Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 27

The Writing Life: A Podcast, and Distraction versus Discipline (The Last Jedi Edition)

So, for any of you missed it, here is the podcast of my interview with Jerry Fabyanic talking about my book, The Thief and The Demon. I had a great time, and would once again like to thank Jerry, and KYGT-FM, the Goat radio station. I had a great time, and hope to return to discuss my next book!

And on to a quick little chat on Distraction and Discipline. Distraction is an enemy to writers, a sneak thief of time who poses as subjects of interest, or even creative fuel, when in fact little but time lost is gained by indulging in it. As writing is a time-intensive process, distractions are a major force to be recognised, ignored, or overcome.

Distraction’s antithesis, for me, is Discipline. If Discipline is lacking, Distraction wins every time, and not just hours, but days can be lost. If Discipline wins, then Distractions can be shut out, for a time.

Discipline is not easy. You can have motivation to write, and eagerness even, but then you sit down, and Distraction trumps motivation and eagerness and you find yourself watching endless spoiler riddled videos about The Last Jedi. Speaking hypothetically, of course.

Discipline for me is knowing yourself, and being able to say NO. Firmly, and in multiple languages, some of them fictional. Sometimes it fails, like today, and yesterday.

Quick very-not-serious thoughts about The Last Jedi.

1) Why doesn’t anyone think Kylo lied about Rey’s parents? Or was lied to by Snoke via force vision? I am still fake convinced she is Reykin Kenobi, and is her own parents because she is a clone of a person created by the gene splicing Boba Fett creator aliens from DNA samples stolen from Obi Wan, and Padme. Hence her asking to see her parents in the non-sexual wet dark hole of darkness and seeing herself. Why not? (Really, why not??)

2) Phasma is so not dead. The next movie will start with Phasma doing a Gandalf-falling-through-the-mountain montage, as she falls through the fiery ship’s hulk and finds her way to an unlikely escape. Maybe fights a balrog too. Even better – Snoke will force talk to her, and his disembodied spirit will enter into her body as a new host because obviously he knew what was coming in the Red Room, and this is all his fake out to see what the kids will do once he’s out of the way.

3) I really expected the Mon Calamari flagship to turn into a white Ford Bronco.

4) Or the Galactica.

5) I want a movie where Justin Theroux gets to play that version of James Bond in the Fifth Element that appears wearing the red rose lapel pin thing in the casino. The red rose lapel pin needed to find the mega code-breaking guy was for me the emblematic red herring in a film chock full of them. Unless I missed that DJ (Benicio, baby) was wearing one.

6) The next film will undo half of what happened in this film. Probably the wrong half.

7) Fuel?

8) Lightspeed battering rams. Tracking through Hyperspace. Other foolish new additions to Star Wars lore which, if used in earlier movies, could have changed quite a bit. X-Wing jumps to the OG Deathstar’s reactor room and blows it up. They knew where it was, they had the plans. Why bother with that whole torpedo through a shielded exhaust port?

Eight is enough. I could go on, but Discipline is telling me to stop.

9) Big googly eyes stop Chewie who has killed, dressed, plucked and then cooked multiple birds, from eating his dinner. Then he lets them nest in the Falcon. Why didn’t they googly eye him earlier?

10) Why didn’t the Dreadnought jump to light speed when it looked like it was going bad for them? The bomber was hanging over it for quite a while. (Let’s not talk about the bombers, I enjoyed the WW2 vibe, for about 5 minutes) Why do only the good guys remember to use hyper-speed to get out of trouble?

11) I still love Star Wars. But man this film furrowed my brow, big time.

12) There will be a Darth somebody in the next movie. (I’m still on the Snoke/Plagueis train. In Brienne of Tarth’s scorched eyepatch body.)

13) The fish nuns. More of them, please.

No more Distractions. Back to writing. May the Force be with You.

 

Why I Write Fantasy: Ideas, Imagination and the Power of “What if?”

Last week I discussed the allure of creating worlds, the joy of it often being in the freedom it grants you as a writer to shape the drama of your story from the ground up, and have the universe in which your narrative takes place become, in a sense, an active character in that story. Or if not an active character, then at least a defining influence upon the people whose struggles and adventures are played out within that milieu.

I like to have strong ideas running in the background of my creations. (Yes, I only have one in publication at present – but there are more waiting in the wings!) Like an operating system they are not meant to be the star of the show, but enable everything else to function. My aim is not to create a gazetteer or almanac of any particular world, but to provide reasons for why things are as they are, and why characters react and think as they do in a way that makes sense. For me the opportunity created is that different worlds can provide contrasting psychological baselines for the people living there, versus our own world experience.

In worlds of fantasy you get to create characters for whom magic is real, and gods can potentially be met, given the right circumstances, among thousands of other possibilities! That would have a transformative effect on the lived experience. Fantasy literature allows this and other thought experiments to be indulged in, at a step removed from our Earth and its many complications, most of which would strain readers’ suspension of disbelief in a way which doesn’t happen in fantasy. The reader of fantasy comes in ready to allow many things that would be rapidly discounted if inserted into our world, so a few extra concepts about the origins of that particular universe do not tend to shatter the trust between reader and writer, and that all important suspension of disbelief is happily maintained. For me a lot of the fun in fantasy world creation still boils down to “What if this condition in the universe was different? What would the consequences be?”

But the story and the characters still need to come first. The Thief and The Demon started from Fistmar’s opening predicament, his escape from prison, the release of the demon. As I was working on the outline and background of the novel, I started providing explanations for how that could occur, who could want such things to happen and why it would unfold as it does, and the path led all the way back to why the World Belt is organized as it is, which was governed by another “What if?” I had long entertained, the “What if Wizards were not useful old men with awesome powers who don’t seem to have much interest in running the world? Why have all that power and not be in charge? What would such a world look like?” That world needs an explanation for how magic came into the universe, and how Wizards acquire and utilise their power. The reader doesn’t need to know the details (yet), but they have to be there for the actions to make sense before the underlying structures are revealed. You cannot escape the world-building! But in a way the story as originally conceived led to the creation of the rules for that universe. I did not create the universe first and then the story. The story led the way. In The Killer and The Dead I aim to expand the experience of living in the World Belt, and provide more glimpses of the power structures that drive the deeper conflicts within it.

And that is the joy of Fantasy, the ability to use different worlds to explore ideas that despite the strange clothing they can be housed in, are still relevant to us here, or ask us as readers to wonder how we would act in places where some of the rules for living are so very different. That it is possible to do this whilst at the same time writing an action-packed romp that is hopefully exciting and entertaining is a huge benefit. My aim isn’t to give people brain ache, it’s to let them have a good time while reading. Engage, enjoy, entertain – my guiding lights. The level of engagement in whatever ideas I have strewn through the text is, I hope, entirely up to the reader. If afterwards they want to think on some of the ideas behind the world I created for them, or demonstrated through the actions of the characters, then that is a bonus! I’m here, and happy to discuss.

The Writing Life: On The Radio

But not with disco Donna Summer. Or prog Rush. Or ska The Selecter. Or 80s dance Taffy. Or hairmetal-tacular Autograph (sponsored by Papermate, it seemed!). Though all of that music is fantastic, you will have to make do with the sound of my voice. Listen… and remember… buy my book. And post a review after you have read it. When you wake you will remember nothing, but you will act on this message in 3, 2, 1, *snaps*.

This post is a reminder that I will be talking with the fabulous Jerry Fabyanic this Saturday (December 16th) at 1pm MST (Mountain Standard Time), which will be 8pm GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) to give folks a reference. The site schedule has The Rabbit Hole (Jerry’s chats with Colorado writers of all stripes – check out the podcasts!) starting at 2pm, but don’t be fooled! We will be there at 1pm, a seasonal special!

To have a listen, find us on KYGT-FM The Goat, here.

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Why I Write Fantasy: The Joy of Creating Worlds

Writing fantasy fiction is a lot of fun. I’ve always enjoyed it because you get to imagine anything you want, and then find ways to make it work. I mean, a lot of the time it would be much easier to not bother with the making it work part and just throw stuff on the page because it is so cool, but I found out the hard way that coolness without a foundation tends to falter. So you have to find the cool, with some rules.

So when I approach stories now, I start with the cosmology of the universe in which that story is set. It might never see the light of day, may never become important, but for me it needs to be there, the foundation upon which everything else rests. Like a turtle with elephants on its back. That kind of thing. Did those elephants ever get fed gigantic peanuts? And how did the turtle feel about their peeing and pooping on its shell? Wouldn’t that make their footing troublesome? Asking for a friend.

Anyway. The point is that fantasy offers up worlds of possibilities, and I love that I can have total control of the world from the dawn of creation on. It’s not that I’m a megalomaniac you understand. Not. At. All. In your own universe there’s no need to follow conventions or rules set by anyone else, all I have to do is create my own rules, and then try to be consistent. Until such time as a rule breaking or two may be fun. Dangerous road, that, do it wrong and you risk reader goodwill.

In universes I’ve fleshed out so far I’ve had pacts between law and chaos, an involuntary cosmic compromise (my favourite, but I’ve yet to find the story that works in that milieu), demons created because the gods were too lazy to do the boring stuff and were then surprised when their chosen servants decided they didn’t like doing the hard work either, and thus rebelled (as demons are wont to do). The World Belt’s cosmic origin is none of those things, by the way, it involves… well I can’t say. It does explain where the magic comes from though, and one day I may share it within the books.

And that for me is where the magic comes from in fantasy, the act of creation, of breathing life into situations that readers may at first find familiar, but possess enough twists of originality to hold their attention, hopefully!

A final word on cosmology – it is amazing how often in fantasy the origins or great powers in the universe do end up being important to the story, if not the primary antagonist. Evil Gods and Dark Lords a plenty populate fantasy. When you create a mythos it is hard not to create a big bad in the process, an ultimate whatever that may have to be defeated. But beware, once you wheel out the big bad and face him/her/it down there aren’t many other dramatic places to go afterwards. That’s why I think gigantic godly conflicts need to end a series, and be the final ending. Going back to a kitchen sink drama exploring how the protagonist’s marriage didn’t quite work out due to existential burn out having beaten the origin of evil in that universe and finding the flavor of ordinary life has quite faded… well maybe that would be worth doing! Or just, you know, go the classic route and ship out with the elves. Club Valinor, please!

The Writing Life: All We Hear Is…

Radio Ga Ga!

I am excited to share the news that I will be doing my first ever radio interview!

My thanks to KYGT- The Goat for this opportunity!

I’ll be sitting down with Jerry Fabyanic, author of Sisyphus Wins and host of The Rabbit Hole, an hour long chat on all things word related, to talk about my book The Thief and The Demon, on Saturday December the 16th at 1pm!

So mark the date and listen in!

Why I Write Fantasy: The Yearning

When first I wrote fantasy, I yearned for escape, to be lost in worlds of fantasy myself, away from what I perceived as the misery of my own existence at that time.

Then I wrote because I yearned to write as well as my heroes, to be my heroes, use their ideas, their motifs, and make them my own. I yearned for this so profoundly I didn’t even consider how transparent my efforts would be. I just did it.

After that I wrote because I yearned to express new ideas in fantasy form, and to explore those ideas, fresh from the classroom or pages of a textbook, clothed in the flesh of fantasy. (Now I have that Billy Idol song in my head!) I yearned to say something profound, something startling, to share my epiphanies, and perhaps to inspire epiphanies in others. It was a big yearning.

Now I yearn to write well, and share my stories. To engage, entertain, and be enjoyed. No more, no less. I do not need to escape my life (and recognize how blessed it has been), nor attempt to emulate my heroes (though their examples still shine), and ideas continuously appear to bubble along under the surface when I have a story to tell and characters faced with problems and adversaries to overcome. (And my characters always seem to have plenty of problems!)

I yearn for the joy of writing, and the many pleasures it brings. The high of finishing drafts and edits is addictive. The searing hit of a new insight or finding a fix for a narrative problem is intense: whole new vistas of possibilities open up when one of those ideas strike, and they are fantastic to behold. The solid satisfaction of seeing the pieces of your work slot into place and become a cohesive whole that you can take pride in. The simple pleasure of a well turned phrase. Each day I yearn to have one or more of these things happen again, and so I show up, sit down, and try to write something worth sharing.

Yearning still fuels my desire to write, and specifically to write fantasy, a genre in which I have total freedom to craft the worlds I want, and to people those worlds with personalities shaped by experiences very different from my, or even our own, but always with the common thread of humanity hanging between us. Every day I yearn to explore those worlds, to go there and be a guide for others to follow, so that we may discover those places together.

The Writing Life: Aiming High Part 3 – Striving for More

So in this series I’ve described what aiming high means for me, and why I believe that missing the target I set myself (or yourself) isn’t failure. In aiming high, I’m also setting myself challenges in order to improve as a writer. This seems insane, because writing is tough enough on its own, and it took me a long time to get this far, so why choose to make an already difficult task worse? Part of me has no answer to that question and wonders what my problem is! The other part says this: writing my first published book was tough, and was the result of many lessons learned from previous efforts that did not see the light of day, but it is not the end of the road, just another step on it. I have a destination I want to reach, and it cannot be gained by standing still or retreading a familiar path. I must continue to strive for more.

, in his foreword to Jack of Shadows, said something which I have felt driven to emulate, foolishly or not. He said: “This was not one of my more experimental books … wherein I worked out lots of techniques I used in many of the others.” That was a revelation to me. I don’t know why – I’ve studied enough writers and their evolution to know that artists learn, expand their horizons, try new things as they progress through their careers, but coming from him, in such a matter-of-fact way made me realize I had to do something similar. Last week I compared myself to Shakespeare, this week to Zelazny, maybe someday soon I shall come fully down to earth!

The point is, I feel I could write my next book in a similar style to The Thief and The Demon, to refine my technique in that format, improve my execution of that storytelling form. This would be a good thing, as I have plenty more to learn, and I intend to do that. But not with my next book. I feel the need to stretch myself now, sooner rather than later, so that I can work out techniques and be able to employ them with ever more assurance going forward. Also, to be honest, I think it will be fun to do something new, and I want to have fun when I’m writing! Every sentence, paragraph, and chapter of my new story will be worked on with an eye improved by my experiences in writing The Thief and The Demon, but the structure, the point of view needs to be different this time out.

I’m not doing anything wild and crazy, just a first person narrative, probably also down to Mr. Zelazny’s influence – maybe I am still trying to get him out of my system so I can move on! But for me, that is enough of a challenge to be going on with. Within the first person narrative I’m finding all sorts of issues with tense, and with the narrator’s reliability, and with what is directly shown versus what is left to be inferred. I’m discovering all this, and how to write the unwritten story that hides between the lines but is still there for the reader to see, and it’s exhilarating. It is also no small task.

So there you have it, I want to aim high, but also walk before I run; to challenge myself, but not overwhelm; have fun, but still take the task seriously. That’s not too much to expect from myself, right? There are many things to balance in this writing life, and striving to do more makes it harder, but I hope more rewarding in the end. Good luck to all writers out there at the end of this NaNoWriMo – the month may be almost done, but the work goes on, and you can do it! Cheers!

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Why I Write Fantasy: The First Ambitions

So last week I wrote about my first intentions when writing fantasy stories. Some, like the youthful need to ‘borrow’ bits of my favourite books and add them to my own in a wholly unsubtle way, have been abandoned as bad practice. Others, like the fundamental need to write, and to share my imaginings, have not.

Going to University, learning more about literature, studying philosophy, being nineteen in general and having a solid dose of “knowing it all” added another aspect to my writing. Ambition. I didn’t want to write a standard fantasy novel, and I no longer wanted to ape my heroes. I wanted to do more, something different.

One day, when walking home, I looked up into the clouds (I’m really not making this up), and had an idea about Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. About fifteen seconds later, I had my Big Idea (B.I.) for a fantasy novel. It was Big, it was New (at least to me), and it enabled me to write something totally Different. In the first outline (2 pages in pencil, aww, bless) it was supposed to be a Woody Allenesque sex comedy, but it rapidly turned into a more Dark Knight Returns existential swamp. I hadn’t even read Camus. Still haven’t (hmm, maybe I should remedy that). And of course the B.I. allowed me to write a book with all my other Ideas about the world and how it should be, or at least my philosophizing on same, included. I was in undergrad intellectual heaven.

So there they were, my first ambitions: to write something with big bold ideas, to attack the fantasy genre with gusto, do something that had not been seen before. I stuck at my first attempt to do so for a long time. Too long, and the B.I. grew stale.

Until very recently. I just started reading Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher, and it is great to see a book so obviously animated by a Big Idea. I’m looking forward to seeing how the B.I. gets fleshed out in this book, and its new sequel, and it reminded me that maybe it isn’t so bad to wear your ideas on your sleeve, and push them out there. It has inspired me to think again about how to approach future ideas for novels.

In the meantime, I still hope to do something my own, different, and that pulses with its own ideas, big and small. I think I’ve done that successfully with The Thief and The Demon, (though of course you are to be the true judges of that!) and intend to expand both my universe and the ideas that drive it in my next book in progress, The Killer and The Dead.

Nowadays I do not seek to change the world, or even fantasy fiction with my books, though I wouldn’t complain if by some strange chance that happened, and it was for the better! Nowadays my ambition is to walk before running, to do all the things I pooh-poohed as a young and arrogantly insecure college grad: to write better, to synthesize plot and character more gracefully, to come up with hooks and imagery that are pleasing to readers and invites them to read on. That, for now, is enough, though perhaps one day I shall return to that Big Idea still hanging out in the clouds with Marilyn and Humphrey, and see what I can do with it!

The Writing Life: Aiming High Part 2 – Missing is Not Failure

Last week I wrote about what it meant for me to aim high. A significant part of reaching for the stars is not grasping them.

I believe that for me to be fulfilled as an artist, I have to try to hit some pretty difficult targets. I also acknowledge that for me to live as an artist and not endlessly punish myself for my failures, I have to admit when I’ve missed the mark. If the sublime could be so easily grasped, we’d all be visionaries, burning brightly in the night. Sadly, that is not the case.

This may be ridiculous, but I’m going to say it anyway. I start every project wanting to be Shakespeare. Or better him. Why not? What is there to lose? He is not a god, nor is he without flaw, but he is held up to the followers of western literature as the ne plus ultra of writing. It is hard, to live in his shadow. To be told constantly you cannot possibly match him, or Conrad, or the Brontes, or Joyce. They all lived in his shadow too, and none escaped it. So bugger it, I hope to break out of all their shadows when I write. But mostly Shakespeare, as he crushes all who came after, who play in the sandbox we are told he created. I don’t buy that anymore. I think Homer would have a thing or two to say about it, at minimum. I am sure, when William was writing his plays and sonnets, he had no idea what an outsized influence he would leave behind. Thank God, what a pressure that would have been to live with.

But to be honest, I don’t see the point in writing if you’re not going to try your best, and measure yourself against the best. Even when writing something that is essentially designed to be an entertainment. Big Billy wrote things that were essentially entertainments, public and private. Shakespeare took the theory of Sidney, the allegorical soul of Spenser, the dramatic power of Marlowe, and proceeded to use what he learned from them and many others in all kinds of genre fictions: comedies, tragedies, histories, and yes, even fantasies like The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I’m not Shakespeare, certainly, but I don’t mind aiming at him and missing. That’s what I wish to convey to any budding writers out there: do not be ashamed of your ambitions, or your dreams and desires. Do not be ashamed of your medium, or your form, or your genre. Go for it. But also, don’t despair if you fall short. Instead, learn, pick up your bow, and aim high again. Shakespeare, it seems pretty clear, learned from his contemporaries and from his own early efforts, so we can too. You will get better, your aim more true, and you will find that every arrow you fire hits a target, though maybe not the one you aimed for. I believe an arrow truly fired will always hit a worthy writing target.

I tried my best with The Thief and The Demon. Undoubtedly, there are things I would change still, but I also know that paralysis over every word and sentence could have left me publishing nothing at all. I drowned in choking silence for fifteen years with a book I could not speak. I’d rather speak imperfectly now than choke on the perfect sentence. Sod that imagined perfection if it mutes the speaker. I have learned more, even since publication. I will try to do better going forward, and will never aim anything less than high. I hope all you writers, artists, musicians, and dreamers out there do the same, because I, for one, enjoy your efforts.

Why I Write Fantasy: Early Intentions

I don’t know about anyone else, but I started writing stories because I had to. It, being a writer, was what I wanted to be, but more importantly, and far more primal, was the need to tell stories. I needed to write them down, the tales that flowed in fractured circles in my head; the lost daydreams that never made it to completion. I think part of me wanted to capture the dream entire, to complete the story that began as I looked out a classroom window (yes, really), or woke up thinking about, or got absorbed in as I walked through the wind, rain, and sunshine of my youth. I wanted to hold on to the shining moments my imagination provided me, to somehow share those moments with others. Part of it undoubtedly was the desire to show off what I could do, what I loved to do, but I think of that as a surface desire in comparison to the need to just to write stories down.

As I started to write novels as a teenager, what was my intention? I think, hazily, to write something as good as what I had read, except with more of everything I liked in it! My first two novels are a testament to that: especially the sequel, where I just added in everything I liked from any other book I had read and loved and tried to mash it all together into something that worked. I think the growing realization that all these separate things could not play together was part of why that epic five book series was abandoned two thirds of the way through book two. That and moving back to Edinburgh, and gaining a more active teenage social life…

The other big intention in my early writing was also the reason I read so much: escape. I had so desperately wanted to find my way to Narnia as a child, and had been frankly disappointed when I hadn’t made it. I think it almost cruel to write stories that instill such a destined to never be fulfilled yearning in some children. I wonder how many kids of more recent generations have searched and searched for platform 9 ¾ in vain? I am sure I would have been one of them.

So, having reluctantly made it to puberty and thusly been denied Narnia, I had to find a new escape. I continued to read, but it didn’t cut it as much as it had as a child, the promises of other worlds less believable now to my jaded sensibility. I realized I had to make my own escape, my own worlds I could visit at any time, and that I could never be denied entry into. Those worlds began as daydreams, as I said above, but then I worked to tie them down and make them concrete, an avalanche of words to hold them in place. I could escape, and tell the stories that flourished within me and had to be told, and have an extra way to enjoy my favourite books by drawing the best parts of them (to my mind) into my own fiction. My early writing trifecta!

Then I went to college. And intentions and desires became fused with something else: ambitions. I’ll chat about them next time.

 

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