my batteries, gathering my strength, but no, I had retreated from the battlefield and left doubt the victor. Doubt was happy for his ally distraction to keep me from the field. Or for dissatisfaction to keep me from engaging when sometimes I did dare to look at the pages of words once again. Doubt had me pinned, and was not in any mood to relent.

What happened, how did I turn the tide of this conflict?

Well, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I got older. The dreamtime of my 20s passed, and my 30s rolled on as I pretended I still had acres of future ahead of me. Even into my 40s, delusion, another ally of doubt, kept its grip on me, telling me I had time, I could delay a little longer. (And you know, I’ve never read Sandman, but I think all the main characters there are D this and that – it seems I’m going down the same path here!)

But the cold awareness of growing mortality finally struck. The sense of time’s sand running between my fingers, not in any pretty trickle, but in a flood, overwhelmed me.

Now I spent many years working as a nurse. I have seen death many times, peaceful, traumatic, fearful, accepting, surrounded by love, alone but for strangers. I have tended to the dead and to their families. But it is a funny thing: you can work in the field, see mortality in all its certitude, and still delay in your own case, still not viscerally understand that there lies your future. So I ignored my own mortality for 20 odd years. When finally I felt it in my gut, the utter grim certainty that I too would pass, and needed to act soon or miss what chance I had in life to share my stories, doubt attacked again, telling me it was already too late, why even try now, with the dried out husk that my creativity must have become after all those wasted years? Why even try?

It is a bitter thing to realise you are trying to sabotage yourself into soundless oblivion.

But the urgency of life in me toppled doubt’s ramparts, scattered its troops, shattered its grip. I had to write. I had to publish. I had to ask for help in order to do those things.

I forged forward, I wrote, rewrote, edited, edited again, and again, until I decided that any more was just another form of delay creeping in to hamper me. I published. The doubt of a lifetime, that told me I would never do such a thing, was defeated.

But though driven from that field, it was not vanquished. I started writing my next book, powering through the early phases until doubt started to say hello again, creeping in to spoil progress, to snipe from the edges of the page, to argue over paragraphs, character moments, plot choices. I can tell it to sod off and push through, but I have to acknowledge that it is still there, but reduced to the guerilla fighter I once was. If I keep pushing, maybe I can make it retreat further, to a bunker of its own, or to a spot far from the front line where it can languish, ignored. For now though I can take comfort in knowing I hold the whip hand, and the more I do, the less it becomes. That is how I have found it is best to handle doubt. Doing weakens it.

How might this help you? Well a) please learn from me and don’t wait until you have a not-disguised-at-all midlife crisis about your creativity and finally do something about it. Be aware of all the ways in which doubt, distraction, dissatisfaction, and delusion can work together to delay your output. I know it is hard, but try not to imagine that you have next month, next year. I spent years locked in that trance. I once looked after a man who died on his 40th birthday. When my own 40th birthday rolled around I remembered him, and thought I really should do ‘something’. I dithered (another one!) for another two and a half years. Don’t do that, just don’t. b) understand that the best way to defeat doubt is to act, to work, to write and not stop. Doubt and distraction dazzled me for years. I have found that putting my head down and writing breaks their barrage and advances my own position, line by hard earned line. Persist, if you possibly can, and if you can recognize the tricks doubt and its allies are playing on you, respond by writing. Don’t be satisfied to have an idea, or hold it in your head, or talk about it: write it down, then expand upon it, and then rework it and make it stronger – that is territory hard earned. Defend it, and move forward. Just as doubt likes to hold you still, so moving forward, even erratically, can cause it to scatter before you. Be like that lad I once met in London during a big freeze when all the planes were grounded, the roads blocked and the train service was all that was left, and that not certain for long. We were boarding a train, which did not lead to his destination. He said to me as he bobbed and weaved in the cold, “Gotta keep moving, like a shark. Keep moving, and I’ll get there in the end.”

That memory always makes me smile. I know he got there in the end, because he refused to stay still. Be the shark.

Why I Write Fantasy: Inspirations – the Music of Fantasy Part 2: The Metal Years

I started buying metal and rock albums in 1983. I still remember the date when I first bought Heaven and Hell by Black Sabbath, and the Rainbow albums On Stage and Rising, and I celebrate those days each year. Loudly. 35 years this year. That seems hardly credible, let me tell you!

Ronnie James Dio was the prime musical influence for me, and I listened to his music over and over again, but the 80s were an incredible decade for metal music, and I had the 70s to mine for classic albums from the fathers of metal too. (And the older albums were way cheaper, and so stretched my paper round pound all the farther!)

The first band I owned 5 albums by was Judas Priest. I bought them all in September and October of 1983, the most recent release I bought being 1980’s British Steel, the rest were 70s classics from the time before studs and leather came to dominate their look, and Screaming for Vengeance defined their sound for the rest of that decade. Prior to that they went in quite a few unexpected directions, and I, an ardent teen searching for music to match the feelings and ideas coursing through me, found in them both bone crunching heaviness and otherworldly dreams. The song that for me encapsulates this is in fact two songs that run together on their Sad Wings of Destiny album, Dreamer Deceiver. Give it a listen, you may be surprised by it.

So many of their early songs glittered with ideas for me, Island of Domination, Sinner, Beyond the Realms of Death, Here Come the Tears/Dissident Aggressor (another pairing of songs that should be listened to together, in my mind) making Judas Priest a far more interesting band than the casual observer might imagine when looking at them through the ubiquitous lens of You’ve Got Another Thing Coming, great song though it is.

But if Judas Priest provided a  solid break from the various works of Dio, Queensrÿche and Crimson Glory represented true rivals for the throne of metal in my 80s heart, writing epic songs powered by twinned guitars and voices that in their prime simply had to be heard to be believed.

Queensrÿche arrived first. I saw them supporting Dio on The Last in Line tour in September 1984 and was instantly smitten. For a fantasy obsessed teenager their first EP and album were an insanely perfect fit, the music, ideas and delivery just shocked through me. So many great songs, like dreams becoming real, with Roads to Madness as my personal favourite by the narrowest of margins over everything else, though The Lady Wore Black rides it very close. They did not put a foot wrong in their first four releases, though they turned their back on the fantastical for Operation: Mindcrime, an incredible contemporary concept album that was their crowning achievement. For me, they were never as good after that, though they enjoyed greater commercial success. I remember (to my shame) being on a train and passing off the lyrics to The Lady Wore Black as my own to two older lads I got talking to, as early proof I was a writer. (I had already started writing my first book by this stage, but didn’t have the confidence to share that, and so offered those lyrics as evidence. I wonder now if they knew what I was doing and let it slide, if so, I thank them both very much!) QR’s early music was the soundtrack to scout trips and playing Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! choose your own adventure books, that were so much fun they inspired me to write my own, which one day I may share with you!

(It’s funny how at that time in your life some sets of input can be so closely intertwined as to never quite fully separate afterwards. For me the Belgariad has as its soundtrack Rainbow’s Down To Earth album, especially Eyes of the World, a song that seemed to sum up the malice and threat of Ctuchik, before he was undone at the end of Magician’s Gambit. I digress. But that is an awesome song – listen to it, and if you are an Eddings fan, tell me it doesn’t capture some of that Belgariad magic, haha!)

QR’s songs went everywhere with me. I scrawled Nightrider across far too many school jotters to count, and was in heaven when Rage for Order came out, even if Geoff Tate did look like a glammed up fish on the inner sleeve photo! (the glam metal phase did have an unfortunate effect on some bands that changed their look to adapt – Saxon took a hit that they almost didn’t recover from when they went glam on Innocence is No Excuse, another inner sleeve photo that is best forgotten, which is a shame because that was a great album otherwise, but the denim and leather lads wondered what was up with that lipstick!! It was very much another world 30+ years ago, children!)

Anyway, for a long time I thought nothing could hold a candle to Queensryche, until I discovered Crimson Glory. It was 1988 and I was a grimmer, smellier, all grown up teen. Crimson Glory matched my mood perfectly, with more pointed songs about madness, (I know, I know, my fave QR song was supposedly about that too, (teenagers got to teenage, I guess, and who wasn’t interested at that age in identity and the possibility of it all melting away beneath your feet? You weren’t? No? Oh well, must just have been me and all those metal bands, I suppose!) but it (Roads to Madness) is a fantasy epic and warning not to overreach versus Crimson Glory’s Lost Reflection, which is, in comparison, a raw depiction of actual pain and suffering, brilliantly delivered.)  loves lost and of course dragon ladies. (I mean, why not?) Song about Azrael? Awesome. Again it was the feelings and imagery that the band managed to project that was so enthralling to me at that time, awash in my own teen fantasies. Of course dark ladies of power and promise abounded –  the lyrics of most 80s bands could never be considered progressive, but at the time those things either didn’t register with me, or didn’t matter. Burning Bridges was the most awesome song ever according to 1988 me, it didn’t matter how dubiously conflicted the lyrics were on closer inspection. At the time I was growing my hair and attempting to be cool, and that song had incredible guitar breaks and vocals to die for, which counted for a lot more than any serious consideration of the lyrical content. He sounded tragically heroic, so he was, dammit! The years bring re-evaluations of more than just books.

Crimson Glory’s more tortured aesthetic, love of dark places and magical mistresses had a strong impact on me: the shadowed antagonist of my college-era novel was definitely partly inspired by their music, which also served as a kind of crossing point between a number of musical genres I favoured in the late 80s: fantasy laden rock, old school metal, glam metal, and gothic/alternative rock. Yes, these years also saw the dawn of my Gothic era, to be visited another time, perhaps!

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The Writing Life: Persistence and Progress

I wrote something with more words.

This week I hit some very pleasing milestones in my blogging career. Baby steps down the long road of blogging glory! I received my 500th like, and my 100th follower got on board. I am very grateful for both of these things. Thank you to my readers, and the first 100 to have joined me on this journey down the uncertain path that is the writing life. It has been a genuine pleasure to meet you, and to share my experiences so far.

I blogged erratically over a few years until buckling down to some discipline last September, and am now discovering the joys of persisting, and of actually using the wordpress reader to keep up with other people’s output! (Sorry for not embracing it sooner, hahaha!)

This is my corner of the sky, I’m glad to share it with you. I intend to persist a while yet, Mondays and Thursdays, and occasionally share my quiet satisfaction as the mile markers add up.

Thank you all once again.

Why I Write Fantasy: Inspirations – The Art of Fantasy, Part 1: Masters Old and New

So yes, now I’m dotting around. Last week I talked about a fragment of the music that inspires me, and began with that avatar of fantasy infused metal, Ronnie James Dio. I once wanted to design a tabletop roleplaying game campaign around a number of his songs. Maybe I’ll talk about that another time.

This week I want to talk about art as inspiration to write, and specifically visual art, the traditional image on canvas. I have had the great fortune to be exposed to the art of masters from a relatively young age, free to visit and revist them at will. When I travel, itself a constant source of inspiration, I always find myself drawn to galleries of art, mostly old, sometimes new, and from the creativity and expression of artists I gain great solace, and can feel creatively invigorated myself. I believe that the act of engaging with art that speaks to you, or that you find a way to interact with meaningfully, lights up the creative centres in your brain, or resonates with your artistic soul and calls forth your own impulse to create, however you wish best to imagine it. I can go either way. Art inspires art, seeing the creative expression of others can, and does, inspire the desire in me to produce my own. I just turn to my prefered medium to express my visions.

Now some things you see you just don’t like, or are as bad as can be in your opinion. It happens. Not everything in a gallery is sublime, there’s plenty of chaff to thresh our way through sometimes. The worst thing is for a piece to say nothing to you, for it to be inert. But then, like a book that does nothing for you, you can simply move on. It might speak to someone else.

As a pre-teen I was, for some reason, taken into the Scottish National Gallery, at the bottom of The Mound on Princes Street in Edinburgh. I remember walking into these large vaulted rooms, and being met with vast expanses of paint, detailed pictures of other worlds, some mythological, some of times long lost, but the lives of those people, or fragments of life and emotion captured on that still canvas made a huge impression on me. I always used to say it was a Titian that I was first transfixed by, and the gallery did possess a few, but now I can’t really be sure. I do know that I did return to that gallery as a teenager, as it was free to drop into and I could go there on my way to the train station and home, spend some time sitting and staring up at the works of Titian, Durer, El Greco, Gainsborough, Constable, Cezanne, Monet. I loved the colours of Titian the best. Yes, there were naked ladies, but if I’d gone there to be aroused I’d have blushed furiously and fled the building! No, I went there and my imagination burned with thoughts of who these people were, what those scenes meant (the gallery potted explanations were usefully vague), what had happened off camera, so to speak, or where the stories the paintings told me went next. I was amazed by motion captured in stillness, hands reaching but never moving, the contradiction creating a strange high, a heightened awareness of the visual I had not appreciated before.

Nothing made it directly into my writing, I don’t think, but the sensations of art lingered, became something I wanted to recreate with words after I discovered that I had a hard time with proportion when trying to produce a pen and ink of a stag beetle. The wings, well lets just say I got the detail vividly right, but did not match one wing’s size to the other!

In my 20s I lived in Glasgow, and became acquainted with the Gallery of Modern Art, another institution I could freely wander into at any time. Free access to art is an incredible gift, and one I am eternally grateful for. Here I met art installations, wooden imaginings of Laurasia and Gondwanaland (you sit on them), and massive canvases of single colours, washed out or broken with strong lines, Rabo Karabekian’s Windsor Blue Number Seventeen for real. I loved them, the thought behind washing machine parts and cigarette butts piled together, the visual meditation of standing in front of an abstract wall and letting it wash over and perhaps partly through me. That gallery helped me realized art didn’t end with Picasso, who at the time I didn’t care for that much anyway. It took a trip to Paris many years later for me to appreciate him a little better. (Not that I mentioned him in my Paris blog!) It was also fun to walk down stairs randomly decorated with the busts of Roman Emperors – an interesting contrast to all the modernity – or were they in another gallery? It kind of blurs together sometimes.

The figurative art of my youth fired my imagination, made me wonder about the lives of those strange people in odd clothes (or lack of them), but it also made them real, their experience across centuries as human as my own, making me realize that stories are as universal as the people who inhabit them. Modern art, with its challenge of expectations, and demand for the viewer to participate in making the art work made me realize that you can find wonder in the strangest of places, appreciating modern art helped me appreciate the beauty of the everyday more strongly. Both of these things became deep wells of remembered thoughts and feelings, especially yearning: art in me inspires yearning, to know, to see, to feel what the artist felt, or wants to inspire in us, and that became part of my own yearning to write, and to show others fantastical worlds, enough like our own for the people who live there to become real, but just out of reach, that we can experience, but never quite touch.

The Writing Life: Hey, Aren’t You Writing a Book?

Why yes, yes I am. Except I had this deadline for a first draft that expired in January, unmet. I think the gods are mocking me for answering a goodreads question about writer’s block and saying “I don’t really suffer from it, but here’s what I do when it kind of strikes…”

Bazinga! It struck, and my proposed solutions, well they didn’t work as well as hoped. I sat myself down sternly and told myself to write any old rubbish quite a few times, but magically decided to read the news instead. The internet is a terrible thing for the not-fully-motivated. Of course I did do writing adjacent stuff – this blog for instance, and getting some stuff done is an easy way to excuse yourself for not doing the main work ahead of you. But after a while you can’t help but notice it is an excuse!

So I feel rather foolish now. I could go back and edit my answer, but I feel my ill-advised hubris should be allowed to stand and act as a reminder to me in future to not take the ability to write for granted. Maybe I should add in a link to this column as a mea culpa.

I’m normally so full of ideas that it never really occurred to me I wouldn’t be able to write them down. I mean for the last month and a half I’ve basically ground to a halt, but I didn’t stop having ideas, running dialogues in my head, thinking about scenes to come etc., but when faced with the task of writing them down, I balked. I really should talk to my phone when daydreaming book fragments. I really really should do that! *Makes emphatic note to self*

Was I succumbing to doubt? There was some perfectionism going on, not wanting to write shoddily, but a first draft is allowed to be shoddyesque – I ignored that memo however. There was definitely procrastination going on too, but I’m not sure the origin of the procrastination was doubt, I think it rather more distraction – I’m seeking employment, and the process, after a few glorious years of freedom, has been quite daunting. Plus other stuff of life happening, as it does.

I was rather stymied by my fixation on writing the draft in a linear fashion. I could have jumped about and written the scenes I woke up daydreaming about, or the conversations I had in my head, and even though I have in fact already done that this draft, (a first for me, and I found I’m not really a fan of writing things out of sequence and then stitching them in when the main narrative meets them, though it is fun when you get to marry a fragment to the main text – you get a sudden boost to the page total, and feel something akin to the satisfaction of finding a particularly stubborn puzzle piece and slotting it home.) I did not do that this time, my characters were stuck in a spot, and I was stuck with them.

But no more! Yesterday I cranked out a chapter and a half – finally escaped that scene – via a chase, finger harvests, and immolating a bloodied skeleton. As you do. Plus a flood. Got to have a flood.

Does it count as spoilers if it’s in a first draft?

So: progress has returned. A couple of boxes in my outline ticked off. Far fewer remain than have been completed. I would say I hope to be finished by the end of this month – but I’ve tempted that fate already!

And then the first pass of continuity and timing fixes. I’m looking forward to that: having the entire story written out, no matter how much gets altered eventually, will be a great relief.

I don’t have a magic solution anymore for being blocked – I just showed up every day and looked, tinkered, fussed, and distracted myself until eventually the catalyst to write came. Not very useful, but it’s what happened. Knowing I was wasting precious time hadn’t worked for weeks, but maybe the knowledge that much more time wasted would push back my publication date back also finally got me going.

Speaking of, I think I should get back to it! See you guys on Monday!

Why I Write Fantasy: Inspirations – the Music of Fantasy, Part 1: Ronnie James Dio

I’ve done a fair bit about morality in fantasy recently, and though I have at least another three meditations on that theme, I think it’s time for a break. Let’s get back to the origins of why I write fantasy. I’ve written a few columns on my literary influences, but I have been led to the land of fantasy by other routes, through art, film, and most especially by music.

I am unashamedly a child of the late 70s and 80s. Rock, and then metal were the dominant forces in my musical world, and though I explored and appreciated many other areas of music later in life, I have to be honest about my first love in music, and what a huge effect it had on my fledgling imagination.

My elder brother was a massive Motörhead fan. Every surface of his room, including ceiling, was covered in Motörhead posters, memorabilia, and articles about the band torn from the pages of Sounds magazine. He had an ancient turntable with a built in speaker that had to have an emptied spool of thread glued to the end of the tone arm above the stylus to keep the needle from jumping. However primitive it might have been, it was loud. The things you remember.

However, before he became an acolyte of the church of Motörhead and abandoned all other musicians, my brother had possessed other slices of 70s rock history, and the images of these album covers lingered in my memory as something to be rediscovered when I myself reached the age of 12, with enough money from my paper round to keep me in sweets for the week with a bit left over. I remembered two covers in particular: one was a glass head with a rod of strange lights going through it – Judas Priest’s Stained Class, the other a pencil drawing of five faces looking out from an interlinked mass of hair. Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll. I vaguely remembered it, and thought I’d liked it, most memories of earlier music having been almost obliterated by a wall of constant Lemmy & Co. (Capricorn is a fantastic (and fantastical to me at the time) early tune, I always wanted them to play that rather than Metropolis when I saw them live. I dimly think my wish was granted once.)

So I wandered up town, and found that I had enough money to buy two Rainbow albums. I bought Long Live Rock ‘N’ Roll and Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. I don’t know why I didn’t get Rising that day, but I’m glad I didn’t, it was a treat saved for a few months later, and appreciating Rainbow’s first album meant I wasn’t always looking for bombast in future – though in my teens that was mostly what I wanted! I went home. My mother and sister were out, off to the Usher Hall to listen to entirely other music. I put on side one of LLR’N’R, on mum’s good record player (no spools required), and was blown away by the voice that soared from those speakers.

I thought I was in heaven, this was amazing, I couldn’t believe how good everything sounded, right down to my gut, even as my mind sparkled and shone with the images bursting from Ronnie James Dio’s lyrics. Then the last song on side one began. Gates of Babylon. If there was ever a chance I would not be a lifelong fan of RJD, it was gone then. I mean, Ritchie Blackmore is amazing, and I love almost anything with his playing on it, but this is about first loves, and that love was Dio’s incomparable voice tempting me to look away from the sea and go with him anywhere. Get ‘em when they’re young. I was hopelessly hooked. The song ended, I lifted the needle, put it back to the start of that song, turned the volume up, and moved the speakers so my head was directly between them. I wanted to be inside the song. My odyssey into hearing loss had begun, but I didn’t know it then, all that mattered was how I felt, overwhelmed by the song, wanting to be part of it, to go where that incredible voice could take me, make the images that burst into my mind real. Music, like reading, offered a powerful avenue of escape from the humdrum daily life, a portal into other worlds that could exist in my mind. I was glad of another entrance, something else to daydream about as I stared out of that classroom window. The first of thousands of writing prompts were born right there, something not torn from the books I read, but borne on waves of sound into my eager consciousness, the first mixing of two huge imaginative influences in my life.

First with Rainbow, and then in his time with Black Sabbath, and on into his solo career, Ronnie James Dio wrote and performed songs that were the inspiration to, and soundtrack of my first writing efforts. The imagery of Tarot Woman, Stargazer, Temple of the King, Catch the Rainbow, Man on the Silver Mountain, Lady of the Lake, L.A. Connection, and A Light in the Black by Rainbow fuelled my dreams, helped at times to shape my imagination. Neon Knights, Children of the Sea, Heaven and Hell, Lonely is the Word, Mob Rules, Sign of the Southern Cross, Falling off the Edge of the World by Black Sabbath brought passion and intensity to the stories I wanted to tell. Holy Diver, Don’t Talk to Strangers, The Last in Line, One Night in the City and many more songs from Dio’s solo band continued to hit home emotionally and fill me with the yearning to be creative, and for me that was to write. Though I have moved on a long way from naming magical items in my first book after a Dio album and song, the wonder of those first impressions has not left me, and his turn of lyrical expression can sometimes still be found here and there in my writing style. I may not be obsessed with rainbows as RJD was lyrically, but I’m sure my own tics will become more obvious with time, just as his did. It didn’t stop him being excellent, even in later years when I was afraid he’d not be able to cut it in concert anymore, and came away awed and happy every time. He might have lost octaves, but his magic as a performer never waned, and that was an incredible achievement.

I think most us have musical heroes and inspirations, and I firmly believe that the more artistic exposure and inspiration you have in your life the better, as it is all raw material of the best quality for your own creative processes to transform and turn into something new: your unique combination of influences filtered through your own life experiences and forged by your creative will into something fresh and exciting. The music of Ronnie James Dio is a huge part of my creative unconscious now, along with other great bands of the 70s and 80s that I may bend your ear about another time!

The Writing Life: Doubts Part 4: Procrastination, The Thief of Time

I’m going to try to keep this one brief. You know, because I’ve got things to do.

In this fourth installment of the doubt series, (Here are one, two and three) I’d like to say that procrastination can be a profound expression of doubt, of fear holding us back.

I held myself back for 25+ years. From the age of 19 when I first started writing The Crystal Fruit to last October when at 46 I published The Thief and The Demon. I spent years telling other people, and more importantly, myself, that I wasn’t quite ready to submit, or to publish. Why? I had material, but always I was ‘most of the way’ through various edits and revisions, never able to find my way to the finish line. Did I really want to finish? On reflection, I don’t think so. If I’d been serious I’d have got help sooner, would have exposed myself to criticism in order to improve myself earlier. Instead I talked a good game about writing, waxed rhapsodic about my ideas and imaginings of execution… but didn’t actually execute.

That is meta-level procrastination, the refusal to take the final steps to put your work out there. I was afraid of failure. There is a common saying: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.” For me it was “Better to never finish and think yourself a writer, than publish and be found out as a fraud.” I was invested in not discovering the worst. Doubt robbed me of optimism. The uncertainty of doubt is a weapon, but also, once you are used to it, it can become something of a security blanket. Back then I’d rather remain unsure of whether or not I had any talent than submit to agents and be rejected, than publish and find no readers, or a wall of negativity and derision. Better to do nothing, than do something and risk having all your cherished illusions shattered. When you are suffocated by doubt it becomes all you know, and you’d rather live in doubt than be exposed to certainty and discover, once and for all, that your dreams are broken.

Did I say doubt sucks?

So you procrastinate. If you don’t get to the end of the line, you don’t have to know what the outcome will be. Waste some time instead. Do all the common-or-garden procrastination ploys. Allow distractions to take you easily away from your writing. Make excuses for your failure to hit targets and deadlines. One more cup of tea. One more episode of that TV show. Oh, is that another evening gone with no writing? No problem, I’ll get at it tomorrow morning. Right after checking my email. And what is that headline? I need to find out the football results too. And what’s happening in the Supreme Court? I’ve been sitting too long. Maybe go for a walk. Need to make lunch. Have a shower. Play some pool. Anything, anything except write. Computer games: yes let’s replay Baldur’s Gate in every character class. That was so necessary. Online games. Oh. My. God. The Nirvana of procrastination has been found. A quick quest. I’ll just drop in to see how the Guild is doing. Make some potions. Just click away from that Word document, you’ve just got to click away from that Word document! Because at core, the fear of finishing and finding out you’re a fraud is smothering your desire to write. Who wants to learn that about themselves? No one rational, so the rational act is to avoid facing that possibility. And besides, you’ve got a job. It takes up all your time. You let weeks and months pass without writing. You think about it, though. Wake up with ideas. Maybe jot the odd note down, to pretend you’re still on it, still committed, but always you’re doing something peripheral, never actually moving the body of your work forward. Life is busy, you say, as your writing heart quietly breaks.

Procrastination is the thief of time. The time you steal from yourself, because doubt and fear have convinced you that only negativity awaits you at the end of the long road that is your writing journey.

But they lie. Doubt and fear distort your thought. They try to force you into submission, into inactivity. They kill your dreams by making you fear your dream can never come true, so you stop trying, procrastinating away your life.

Screw them.  

Don’t let procrastination lay a hold on you. Cultivate to-do lists with achievable goals. I started with ridiculously easy ones (put a stamp on an envelope), just so I could check those boxes and move forward. If you bite off more than you can chew, you can get overwhelmed and decide it is all too much and go back to doing nothing – so make your goals achievable, and scale up as you can do more. Get into the habit of getting stuff done. Work your old procrastination tactics into a timetable: they can have their time after you’ve worked. I still make potions.

It’s not easy, and I have backslid into procrastination here and there, but I have also felt the reward of defeating doubt, moving past my own fear, and putting my writing out there. And you know what? Disaster did not strike. My fears did not come true. My doubts were not realized. People have read my story. Some have even liked it enough to say so. (I am always in the market for more honest reviews – contact me if you want a copy of my book in exchange for a review. I am not afraid of an honest opinion anymore, good or bad – my own doubts were a tougher opponent than any poor review would be! (He says now, before harsh reviews arrive and my blotted tears boost the stocks of kleenex!))

There isn’t a universal fix, but I’m here to say that letting 25 potentially creative years pass before finally publishing was a huge mistake. Do not rob yourself of time the way I did. Believe, and act.

Why I Write Fantasy: To Appear on YouTube talking about Morality in Fantasy World Building, Obviously

Brace yourselves lads and ladesses, we’re going in!

If something is missing from your life, it might be me in glorious technicolour! You can view me waffl- er, talking about issues around morality in fantasy, and how it can influence world building, character development and conflict. With random dubious digressions into world history. Extemporising is fun!

For those of you who have been following my so far three part series on morality in fantasy writing, this video covers and integrates a lot of those topics into one rather free-form whole, plus extras I haven’t covered here yet!

Thanks again to my gracious host Jesper Schmidt for being so welcoming, and allowing me to talk without pause for breath in 14 minute chunks. Once you get me going…

Find us talking here. No earlobes were harmed during the making of this video!

If you have any questions about morality in fantasy, feel free to ask me here, or in the comments on Jesper’s most excellent channel. I am always happy to dig deeper into a subject like this.

The Writing Life: Doubts Part 3: Losing At The Comparison Game

Here we are again, wrestling with doubts! This week I’m going to highlight another way that doubt can worm its way into a writer’s psyche: the comparison game.

By now, I hope you are all familiar with my cast of doubt-related characters: General Zod, Sally, and the Toad. Visit here for the primer!

Over many years as an aspiring author, I would pick up books in libraries and bookstores, flip them open, and be astonished by what I saw. In my august opinion, the writing just wasn’t that good. General Zod went crazy, and demanded that the terrible writing kneel before him, and shouted wildly that anything he (I) wrote would inevitably be far superior to the feeble efforts of these pathetic ‘so-called’ writers! Everyone’s a critic, and the General is particularly harsh when he’s feeling otherwise vulnerable. It made him feel better on a miserable Wednesday afternoon when he hadn’t written anything worthwhile in weeks, to rant and rave about someone else’s inadequacies.

This is not, I believe, a healthy or productive practice. Quite the opposite, as what good does it do you to run someone else’s work down? Does it make you go home and work harder, or allow you to rest on some imaginary unearned laurels? I opted for the latter far too often. You’re still holding a published book in your hands, so green-eyed envy is clearly in ample supply when you yield to the temptation to pour scorn on another (often successful) writer’s work.  If your complaints have no relevance to your own current project, or serve only to cause you to do less because you’re already ‘better’ than X in your own not entirely reliable mind, then how have they helped you? Even in trying to build yourself up in comparison to something you feel is badly constructed you aren’t doing yourself any favours if it just causes you to slack off and lose focus.

And this is accepting for one hot second that your opinion is even remotely unaffected by your envy and unfulfilled dreams, which it clearly is. That writer has had the Sally moment you so desperately crave, and you just can’t understand why because under your jealous eye the writing does not justify the accolades. You imagine you’re better, but you’ve done nothing to prove it, and so you rant impotently about something else as a way to release the frustrations you have at yourself for not getting your work done, for not believing in yourself enough, for allowing doubt to hold you back. That writer’s success and self-belief are on every published page, in every line you think is so bad, and though you started off thinking you were criticizing them, in reality the negativity rolls right back around and gets turned on yourself. The unspoken doubts run like this: “If they’re published, why aren’t I?” “What is wrong with my writing – there must be something, if I can’t make it and X has!” You might not even articulate these ideas at first, so wrapped up in Zod’s critiques as you are, but sooner or later the Toad slides into view as Zod runs out of steam, and whispers the negatives into your unwilling ear. This can be avoided if you refuse to play the comparison game, but it is so easy to sit in judgment and ignore your own flaws by focusing on someone else’s.  Just don’t go there, or if you do, shake it off fast and take a humility pill, and remind yourself that even if all your wildest writing dreams come true, somewhere someone will pick up your book and be deeply unimpressed. All you can do is your best, and get your book out there. The rest will take care of itself.

Now it’s all well and good to rag on someone else’s writing to make yourself feel better (a temporary and potentially bitter fix, as I think I’ve shown), but what happens when General Zod reads a book and is blown away by its artistry and finesse? His puffed up arrogance withers and dies as the Toad slithers past him to sit coldly on your shoulder and peer at the beautiful writing too.

Reading excellent and inspiring writers can sometimes be worse than deludedly deciding you are clearly better than ‘bad’ writers, if you allow yourself to play the comparison game.

When you read great writing doubt can rear up and swallow you. The Toad gurgles gleefully that you’ll never match that, so why bother trying? In a universe with such artists, what is the point of your hopeless chicken-scratches? I didn’t write for a year after reading Brent Weeks and Patrick Rothfuss back to back. They blew me away, and then buried me under a mountain of my own perceived inadequacies. They were so good I was nothing but an obliterated shadow, their twin suns leaving me nowhere to hide. It sucked. I still love those books, but have moved past the intimidation of them, because I realized they are not infallible, not perfect, and what choice do you have if after a while the urge to write returns, and cannot be ignored?

In both cases I believe there is a failure of perception when the budding writer compares their output to those who have experienced some success. When running a book down and indulging General Zod you ignore the good aspects of the story, the things that made it a success, that spoke to people. Instead you pick at something you think you can do better, to bolster your fragile ego. Your vision is very selective, its choices determined by your own unacknowledged doubts. When being overwhelmed by glorious writing, you similarly ignore the flaws present in the book, and focus only on the aspects you feel you cannot compete with. The doubt riddled perspective that denies you can match them is as faulty as the one that declares your writing to be the best thing since sliced bread.

So: do not play the comparison game. If you are inclined to self-doubt, and many (all?) writers are, you’ll find ways to sabotage yourself whichever direction the comparison falls. If you think a book is poor for whatever reason, and you cannot make yourself acknowledge its strengths, read positive reviews of it, and be informed. Do the opposite for books you think you can’t hold a candle to, and refuse to find flaws in. Other people will have found them, have no fear. Do what you need to gain some perspective if you find yourself obsessing over other people’s writings and constantly comparing them to your own, and making yourself unhappy. Then do your best not to play that foolish game again. Read for pleasure, for enjoyment, as an educational exercise, just don’t read as a competition, because then you are destined to lose, no matter what the other guy does.