Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 28

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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The Writing Life: Aiming High

For me, aiming high in writing is to simply try to do the best I can, write as well as I can, and try to express my ideas in a way that satisfies both my potential readers and myself. But of course, there is always more to it than that, or this article could start and finish with that single sentence.

I write for an audience. An unread book is at best a doorstop, at worst an utter irrelevance. The goal has to be to write something that other people will read. The three en’s. (I just made these up, but I’m sure they’ve been used somewhere) As a writer of fiction I hope for readers to engage, enjoy, and be entertained. Those are my primary goals.

But is that all I do in my writing? Nope. Though I do devoutly want to attract as big an audience as possible, and so aim for the three en’s, I also, inevitably, write for myself. My own enjoyment of the written word, my own pleasure in words and phrases, and my own satisfaction in putting together the complex puzzle that is a novel: a seemingly simple creation comprised of a thousand moving parts, all hopefully hidden beneath the surface, away from the reader’s eye.

In the act of writing, as frustrating or tedious as it can be at times, I entertain myself. I enjoy the process (with the aforementioned caveats), and I engage fully in working ideas, themes, and motifs into my writing. I put those things in not because I think they “should be” added, or because I think they will help me gain more readers, but because for me, in writing, it is what I personally must do, because my fiction writing must include at least a nod in the direction of those things, or I cannot write it with any conviction. I cannot begin my stories, cannot finish the execution of a tale, if it does not have an underlying structure or theme that sings to me.

Back in university I noticed when struggling with essays that until I found a core concept or argument to hang my discussion of literature, philosophy, or history around, I tended to be lost and flail about with bits of information, my efforts disjointed. But when I found a theme, or angle, or motif that stimulated my thinking on the subject, everything flowed and I produced much more coherent work. My professors still noted a tendency for me to write like I was running for a train, but they let me off with a better mark if a central idea animated my discussions rather than the essay just being a collection of points without an organizing principle.

So it is with me in writing novels. Aiming high is to capture perfectly something that my readers can engage with, enjoy, and be entertained by, which at the same time I have organized around themes and ideas that flow and are exemplified beautifully through plot, characterization, dialogue and imagery, without ever getting didactic, or having the themes get in the way of the fun for the reader. That for me would be my perfect book, and something I will always strive for.

Why I Write Fantasy: Honouring Influences Without Being a Slave to Them.

I think many writers spend some time forging their own writing identity: the what it is they want to write, and how they wish to present it to others. For many a young writer there is a phase of aping the things they love, and it can be a very conscious process. It certainly was with me – my early stories are a testament to the books I loved at the time. My influences were very clear in those tales, though they do have the odd slice of originality here and there! However, I think that I, like many young writers, had to regurgitate some of our author heroes onto the page in order to move on and be free of them.

What things did I shamelessly reproduce in slightly different skins? In no particular order – a dragon with abilities eerily similar to those that exist on Pern, but with crystal skulls borrowed from a comic strip I read. The skulls had memories etched into them like a vinyl record, the memories activated by exposure to dragonfire. That was my slice of semi-originality, but now I think about it could also owe something to Rogue Trooper. 2000AD is a huge influence I have yet to discuss.

Shape-changers appeared because I loved the ones in the Riddle-Master series, but wanted them to be better (by my teenage self’s lights), because in my youth I thought the shape-changers should have won, and didn’t really understand why they hadn’t. In fact I should go back and read that series again and see how time has altered my perception of the events in those books – I blogged earlier this year about how that happened when re-reading the Wheel of Time in my forties versus my twenties, and it was quite revelatory.

I threw a necromancer into book two because they’re cool, there was one in The Hobbit and though I’d read The Lord of the Rings multiple times by then, I’m not sure I’d made the connection between Sauron and the Necromancer yet. Sometimes, often in the case of layered literature, you can read all the words and not catch all the meanings, especially when young and determined just to say you’d finished the ‘big’ book and feel all grown up. I also thought that Kalarr and the necromancers in The Horse Lord got short changed and wanted to give them a more prominent role, but as a reincarnated good guy, of course!

And who wouldn’t want to have a Balrog in their book? So I had my misunderstood-in-search-of-redemption-for-earlier-accidental-evils necromancer accidentally raise him from the dead, as you do. (I was pantsing for all I was worth at this stage, and so had to give my demon lord a vampire arch enemy, in addition to hating the shape-changers, because they were antagonists in my books too, and the Balrog had to be on what was obviously ‘my’ side in the story!) The whole series was to be five books long because The Belgariad, (my series of the 80s, constantly re-read), was five books long. As was the Amber series. I am a bit amazed I did not have Corwin just appear in my books, being suave. Maybe that would have happened in book three.

I named a magical artifact after a Dio album, (itself probably named after something else entirely) added in a scene based on the cover of one of my favourite board games, and generally just fulfilled my every toe-curling teenage wish in the form of fiction. Corwin did appear in a Fighting Fantasy game book I created, along with a Tunnels and Trolls play by numbers solo dungeon I designed. Both came complete with a laborious hand written reference randomisation process. Budding cryptographer, I was not. All are still with me, lined yellowed paper in old ring-binders.

The Thief and The Demon does not wear its influences as boldly on its sleeve as those early efforts. Rather than trying in some way to continue the stories of others in my own words, I’m telling my own story, one that grew organically over years and through many filters of experience. But those strong fantasy echoes from my childhood onwards have inspired ideas to build on, or kick against: reworking situations and dynamics into my own imaginative lexicon, not simply rehashing someone else’s narrative. Or at least that’s what I hope has happened! I think that is how you honour your influences without being their slave: you find ways to make their impact upon you your own, and transform it into something new. I hope I’ve done that, but it may well be that one day I look back on The Thief and The Demon much like I currently view my teenage efforts: as something necessary to finding my way to the best expression of my ideas in fantasy form. I’ll get back to you on that in ten years!

The Writing Life: Maintaining Focus, New Goals

It has been over a month since The Thief and The Demon’s release. A month to reflect on how much work has been done, and realize how much more remains to be done.

There is a lot to learn and to do online, social media can be an absorbing maze with a lot of new rules, and I’ve many more platforms to explore!

The main thing I have resolved to do is keep a steady pace. Walk, not run. Writing as a career is a distance event, not a sprint. So I’ll keep chipping away on social media where I can, when I can, and expand my presence and contributions as I grow more familiar and comfortable with the platforms I currently use.

I have read very good, if daunting, advice from Hugh Howey over the last day or so. I read part four first, then part one and parts of part three. What can I say, I’m a pick and choose kind of guy. It was inspiring in an “Oh my god that is a ton of work you are talking about there! Write a draft, twelve revision passes plus possible rewrites and look to get two books out a year? Is that even remotely possible??” kind of way. It is what it is, and I got a lot out of his hard earned insights, including the conviction that while I may not match his level of production, I intend to give it a solid shot.

The core advice is to keep writing, and I’m already there. Write, work to get better. That is my primary goal. I have started the first draft of my next novel, The Killer and The Dead. It is set in Aranvail, in the World Belt, just as The Thief and The Demon is, and there are some cross-connections, but both are intended to stand alone and be read independently. My goal is to have the one hundred and twenty thousand word draft completed by January 4th 2018. I am over twenty thousand in now. I have just celebrated an anniversary, because life does come first, (even before writing!), but upon my return home (via a couple of flights during which I shall be working) a new regimen begins, one in which I have no time to lose. NaNoWriMo began for many people ten days ago, it starts for me on 11/11/17, so I have some catching up to do!

I’m excited to be writing new material. In going first person narrative I’m trying something new, and I’m enjoying the challenge. My focus will be on the writing, but I shall find the time to keep experimenting with advertising campaigns, writing these blogs, staying in touch with old friends and new, and reaching out for more reviews of The Thief and The Demon. I’m toying with the idea of doing a narration for Audible. Or perhaps podcasts are in my future! More to learn. The business of writing rolls on, even when you are celebrating life events. It can seem like there are a thousand things to do, but it is useful to remember one thing: keep writing. Everything else can fall into place around that, rather than allowing everything else to get in the way of the thing writers should want to do first and last and always, which is write. It is very easy, judging from my own experience, to lose track of writing amongst all the other stuff, but I’m trying to hold onto that focus. So now I’ve shared my goals with you as a means to maintain that focus, because now I have to follow through!

Good luck to all writers participating in NaNoWriMo!!

Why I Write Fantasy: The Travel Begins at Home Edition

All writing, it seems to me, begins in your own head. Sometimes it will be written as a strong spontaneous reaction to outside stimulus – protest songs, polemical essays, critical feuds, a satirical impulse to start telling a particular story in order to hit a particular target, but for me, the story starts as a piece of idle conjecture: “What if?”

For a long time in my o’erweening youth, I thought that was it – my big old brain just conjured everything up out of the whole cloth. That certainly soothed my fragile ego.

But that cannot truly be so. We are all products of our environment, the climate, geography, and people that surround us. These things help, subtly or not, to shape our thoughts, and perhaps insidiously to guide our imaginations. So while writing may begin in your head, what and how you write depends a lot on where your head has been.

I was very lucky to grow up in Edinburgh – an unburied time capsule (well most of it, some streets have indeed been paved over!), where I could live in a house built in the 1920’s, go to school in a building from in the 19th century, visit the city centre designed at the end of the 18th century, and then travel to the High Street and Old Town dating back to the 13th century. The bifurcated nature of Edinburgh’s Old and New Town, and the very different people that lived in each section were the inspiration behind Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: confronted by a divided city, he created a schizophrenic character to reflect the strains in Victorian era Edinburgh, the buttoned up well to do in the New Town versus the seamy brothels, gambling dens and squalor of the Old Town, where men of means went to have their licentious fun in secret, away from disapproving eyes.

The city helped to foster in me a sense of time, of communal lived experience, and of the changes that set each era apart. Edinburgh is a living museum, and I think living there shaped my tendency to look at all the places I visit through time travel goggles: I’m so used to seeing layers of history in my hometown that I search automatically for it elsewhere, and frequently it helps me to uncover rich sources of inspiration wherever I go, a veritable parade of “What ifs?”

And Edinburgh has at its heart a gem of geological history: Arthur’s Seat, an ancient volcanic plug minutes from the High Street, the spine of the Old Town. The same basalt that Edinburgh Castle sits upon also rises into a rounded mount with a line of ragged cliffs – the Salisbury Crags. Just a short walk from the bustling city centre you can round two corners on a winding path and imagine yourself in the highlands, a landscape of gorse bushes and moor grasses. If you climb the mount, not high, but it always leaves me out of breath, (I like to take a steepish and rough stair around the northeast slope to get to the final climb from the south) you look down on the old city, the new, and the more modern that grew all round it, all from a fragment of wilderness kept at its heart. To the north snakes the Firth of Forth, a mighty estuary and gateway to a far wider world, to the east rises Berwick Law, ancient twin to Arthur’s seat, to the south lie the Pentland Hills, the first wrinkles into the lowlands that separate Scotland from England, and to the west the wide valley of the central belt beckons. I’ll be honest, I never looked much west. Ironic, considering how far west I ended up travelling.

I grew up surrounded by an embarrassment of riches. So, like most locals, I ignored them. But when you move away, that journey makes you reflect more on what you left behind, and your mind and imagination linger and retrace the streets where once you so easily roamed. I may not have created a fantasy Edinburgh yet, but the images, ideas, histories (and I haven’t even touched on the military, religious, or cultural history of the city), and visions of Edinburgh have without a doubt had an impact on how I look at every other part of this world, and how I may imagine new worlds. You can take the boy out of Edinburgh, but you can’t take Edinburgh out of the boy. I’d not want it any other way.

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