Cameron Darrow's Blog, page 7

First Draft Finished!

The first draft of From the Ashes of Victory Book V: The Raven and The Firebird is done!

It's been a labor of love (in the best way) so far, and looks like it will be about as long as Remember, November when it's done, maybe a little shorter. It's a lot more plot-driven than Colours of Dawn was, but there's no shortage of character moments in it. Beyond that, I don't want to say any more!

Now comes my favorite part of every book: the revisions and editing. This is when it becomes a book, instead of a string of scenes that theoretically hold together. I already have a ton of notes to integrate, and further re-reads will reveal even more that needs to be done. But, from my perspective, the hardest part is done. For you, its starts! The teasing and anticipation can begin now.

After this, there's only one book left, and I can't tell you how surreal it is to be able to say that. Have to finish this one first, though!

As You Know... (Why) You Shouldn't Use 'As You Know'

One of my pet peeves I come across in writing is something you may not have even noticed for how prevalent it is. Authors I respect and whose work I enjoy do it, so I'm likely in the minority. But today I want to rant talk about using the phrase "As you know" in dialogue.

Characters telling other characters things they already know (and prefacing it by telling them they already know!) bugs the crap out of me. It's so forced and unnatural. Look, I get it. It's a way to get information to the reader that they need for the plot to make sense. In movies it's more forgivable because we don't have access to the character's thoughts. But having a character say "As you know" is just straight-up the author talking.

Why does it bug me so much? Because it undermines the character saying it! I do not for a minute subscribe to the idea that dialogue should sound 'how people actually talk' (have you ever tried to transcribe a conversation you've had? It's awful to read), but telling someone something they already know and telling them they already know it makes the character sound like an idiot. It's too unnatural.

I understand why it's done, I've been tempted to on more than one occasion (after time jumps in the From the Ashes of Victory series, if you'd like to know when). It's a simple, direct way to deliver exposition through dialogue, which many believe is superior to doing it through prose. Fine. But at what cost? Maybe you don't think about it, but I do! One of the main characters in the Ashes books, Victoria, is a doctor of physics. She's brilliant, and to stuff those words in her mouth would make her sound... dumb. It would compromise her. I am not her, and she is not me, I won't make her a worse character by speaking through her that way.

And even if you're not worried about how it reflects on your characters, you can still be wasting an opportunity! You can sacrifice a little efficiency for insight.


Try this:

"As you know, Princess Haughtypants hasn't responded to any attempts to get her under control, and the Council is worried about the future of the kingdom."

Versus:

"The Council still has grave concerns over Princess Haughtypants' demeanor," Conspirator Man said.
"Still?" Protagonist replied. The Princess was a legendarily selfish brat, spoiled beyond a turnip left in the sun for two weeks, and half as smart. "Have none of their attempts to rein her in made any progress?"
"Unfortunately not."


There! See? That shows more character and still gets the same information across! Two for one! More words, but way more information.

I know it's not as easy as I'm making it out to be, and not every situation can be addressed like this cherry-picked one I made up specifically to help make my point. Sometimes you just need to get the info out and move the f*ck on. I get it. I've done it. I'm not saying you're bad if you do it. I just wanted to address something I notice and tie it in to where my priorities lie when writing dialogue. I'm a character-first writer, plot comes second (or later), so this kind of thing is important to me.

So just remember to keep your characters in mind when balancing your exposition dumps, and how it might reflect on them. As you (now) know, someone out there is watching for it!

P.S.

There's also the famous example of this from the first Mortal Kombat movie, where a character starts a conversation by saying "Remember when our parents died" to get that information to the audience. It's legendarily terrible dialogue, but is it really that much worse than "As you know"?

November Sale!

All this month, Remember, November will be on sale WORLDWIDE for 99 cents (or the local equivalent)!

I'm doing this both to mark the 103rd anniversary of the end of World War I and so you have an easy way to get started on the From the Ashes of Victory series before the fifth book comes out. There's almost half-a-million words between zero and then, so no time like the present to begin!

Catharsis

I've written many times here about the trials and tribulations of writing a series, but I'd like to flip the script and write about one of the good points that I hadn't really considered when I started From the Ashes of Victory: catharsis.

Every writer wants to feel the satisfaction of paying off things that they set up, no matter how big or small it might be. Whether the climax of the story, or a revelation a character has, or seeing a villain get their just desserts, any number of events can give us that fist-pump "F*ck yeah!" feeling. (And you, too, I sincerely hope. I'm speaking from the perspective of coming up with it in the first place.)

But what I didn't expect was how amplified that feeling can get the longer it takes to get to that moment. Book V is not the last in the series, but I did just get to do something I've been dying to do since I started it. I'm not going to tell you what it is, of course, but it completely turned around a bummer week I was having.

I've known what happens at the end of the series for a while now, and I don't know that I'm prepared for what that will feel like, but I have a feeling what I got to do this week will come in second. (Maybe third. I have some doozies planned for Book VI!) Here's a hint: it was on my writing bucket list.

Seriously. Not just for this book or this series, but something I wanted to do as a writer got ticked off this week.

I can't wait for you to read it.

A Delay, but Don't Dismay

I'll get right to it: there's no way I'm going to have Book V out this year.

It sucks, and it hurts, but I just can't do it. There are a lot of reasons (the biggest being that Without Words took a lot longer than I thought it would, which was itself late for reasons outside my control), but the book will be better for having more time.

Unfortunately, that means 2021 will be the first year I don't get a From the Ashes of Victory book out since I released the first one in 2018, and that is a bitter pill to swallow. I'm super bummed about it more than anything.

BUT

It likely means you'll be getting the sixth and final book a few months early! I'm writing them back-to-back, non-stop, and I don't see any reason to hold Book VI until November, when I had originally planned to have it out. That is, if nothing else goes wrong.

Book V is still in its first draft, but I've written a few bits and bobs for VI already, too. The end is in sight, which is a bittersweet thing to be able to say, more so for perhaps being even closer than I had thought it was.

So, now you know. No one is more upset about it than me, but I hope you'll find the wait was worth it. I will have a lot more to say when the time comes! For now, it's back to work.

Feeling Seen

I got a fan letter last week. Me. Some wonderful person out there took the time to sit down and write a letter to me telling me how much they liked something I wrote.

Wow.

It's only the second one I've ever gotten, and if anything, it's even harder to believe than the first one. Someone else out there likes what I do? It wasn't just a one-off fluke?

I know we live in an age of turbocynicism and hypervanity, so my motivations for even mentioning this could be viewed, as the kids say, 'sus', but... I'm genuinely flabbergasted. Floored.

Writing books is hard, and lonely. Taking this thing that you've spent months or even years on, poured your heart and soul into and then just firing it off into the void wears on you. To hear the void talk back and tell you that it was worth it is incredibly validating. And motivating. There are people out there, who read my books! Like... what?

It sounds stupid. If you've never released any sort of creative work, I probably sound mad. But authors don't have a live audience reacting in real time. I don't hear you laughing or crying, those are personal, private reactions you have in bed or your reading nook or wherever. The point is, I don't know about it unless you tell me.

It's not about ego-stroking or getting pats on the head and being told 'good job!'. Why do you think we publish our work instead of just sticking it in a drawer somewhere? We want people to have emotional reactions, to make their day better (or worse), to connect, to speak to people, to resonate and make them think. To know that they did feels unlike anything else. It worked!

So if you come across something that you really enjoy, that moves you or speaks to you, reach out to the one who made it and let them know. Especially writers. It doesn't have to be me, I'm not begging for reviews here, I'm just trying to shine a little light on the other side of the equation. It's very, very easy to come to believe that what we do doesn't matter and that no one cares. Book after book, they're just more jetsam chucked into the consumer-churn wood chipper and shot out the other end with no impact whatsoever.

It's made me think about how I silently consume the things I love, so to that end I am going to try to be better about reaching out to creators and letting them know the difference they've made to me. On a grand scale, will it matter? Maybe, maybe not. But to that individual hunched over their keyboard in the dark, plagued with doubt, discouraged and alone, it can make all the difference in the world.

Inspiration

One thing you simply cannot do if you want to get work out consistently is only write when you feel inspired. Waiting and waiting for the Muse to whisper in your ear and hope that you're not half asleep when it happens. And near a keyboard. With the time.

If you're writing for fun, as a hobby and it doesn't matter if you finish or there's no one waiting for your thing to be done, sure, you do you. But otherwise (cliche as it sounds), you really do have to think of it as a job. Day in day out, get your reps in, hit your word count. Or, as I've recently heard it put you have to 'touch your story' every day. Doesn't always mean writing (I, for one, can't brainstorm/outline a project at the same time I'm writing another. I've tried, believe me), but you have to make contact with it somehow. Keep the mill churning, keep your momentum, don't forget where you were or what you were doing in the story.

Now, all that said, when the Muse happens to whisper at the same time you're sitting down at your keyboard and already ready to rock, it is absolute magic,. Those days are super rare, but you better believe I savor every moment. I had one this week, and I was buzzing from sheer creativity so much I literally couldn't get to sleep that night. When you really feel it, when you inhabit your characters and they speak to you, when it all becomes clear and you know you have to get down as many words/notes as you can as fast as possible because you know it's going to go away soon... fantastic. I live for those days, but they are so few and far between I really feel like I have to earn them.

Sometimes you can trace it directly to something you read or saw or heard, and you feel a debt of gratitude to that thing and its creator for the rest of your life. Sometimes it just strikes like lightning out of the blue. Sometimes it's just grinding away at a problem/character, etc. subconsciously for awhile before it spits out a solution.

The overall point though, is that you can't wait for it. You have to go get it, and sometimes earn it, but much like luck, you have to put yourself in a position to benefit from it. Novels take a long time, and the inspiration won't last, but those moments that may only last hours can change the course of your story forever.

Do You Force It?

If you've ever written anything of any length, you've probably run into times where you sit down at the keyboard and... nothing happens. Or maybe you don't even make it to the keyboard at all, 'cause you're just not feeling it. It's not writer's block, you know what you need to write, you have an outline, etc., but the motivation to put them down just isn't there.

What do you do?

Answer you don't want: it depends.
Answer that is the answer: it depends.

For me, the next book I publish will be my seventh. I'm at a stage where I've done this before, so I know I can do it. It's not a lack of experience or confidence that keeps my fingers from moving, it's usually something else. Writing the fifth (and sixth) book(s) in a series, sometimes the feeling that creeps in is that I have to do this, rather than want to. Which is weird, because I very much want to! My characters deserve to have their story told, I want to share with you what happens, but with the publishing of Book 4, the series crossed half-a-million words. Published words. I couldn't tell you how many I've cut. That's... a lot. Add on to the fact that these books are tough to write, and sometimes my brain just nopes out.

Most times, I give my brain a stern talking to and force myself to sit down and get the words down. Even if they're crap, it's something that I can edit into readability later. But on occasion, you just have to take a Mulligan. Just accept that it won't happen, and go do something else. There's always blog posts to write, reviews to submit, social media, all that stuff (that I have to do anyway) can be done instead of writing when it'S just not happening.

And that's okay! It took me a long time to be able to let myself do that without then beating myself up afterwards. If you force it too often, it can actually be counterproductive. You can start to dislike doing the work at all, and then you'll end up even farther back than you started.

But if you're just starting out, I wouldn't recommend doing the above until you understand your own habits and mental situation. Maybe you need smaller word count goals. Or you're just lost, and need to outline more. The important part is developing consistent habits, so the reasons you're struggling will become more apparent. If you don't know what normal is, how are you going to understand what's abnormal, let alone why?

Know thyself. I think as writers, this is one important thing that gets overlooked when you're starting. Maybe you can't do 2,000 words a day, maybe you're not a gardener-type after all, there's lots of things you can tweak about your habits until you're consistent and happy. There's an old stereotype about writers all being miserable alcoholics, but it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, it shouldn't, right?

Write what makes you happy, not what the Kindle charts say is popular. Write as many words as you can do every day, not just when the muse is whispering in your ear. Whatever you put down you can fix. The 'save' button isn't the 'publish' button! No one is going to see the garbage! Walking on a treadmill is still exercise; just because you didn't end up on the top of a mountain doesn't mean you didn't hike.

Sometimes forcing it can lead to breakthroughs, but sometimes it can just lead to breaks. Get a feel for which one it might be before you choose what to do.

Know yourself. Forgive yourself. Just don't give up.

Heads and Tails

Over the course of writing my books, one technique that's developed more or less organically is that on a first draft I am more and more leaving the heads and tails off of scenes during the first draft. Like a shrimp.

What I mean is that increasingly I don't worry about the beginnings and endings of scenes, and only focus on the core. What the scene is about, what it needs to accomplish. The whole point.

This has come about because I like to leave myself some flexibility in where scenes go in the story, and it's the context of what comes before and after that determines how they begin and end (in most cases). This is especially true for the Ashes books because I don't use chapters, so I like to make scenes flow into one another. Chapter-ending DUN-DUN-DUN moments are fun, but lose effectiveness when the next scene is only a few asterisks away instead of an entire page.

Now, some scenes (like major plot points) can't be moved, so their place in the story is fixed, but that doesn't mean I know what the immediately preceding scene is going to be. The heads and tails of scenes can go a long way towards helping to shift the tone, so if you have a romantic scene followed by a dramatic scene, you want to be able to bridge them without inducing whiplash. If you're lucky, you won't need an entire scene to serve as a transition, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

In addition, one of my creeds when writing is 'give yourself something to fix', which basically means get the words down and fix it later. Sometimes scenes don't work, or become redundant when you can get the information out somewhere else, so leaving off the heads and tails of scenes can help speed the process of finding the overall flow of the story.

I find this especially helpful with romantic scenes. The Ashes books aren't romances, but have strong romantic elements. This can be hard to integrate into some of the larger, more dramatic storylines, so saving the transitions between the two for later when you have a firmer understanding of context can be helpful, and less likely to bog you down during the first draft.

If you're a detailed outliner, then none of this is really useful to you, since you know all the answers to these questions already, but for writers like me, who plot out the big parts and find the connective tissue later, this technique has proven not only effective, but natural.

Enjoy your shrimp!

Writing Historical Fiction

Jumping off of last week's 'how to' post, I thought I would throw out some advice about writing historical fiction as well, especially since some of the techniques overlap.

I'm currently writing the last two books of the From the Ashes of Victory series, which are set in England in the late 1920s. Disclaimer: it's an alternate universe where magic is real, but much of the inspiration, and the entire jumping off point for the series (World War I) is real history.

So what if you want to write a historical (fantasy) novel?

Start from first principles. "I want to write a historical novel, but I don't want to do research." Sorry, then you don't want to write a historical novel. Make sure you want to write in a historical setting for the right reasons before you try writing in a historical setting. It's okay not to follow through! Be honest with yourself. There's a lot of extra work involved, especially if you're writing in a completely unfamiliar place as well as time. The more degrees of separation there are between you and your characters, the harder it's going to be to write them authentically day after day. Trust me, it can be exhausting to be someone else (or three someones) from another time and place consistently for months. Or years. But if you get it right, wow is it rewarding. (Disclaimer: I have probably not gotten it right. My lies fuel me.)

BUT! Don't sweat every last detail. Especially money! Oh my God, money in Britain before decimalization was an exercise in masochism. And even if you go through all the trouble of figuring out how many pence were in a pound (240. Still want to be specific?), good luck finding prices for a pound of flour in Glasgow in 1897. Besides, it probably won't mean much to a modern reader anyway. Think about money today. If I gave you a price in yen or rand, would it mean anything? Here's an example of how to get around it from Colours of Dawn: 'Vita fished out her wallet and produced the fare.' That's all you need to get across that your characters aren't kleptomaniacs.

Choose a time period you're already interested in. This lines up with last week as well, and for the same reasons. You'll already have a baseline to start from and you'll want to learn more about it.

Be sensitive to who you're writing about. The farther back you go, the less this applies, but if you're writing in a time period that is within living memory, keep in mind that you are staying in someone else's house. People actually lived through that time, and remember it (fondly or otherwise). Be respectful and pay attention to context! Context is the first thing to go when people look back at the past, and it's easy to make blanket judgments based on the little bits and pieces that filter down to the present. It's our job as historical (fantasy) writers to provide that context, I believe. If we're going to be spending an entire novel (or series) there, you have to provide insight into the forces working on your characters. History is grey, not stark black-and-white. Example: Victoria was a White Feather girl. It is very easy to paint them all as heartless monsters who used public shaming as a weapon, but it was more nuanced than that. Does Victoria regret what she did? Absolutely. But we see why she did it, and the circumstances surrounding that choice. Plus an entirely different view later, when Katya gives her feelings on the movement. (At least those men had a choice.) See? Grey.

But remember, it's not real. You're not going to get the research 100% correct, and on top of that, you have to make accommodations for the fact you're writing for people who are living right now. Your characters can speak authentically sure, but if it's so full of slang and outdated references, what good is it? "Gimme five bees for a quarter, they'd say!" You're writing a story, not a textbook. I mean, put magic in my books!

Pictures/films/music can go a long way for inspiration. If you choose a time period from after the invention of the camera, you have a big advantage. You can look at stuff the way it was at the time! When I was writing the 'Christmas in Paris' short story that's included in the Books 1-3 box set, I had a hard time picturing what Paris actually looked like in 1919. Then I saw an illustration that showed just how utterly monstrous the Eiffel Tower was compared to everything else in the city, and it suddenly clicked just how different the skyline looked. For the second trilogy, I love going through pictures from the 20s to help immerse myself in the time period. The graininess and lack of color only add to the temporal distance and give it a layer of unreality that makes it easier to fictionalize for me. Silent films, too. Frame rates and the lack of audio, in addition to the makeup and costuming always make them feel off in a way that really does seem like looking back in time. Silent film actresses have had enormous influence on informing my characters, from appearance to bearing. They always look so melancholy! Music too, from that era helps. Tinny and scratchy, it's like listening through a time portal. No remasters or re-recordings for me, but you do you.

These are only some of the techniques/advice that has gotten me this far, it's not everything. It may not even be right! It's just my perspective. A lot of people will recommend actually visiting the place you're writing about, but that's simply not an option to many (especially now), so I didn't include it.

Remember, the most important element in your story is the characters. If I don't care about them, then none of the rest matters. I'll happily look past a fabric type being 10 years early if I enjoy spending time with the person inside the dress it's made from.

Hope this helps!