Eric Witchey's Blog: Shared ShadowSpinners Blog , page 18

Musings on Breathing Life into a Heartless Villain, by Pamela Jean Herber

 

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Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Madame Humbert and her counsel : an appreciation of the humorous side of the “cause célèbre.”” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1903.

What makes for a memorable antagonist?

I’ve been having trouble with the antagonist in my current novel-in-progress. She’s boring. I have a decent handle on how she operates in her world, and the role she plays in the story, but she feels more like a mathematical formula than a human being. What to do?… Go out in search of a villain I’m excited about who has similar traits to my antagonist.

An intriguing historical villain

In my travels through books, the Internet, and my own memory, I found a deliciously evil woman from the early 1800s who grew up in Bauzelles, France. Her name was Thérèse Humbert.

As a girl, Thérèse was betrayed by her own father. He had raised her to believe she and her family were wealthy aristocrats. When the truth came out upon her father’s death that she was not of nobility, and wouldn’t be inheriting great wealth, Thérèse was robbed of a station in society she believed she was entitled to. Without legitimate means to claim her place, she resorted to her father’s game. Fraud.

She continued to tell the tale of her family’s aristocratic standing. She was able to obtain credit based on soon-to-be received wealth, piling up huge debt buying a lifestyle that gave the appearance of wealth. Along the way, Thérèse’s husband, and her father-in-law covered her debts as best they could, perhaps to protect their own reputations. She convinced bankers to allow debts to go unpaid for long after they were due by weaving story after story of an impending inheritance and a favorable marriage by her sister.

Eventually, Thérèse was arrested, tried, and imprisoned, but not after she had wreaked havoc on the hopes, reputations, and livelihoods of numerous family members, friends, and business associates. These unsustainable ways lead Thérèse to betray her younger sister in the very way her father had betrayed her.

With only a brief sketch of Thérèse’s life, I’m hooked.

What makes Thérèse Humbert such an interesting character?

The fact that Thérèse’s father betrayed her makes her need for money and status believable and heartbreaking. Her actions were still unconscionable, but I sympathize with how she became capable of them.
She betrayed her daughter in the same way she was betrayed. Wow. Just wow. This makes me worry for not just the family, but for all the descendants, and especially the sister. Will it be possible for her to break the cycle?
The younger sister could not have been deceived without the support of family members who knew the truth. Thérèse could not have successfully defrauded so many people without the support of her very victims: family, friends, and business associates.

In light of what I’ve found, what can I try out on my antagonist?

Provide a single and traumatic event that drives her need for money and status.
Show that her daughter is at risk of falling into the same patterns of behavior.
Populate the story with a network of people that support the antagonist.

The villain in the story doesn’t breathe on their own. The person the villain was before the damage, and the people in the villains’s life who have retained their compassion, they are the ones who bring the villain to life.

Tagged: Characters, creative process, fiction, inspiration, Novel Writing, Shadow Spinners, ShadowSpinners, Thérèse Humbert, Villain, villainy, writing

Fiction and Viktor Frankl, by Eric Witchey

[image error] (image source: Alan M. Clark, cover artist)

Fiction and Viktor Frankl, by Eric Witchey

In my small way, I try to continually expand my awareness of the experiences of others. I do this because I’m curious by nature and because to do so improves my ability to tell a story. Because I have been working on a fantasy story to support the marketing efforts of Dungeon Solitaire, I found myself researching death rites and rituals from various parts of the world. I also decided to reread Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

For any human being capable of compassion, reading Viktor Frankl is always a heady experience. However, my immersion in death rites and rituals somehow brought me to a moment where I was struck by how fully universal to the human experience his accounts of life and core integrity are. Perhaps I should have felt this before, and I certainly understood it before, but this time it hit me more deeply in both the heart and mind.

In my travels in the writing life, I have met some pretty rabid Zionists, a few really terrifying Palestinian poets, escaped hostages from the Palestinian hostage crisis, survivors of Guatemalan genocide, Serbs, Iranian ex-pats, righteous American ex-pats, escaped cold war Ukrainians, Holocaust survivors, Turkish intellectual Muslims, a Greek freedom fighter (against the Germans and carrying huge hatred of all Germans and Turks), a Catholic monk who fought on the German side in WWI and the American side in WWII, and all manner of extreme Christians who, more than the others, scared the hell out of me personally. That last one included a mercenary I met on his way to South Africa to fight for the Christian white-right to bring Apartheid back. I won’t add more to this list. It’s already long enough to make my point.

During my interactions with various people who held aggressive/defensive positions that made me nervous, I have tried to keep my fear in check and truly listen to their (sometimes insane and irrational) personal positions in order to seek some understanding of what motivates actions I cannot understand from the context of my white-boy, Midwestern, multi-religion upbringing.

Those extreme souls I met who had a sense of history, even if only from their own agenda-driven point of view or other-interpreted oral traditions, had one thing in common. They deeply felt, and were sometimes motivated solely by, their fear for their families and their futures. Often, that fear was grounded in their sense of history, and their sense of history was based entirely on which side of the experiences they were on.

Here’s an example. I was in a village in central Mexico, and the man I was staying with casually described how he really liked the new mayor because she was not corrupt. I asked how he knew she was not corrupt, and he said, “Because the cartel has tried to kill her twice.”

Well, that caught my attention.

I asked about the cartel and whether we were safe. He laughed and told me that of course we were safe. He said, “If you were in one of your cities, there would places you knew not to go at night, right?” I nodded. “Us, too,” he said. “We just don’t go to the wrong places at the wrong times.”

The casual conversation moved on, and he eventually described to me how the cartels weren’t really a problem to the people of the village. From his perspective, the American gun dealers were the real problem.

I kept listening. He kept talking. From his perspective, the cartels were like the weather, but the Americans sold death. From his perspective, the cartels were God-fearing people doing the best they could in terrible economic circumstances. They brought products in from the South, moved the products through the area, and passed them on across the border to the North. However, it was the Godless, money-hungry Americans who created the market for the drugs and who fueled the destruction of families by selling guns to both the government and the cartels.

The above is a very short description of an off-and-on conversation that went on for more than a week, but I hope you get the idea. Everything he said was true for him and his family in their lives in their world.

The flip-side of that story is also equally true. The DEA agent I met in Pima, Arizona who had lost two members of her family, one to addiction and one to gunfire, hated the Mexican government and the Mexican people for allowing the cartels, for trafficking across the border, and for making poison available on the streets in a way that killed her brother. She believed that the Pope at that time supported the trafficking and that Catholic confession was part of the reason the smugglers could do what they did without remorse. She was also correct from within her context.

Both people were deeply moved because of their connection to family history, family safety, and possible futures. Both essentially hated the other for what they considered to be good reasons. Both supported their positions from a combination of personal experience, family history, speculation, and verifiable fact.

An aside: Personally, the more I learned about the illegal gun trade and the multi-billion dollar flow of firearms from the U.S. to Mexico, the more disgusted I got with the whole situation. So, I wrote a story, “The Tequila Volcano.” It appeared in a literary journal last year, Timberline Review. It’s very short, and I recommend both the story and the journal.

When Viktor Frankl described both the deterioration of prisoners, whom one would expect to be supportive of one another, into brutal behavior toward one another and concentration camp guards, whom one would expect to be brutal but a few of whom engaged in acts of compassion and kindness, I was struck once more with the sad truth that no group has a lock on reality.

No person or group is entitled to perfect righteousness.

Frankl broke both the prisoners and the guards of the concentration camps into two essential groups: those who have core decency and those who do not. Neither guards nor prisoners were a homogenous front of virtue or brutality.

My life has exposed me to people from many traditions, to multiple holy texts, to people who have survived race and religion-motivated traumas, and to amazing acts of kindness and human decency from all regions, races, and holy traditions.

I do my very best to support the growth of the human heart. I do my best to find the commonality of experience and to avoid becoming bogged down in the destructive, isolating interpretations of ideology that are often used to fuel fear and justify destructive behavior. I cannot ever truly understand the devastation that is part of some family histories and historical identities. I can only do my best to dampen and block the perpetuation of fear and hatred in all its forms. I hope that my fiction explores mutual understanding, expands the development of compassion, and creates some sense of common ground in the human condition.

I believe that stories can help to heal the world. They lead the way to new thoughts, to expanded awareness, to a smaller sense of “I” and a greater sense of “we.”

So, I tell another story.

Which Snow Queen Character Are You?

by Christina Lay

We all want to be the Queen, but let’s face it; sometimes we’re the crow, the witch, or the hobgoblin.

I’ve been thinking lately about how a fairy tale penned in 1844 remains relevant in our culture today. Mind you, my thoughts never stray far from the realm of folklore and fairy, and working for the Eugene Ballet Company, listening to the brand new score for the brand new Snow Queen Ballet drift up from the studio below my office, I’ve been finding it harder than ever to concentrate on bookkeeping and easier and easier to drift into the realm of story.

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Principal Dancer Danielle Tolmie as The Snow Queen – Photo Courtesy of The Eugene Ballet

The Snow Queen has always been one of those tales that didn’t sit quite comfortably with me. I remember watching a version of it on TV when I was kid. I was both fascinated and disturbed. I wish I could remember which of the many adaptations it was (I’m guessing this was around 1970) but as with other non-Disney, weirdly and honestly portrayed tales, it left me not knowing what to think or feel. That sense of unease stayed with me until I recently re-read the original tale and rediscovered a treasure trove of fascinating characters and stunning images mined from the archival memory of folklore.

Yes, it is weird as only a 173 year-old fairy tale can be, but Gerda, the very good girl, rescues her dear friend Kay and all is well in the end. I think what disturbed me was the lack of resolution regarding the Queen herself. The focal point of anticipation and wonder conveniently leaves on vacation when Gerda shows up at her palace of ice. (Hope this isn’t a spoiler for anyone). Maybe she was bored with Kay and was glad to get him off her hands.

I can only guess the movie version I saw didn’t send the queen away with no resolution, but who knows. The Queen remains a literary enigma, a mystery ensconced in a palace of ice who occasionally abducts little boys in order to have them move pieces of ice around on her frozen “lake of reason”.

Disney’s recent Frozen, very loosely based on The Snow Queen, is a sort of origin tale for the queen, exploring how a person might come to choose to live alone in a palace of ice. Obviously, zillions of movie-goers related to the concept of a person “frozen” due to the denial of their individuality; be it their artistic leanings, their sexuality, their personality, their natural talents. The story examines the damage inflicted when an essential part of oneself is rejected by those closest to you (in Frozen, Elsa’s own parents force her to suppress her astounding magical abilities out of fear). Many of us have experienced this on some level, and understand the urge to withdraw and hide our true selves to avoid further pain. In this case, we are the queen.

But there are many more characters in The Snow Queen and not all are so regal or impressively outfitted.

There’s Gerda, the lovely little girl who even the angels want to help. Gerda represents unconditional love and innocence. Something we can all relate to, right? Although she’s rejected by Kay, and even believes him dead, she won’t give up on him until she’s sure. She’s not terribly bright; her best idea to find out where Kay has gone is to throw her shoes into the river as a payment for knowledge, even after the river insists it doesn’t know anything. She does manage to get stuck on a boat and in the way of fairy tales, is carried toward her ultimate goal. Gerda also represents blind faith, and it works for her. Maybe we are Gerda when we throw common sense to the winds in order to pursue our dreams, loves, impossible wishes. Don’t the gurus always claim that when you follow your heart, the universe will aid you?

In contrast to Gerda is the robber girl, who is a psychopath with a heart of gold. She’s been raised by thieves to be violent, selfish and impulsive and yet she does help Gerda in the end. It’s not clear why, other than it amuses her more to see Gerda continue on her adventure than to murder her. I’m afraid I’ve been the robber girl on occasion. Not that I’ve every threatened to slit anyone’s throat, but the self-absorbed obsession with my own impulses isn’t entirely unfamiliar. I would venture to guess that in most people there exists an equal balance between Gerda’s unselfish goodness on one extreme and the robber girl’s amoral wildness on the other. Neither melds well to my sense of self, but I’ve been in both places.

What about the crow? Good natured, helpful, engaged but willing to risk his betrothed’s position at court in order to help out a stranger? And the crow loves to eat. The crow is about the most normal person in this entire fairy tale. Naturally he must die.

The old witch who lives on the river? She so enjoys Gerda’s company she attempts to erase Gerda’s memories of Kay in order to keep the girl by her side. The witch kills her many rose bushes so that the sight of them won’t trigger Gerda’s memories. In an absolutely lovely image, Gerda’s tears awaken the roses that have been buried beneath the earth and cause them to once again grow above into the sunlight. Then Gerda in her less than stable way runs around for a long while trying to get the roses to tell her where Kay has gone. The flowers have other things on their minds.

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Flowers Return to Life – Photo Courtesy of The Eugene Ballet

I find the old witch more disturbing than the Snow Queen or the robber girl. Her manipulation is subtle, possibly even well-intentioned, and she could represent the authority figure who suppresses dreams, talents and nature in order to cleave someone to their side; depending on your perspective, this could be an entirely selfish quest to clip someone else’s wings or a rational desire to keep someone safe. Doesn’t every parent or lover have a little bit of this impulse inside them? Stay near, dear one, don’t venture out where you might get hurt, or lost, or worse, fall in love with someone else and leave me.

And then there are the hobgoblins, or trolls, if you prefer, who start the whole thing. The trolls have a mirror which when gazed upon, distorts whatever beauty there is into ugliness. They have great fun tormenting everyone with it and decide to take it to heaven to mess with the angels. Well, the mirror falls and shatters into a million pieces, but the shards still have their evil effect. Only now, the shards get into people’s eyes and hearts and make them see everything as twisted, bad and ugly. Obviously fragments of the troll mirror are still at work today, with hate and bigotry so prevalent in our politics and media. There’s no shortage of trolls at work eager to warp and twist reality into something monstrous that can conjure hatred. “Fearmongering” is word that is sadly useful here. Have you ever used gossip or lies in order to punish, manipulate or control? Yeah, me neither.

Kay, the little boy whose heart turns into a block of ice, represents the human side of the troll equation. It is certainly not uncommon to be infected with an attitude that turns everything grey, or threatening. Depression is like this, but so is prejudice; fear of the other. I hate to admit I’ve been under the influence of troll thinking more than a few times in my life. If we are exceptionally lucky, we have a Gerda in our lives who will stand by us now matter how big a prick we become, someone whose love might save us from our own worst impulses.

The Snow Queen clearly still touches our hearts and our imaginations. I’ve read the theory that Hans Christen Anderson’s character of the Snow Queen, a heartless figure sitting on her throne of ice in the middle of the lake of reason, was a reaction against criticism he’d received for writing fanciful fairy tales. Writers of fantasy today still have to defend the relevance of their “fairy tales”, despite the fact the genre has become hugely popular. People who don’t “get” fantasy fail to see the truth behind the tall tales. Perhaps they have a bit of glass in their eye. Fantasy is to literature as poetry is to language, it gives us the magical ability to say things in words that can’t be said in words. And now, in the wonderful way of human creativity, the poem is being translated into dance. No matter the medium, fantasy and fairy tales let us see beyond the clouded mirrors to deep within our souls and into the souls of others, connecting us in the dreams we share.

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If you happen to be in Eugene this weekend, don’t miss the chance to check out The Snow Queen, an original ballet choreographed by Toni Pimble, original score by Kenji Bunch.

 

 

 

Tagged: Characters, creative process, creativity, Eugene Ballet, fairy tale, fantasy, folklore, Frozen, Hans Christen Anderson, inspiration, Snow Queen, writing

When Furry Fiction Meets Dark Fiction

By Mary E. Lowd

I like animals, and so I write about them.  Early on, I tried to keep the animals under control, off to the side, with plenty of human characters for readers to identify with at the center of my stories.  Eventually, I discovered that there’s a whole genre of fiction for people like me who want to read and write about animals — it’s called furry fiction, and it changed my life.  I stopped trying to shoehorn humans into my stories and fully embraced my desire to write animal characters.[image error]

There are a lot of advantages to writing furry fiction.  In 2005, I started writing a NaNoWriMo novel about a down and out tabby cat and the dog goon who’s hired to get rid of her but turns out to have a heart of gold.  It was inspired by watching my dog Patrick bark at my cat Heidi.  It was supposed to be a quick and dirty novel to get the pump primed, and then once I had the animal characters out of my system, I’d move on to writing some serious science-fiction.  Ten years later though, I’m still exploring the world of that novel because it turned out to be so rich.  My fourth novel in that setting, Otters In Space 3: Octopus Uprising, should come out some time in the next year.

When you write about animal species, they’re fun and easy to picture, so a story is almost automatically colorful and compelling on a shallow level.  This is why so many cartoons and animated films feature animal characters.  Animals are fun to look at; animal characters are fun to think about.  But more than that, each different animal species comes with its own quirks — some are predators, some are prey; some live in desserts, some are aquatic; they can have bushy fur, scales, feathers, or even skin that changes color.  Antlers, wings, giant ears, long tails?  So many options.  And all these differences lead to different needs and different priorities.  So, if you take your animal characters seriously, you can end up with a really rich world really fast.  If you’ve seen the movie Zootopia, then you know what I mean.

But ShadowSpinners is a blog about dark fiction, so I want to steer this toward the intersection between dark fiction and furry fiction, because something really interesting happens when those two flavors combine.

Furry characters give the reader a feeling of safe distance — “That couldn’t happen to me; it’s happening to a cartoon character.”  Wile E. Coyote can blow himself up, fall off cliffs, and be crushed by anvils all day every day, and it’s funny.  George Orwell’s 1984 is terrifying, but Animal Farm is cute.  The Netflix show BoJack Horseman delves deeply into the truth of depression.  And Art Spiegelman’s Maus stares unflinchingly at the reality of Auschwitz.  This is a powerful tool.  But there’s a flip side, a double standard if you will.

People will cry over animals like they’ll never cry over other humans.  I have a series of short stories about a tabby cat who constantly runs afoul of his owner’s household appliances — these are lightweight, fun, adventure romps with a supernatural twist.  Yet, I’ve had these stories rejected (once by a YA market that lists The Hunger Games as the type of fiction they like) on the grounds that a cat killing a mouse is too dark.

Is there any way to twist the knife in a story more powerful than killing the dog?  Sure, you can “kill the dog” without writing furry fiction.  But furry fiction gives you a lot more dogs to kill.

If you want to write something truly, deeply dark, imagine combining both halves of that double standard.

I’ll let that idea sit for a moment.

It’s like the salty, nutty taste of peanut butter, undercut by the intense, bittersweet flavor of chocolate.  Complex on the tongue and totally addictive.  Lure the reader in with happy animal characters and make them feel safe — twitching noses, fluffy cottontails, and long ears.  Then leave the poor bunny with its hind foot caught in a snare, twisted and bleeding to death on the floor — hitting the reader harder than they’ve ever been hit before.

The magical blend of furry fiction and dark fiction lends a unique opportunity to dark fiction writers.  If you want to explore the possibilities for fitting furry characters into your own fiction, check out my essay “Writing Furry Speculative Fiction” on Jester Harley’s Manuscript Page where I break down all the standard tropes of furry world-building.  For more information about furry fiction in general, check out the Furry Writers’ Guild website — among other things, the FWG keeps a listing of furry markets and hosts a forum and Slack group with a very active community of writers.

Furry fiction is an exciting and growing genre.  We’d love to welcome more dark fiction writers into our ranks!

* * * *

Mary E. Lowd writes stories and collects creatures. She’s had three novels and more than eighty short stories published so far. Her fiction has won an Ursa Major Award and two Cóyotl Awards. Meanwhile, she’s collected a husband, daughter, son, bevy of cats and dogs, and the occasional fish. The stories, creatures, and Mary live together in a crashed spaceship disguised as a house, hidden in a rose garden in Oregon. Learn more at www.marylowd.com, or read much of her short fiction at www.deepskyanchor.com.

Tagged: fantasy, furry, Mary Lowd, writing, Writing Dark Fiction

Interview Series: Interview with author Mary E. Lowd

By Cynthia Ray

The creative process has always fascinated me, and especially how it works for individual artists and writers.  I’ll be delving into this in a series of interviews with authors near and far.   In the first of this series, we meet Mary E. Lowd.  I met Mary in a writing group in Oregon, and I was immediately drawn to her quirky humor, and her warm, insightful stories.   She’s had three novels and more than eighty short stories published so far. Her fiction has won an Ursa Major Award and two Cóyotl Awards. Meanwhile, she’s collected a husband, daughter, son, bevy of cats and dogs, and the occasional fish.

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Mary, what can you tell us about your work, and yourself as an author?

I write science-fiction and furry fiction.  That means spaceships and talking animals.  I have been known to write the occasional piece of contemporary science-fiction, and some of the animals I write about can’t talk.  But mostly, I like to write stories that have spaceships and talking animals.  So, it should come as no surprise that the novel series I’ve been working on for the last decade is called Otters In Space.

I self-published the first Otters In Space novel in 2010.  Then I discovered the furry fandom, and I spent the next year tirelessly trying to sell my self-published novel to an actual furry publisher.  In 2012, Otters In Space was re-released by FurPlanet, and I could not have been prouder of that swirly emblem with two paw-prints emblazoned on the back cover of my book, pronouncing it a FurPlanet book.  Since then, I’ve had two more novels published by FurPlanet, a collection of short stories, and I’ve become the editor for their annual anthology ROAR.  The third Otters In Space novel is in the final editing phases now and will hopefully come out later this year or early next year.

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That’s good to hear.  I’ve been waiting for that book to come out.  It’s themes are very relevant to the environment that we find ourselves in today.  So, why do you write?

I write because I have to.  It’s what I’ve been doing my whole life.  Even before I could read, my mom encouraged me to tell stories, and she’d write them down for me.  Two of my earliest works were “Sally Cat and the Six Magic Balls” and “Salamander.”  One was a fantasy story about a cat (so, the kind of thing that I still write) and the other was a personal narrative of the day that I caught a salamander.

Once I could actually write the words down myself, writing became my escape.  Why would you spend a day in middle school when you could use the notebook paper in front of you to escape to the Serengeti where a poodle is trying to steal the throne from a blind lion?  (I believe that story was heavily influenced by Gary Larson’s The Far Side.)  I spent most of middle school surrounded by the cheerful woodland creatures of Great Oak Abbey, a place which bore a striking resemblance to Brian Jacques’ Redwall Abbey.  Then after reading C.J. Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur, I moved to outer space with a crew of tiger-like aliens and spent all of high school on their spaceship with them.

These days, why would I live in a country that failed to elect its first woman president this fall when I could instead hang out in deep space with all kinds of animal-like aliens?  At this point, I’ve spent so much of my life writing that I get twitchy if I go very long without doing it.  Writing is something that I have to do, so I may as well make use of it.

I like your idea of hanging out in deep space.  I’ve heard they have a woman president on Mars.  But seriously, what does Creative Process mean to you?  What is yours?

There are a lot of ways to go about writing, and a strategy that works for you at one time may be a complete dead-end later.  So, I guess I believe that creative processes are always evolving.  As such, I’ll tell you about a strategy that’s worked out really well for me this year.

Last summer, I’d been stuck trying to finish Otters In Space 3 for so long — tying up loose threads and managing continuity with three previously published novels in the same world — that I was sick to death of writing a long work.  I wanted the freedom of writing something much shorter.  So I started playing something I call The Flash Fiction Game.

I got three decks of cards — two story-telling decks from a toy store (one fairy tale themed, the other robot themed) and a deck of animal guide cards.  In the morning, I’d draw a card from each deck, and by the end of the day, I had to finish a complete piece of flash fiction inspired by those three cards.  Animal + robot element + fairy tale element added up to furry space opera for me, so I wrote several dozen pieces of flash fiction set in my Crossroads Station universe by the end of the fall.  Some days, the cards clicked with each other, and it was easy.  Other days, I’d stare at those cards at a complete loss, and every word was a struggle.  But I’d still finish something resembling a complete piece of flash fiction, and finishing a complete story is a huge rush.

So, overall, I ended up with a bunch of stories — some mediocre, but some surprisingly excellent (five of them have been accepted by Daily Science Fiction) — and a huge boost to my confidence.  If you find yourself feeling lost or stuck, it’s a strategy I’d highly recommend giving a try.  Though, it won’t work for everybody.  That’s the thing about creative processes — they’re unique to each person, and even for a single person they’re always evolving.

Yes, the process is unique for each person; thats what makes it so interesting, but there are similarities, aren’t there?   Let me ask you another question.  What is the hardest thing you have worked through?

I nearly died when my daughter was born — if I’d lived in Jane Austen times, I’m sure I would have.  The recovery was brutal — both physically for myself and emotionally for my family, as my husband was deeply scarred by almost losing me.  Human reproduction is a cruel joke.  Of course, I’ve used those feelings to inspire stories.  One of my most successful stories — “Foreknowledge” (http://www.apex-magazine.com/foreknowledge/) — remixed many of my actual feelings into a fictional scenario.  It’s the story I’ve been most often told is my best; it also makes a lot of people cry.  I couldn’t have given it the same immediacy and power without mining my own experiences for kernels of truth.



Thank you for sharing that experience.  What a positive way to work through it.  What is the most revealing thing you have learned about yourself by writing?

I’m a cat who wishes she were a dog.  Or an otter.  I actually didn’t realize this directly from my writing; although, it was right there on the page, staring at me.  Even so, it took a fan coming up to me at a furry convention and telling me that he loved my novel because he’s a cat who wishes he were an otter too.  The main character in each of my novels so far is a cat who wishes she were a dog or otter.  If you don’t speak the language of animal archetypes, this means that I’m particular and persnickety, but I aspire to be care-free and fun-loving.  Though, I think it’s much more elegant and carries far greater nuance in the language of furries:  I’m a cat who wishes she were a dog.

And finally, if you were going to tell aspiring authors one thing, what would it be?

It will be hard.  It will get easier.   Write about animals — they’re fun to write, and people like to read about them.

Learn more at www.marylowd.com, or read much of her short fiction at www.deepskyanchor.com.

https://www.amazon.com/Otters-In-Space-Search-Havana/dp/1614500436

https://www.amazon.com/Otters-Space-Jupiter-Deadly-Volume/dp/1614501181

https://www.amazon.com/Dogs-World-Mary-E-Lowd/dp/1614502374

https://www.amazon.com/Necromouser-Other-Magical-Cats/dp/1614502838/

 

 

 

 

 

Tagged: author, creative process, creativity, Eugene, furry fiction, interviews with authors, Mary Lowd, ShadowSpinners, Writing Fiction, writing process

One Legendary Evening

By Elizabeth Engstrom

There is a legend that tells of Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein sitting down in front of the fireplace one evening with a bottle of brandy, and each of them burning one million unpublished words. To date I’ve been unable to authenticate this legend, but it doesn’t really matter whether or not it is true. I like to think it is, and I choose to think that for many reasons.

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The main reason I like this story is that it tells me that I am not alone with my quirky propensities.

I have a propensity to keep everything I write. I’m not the only writer whose filing cabinet is filling up with unpublished, unpublishable writings. Why do we cling to these things? Because we may look at them some day and discover that they had mutated over the years into something useful?

This lore also tells me that even the great writers—the writers of legend—have dead end ideas, bad books, worthless prose. They don’t consider their every word golden, and neither should I. (Tony Hillerman says he has a whole file cabinet full of first chapters.) They practice their craft, and don’t subject their fans to their practicings. I thank them for that.

I wonder what went into that fire of Heinlein and Bradbury. What brilliant poetry, intriguing concepts from the minds of those two gentlemen will be forever lost to our body of American literature? With Heinlein long dead and Bradbury recently so, what would Christie’s get for those manuscript pages on the auction block?

While I long to read fresh material by these two men, I’m glad they had the courage to reduce those pages to ashes, rather than to let me at their files of rejected prose and aborted projects. Why would I want to lessen my opinion of them by reading their worst, when I have been privileged to read their best?

How was this plan conceived, and how did they go about choosing what went the way of the flames? Were these things unpublished because of the authors’ internal editors or the editors of some publishing house? Did they ball up the pages and toss them in with cavalier bravado, or did they gently, reverently, lay stacks of pages upon the logs? And what did they talk about as they fed the fire? Did they tell bawdy jokes, or gossip about other writers and their work or their love lives, or did they complain about the changing aspects of the publishing industry? Was this an unburdening, cathartic evening, or a memorial service filled with melancholy of stories that could have been?

Two men who wrote with typewriters and carbon paper, pre-computer, pre-Xerox, each burning the equivalent of ten 100,000-word novels. It gives me pause.

Some day, I hope a writer hears about the same ritual as performed by me and one of my contemporaries, and considers it with the same amount of speculation. But to have a million unpublished words is a huge undertaking.

I best get busy.

Tagged: productivity, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Writing Fiction, writing process

A Confusing Lesson in Resistance, Ego, and Illusion

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By Lisa Alber

A few weeks ago, I happened on a funny little book at the New Renaissance bookshop in Portland. After scoffing at a book about how to analyze my issues by observing my dog’s behavior, my gaze stopped on a title that read, I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it. How Resistance Controls Your Life and What To Do About It.

If I believed in the metaphysical, I’d have said it was a sign from the book gods. I knew I had to buy the book when I opened it and read at random:

“If you recognize this trap [i.e. nasty internal voice naysayers], perhaps as a result of years of failed self-improvement plans, you’ve most likely spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out why this is happening. “Why do I keep failing?” And, you’ve probably heard plenty of internal “advice” about what you should do differently, usually amounting to “just try harder.””

It’s as if the author wrote to me personally. Having grown up in a positive-thinking, self-improving family, I am the Queen of Failure when it comes to self-improvement plans. Sometimes I despair of myself, and I do ask myself why I keep failing, and I do have a voice that always demands that I “just” try harder.

“Just” — such an awful little word.

I’m no stranger to pondering the notion of “resistance.” I’ve talked about it enough in psychological terms and in terms of creativity. This little book comes at it from a Buddhist point of view. The book defines resistance as an ego-identity maintenance system. It’s all about how the “I” maintains control and its status quo.

Our egos want to survive above all, and when we set out to change the status quo, the ego brings out the nasty little internal voices that rationalize, accuse, blame, shame, taunt. So, we fall back into old patterns and feel rotten about ourselves.

OK, I can see that, but then the book talks about illusion. As in, what the ego presents to us is illusion: worries, anxieties, shoulds, coulds. All these thoughts about how our lives would be better if X. These are just stories. They aren’t real and the thoughts behind them aren’t real. It’s all illusion.

We tend to believe our thoughts, don’t we? But our thoughts are just thoughts; they’re not indicative of any kind of truth about ourselves. But we believe them and we suffer.

I know I suffer a lot. I feel like I’m always striving, trying to outdistance my voices. Try harder, try harder.

The galling part is that the more I read this book, the more I realize how ego-driven I am. MASSES of ego. Ego all over the place. Oozing ego almost every waking moment, and maybe while I’m asleep.

Thing is, I’m reading this book and gaining insight, but I’m not sure what lessens the resistance … Awareness? I think calling out the thoughts as the unhelpful beasts they are and taking a few breaths to bring myself back to the moment could be helpful.

Of course, the most interesting thing about delving into a book about resistance is that all the while, I’m resisting my writing. So my quest to lessen resistance is itself resistance?

Hmm … Seems confusing, this Buddhist philosophical stuff. Oh wait, is that resistance again?  That is, was that a naysayer thought about reading the book, just to get me to quit reading the book?

And is this tendency of mine to overanalyze yet ANOTHER example of the ego’s resistance tactics?

Dang.

What do you do to lessen resistance?

Tagged: Buddhism, ego, illusion, resistance, self-improvement, writing

It was a Dark and Stormy Sunday Afternoon

by Christina Lay

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I’ve written about how I tend to be a fast writer, a “panster” who plunges ahead at a furious pace and sorts it all out in an excruciating second draft. On writing retreats, I often irritate the hell out of fellow writers with my ability to completely ignore craft and grammar in order to get the words down (little do they know half those words are adjectives). My first draft motto might be “Damn the plot, full speed ahead!” Fingers flying, I am in the zone and happy as a hack-writing clam, if clams had fingers.

However, in the grey of long Sundays spent with ass glued to chair, I too experience the inevitable quagmire of a story gone wrong. Then every word is like passing a gallstone and every scene is as flat and grey as Iowa in January.

I’m fighting with a story now. Or actually, I’ve just finished fighting with a story, which is why I can glibly write this post and tell you all of my profound writerly epiphany, hard won in the trenches of poorly planned story crafting.

Like any writer, I fight with my craft and doubt my abilities. I slog, I wail, I gnash my teeth. But I keep writing. It’s a compulsion I’ve learned to live with and it works out in the end. Recently, I made the decision to stop working on a novel in progress in order to finish a novella with a rapidly approaching deadline. I would take a break, I told myself, whip out 40K words in two months, and then return to the novel and wrap it up in my usual take no prisoners fashion. No problem, right?

Wrong. Upon returning to the neglected story, I found myself sitting and staring at the page as precious minutes, hours and weekends ticked away with very little activity in the finger area. The characters had stopped speaking to me. The plot was a mysterious shambles. What had I been thinking? I couldn’t remember. My notes gave me no clear direction. It was agonizing. Life piled up, the house fell into disarray, but I had to spend every “free” moment slogging through this mess of a book.

It got so bad at one point I briefly told myself I could just walk away. Finish it later. Maybe it’s too broken. Maybe I should cut my losses and run.

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I haven’t had this pernicious thought in years. I have come to recognize it as the voice of doom. I shrugged it off, but it got me to thinking. Like any writer, I have a veritable library of unfinished first drafts. I even have unfinished third and fourth drafts. Some deserved to be abandoned, others not so much. The one thing they all have in common is that when the going got rough, I set them aside to work on something new and shiny.

I have quite a few decent starts, and I’ve gone back to try to finish them, and it just doesn’t work. The juice, the fire, the whatever-made-it-exciting-in-the-first-place, has fled. And that is why getting restarted on this current project was so damn hard. I shut off the flow (for good reason, purely innocent and all) and nearly killed the story. This was at three-fourths of the way through, over 50,000 words. In olden times, I might have quit. But now I’m what you might call a professional writer and I know my editor is waiting for this book. So I pushed on. Toiled. Had nightmares. Sank into a depression. Wondered if the ability to write had finally petered out. All of it. But I didn’t quit and today I am looking at the downhill slide toward the end. One more chapter and I will get to begin the hellacious rewrite. What joy. What rapture.

So my epiphany is “don’t quit”. Hmmph, you might say. Not terribly profound. But think back on all the unfinished projects. Are there good reasons they remain unfinished, or is it because the going got too damn hard? Be honest. Be tough. If you really do have to take a break, because you’re say, giving birth or have been accepted into NASA’s space program, make sure you leave yourself good notes, and try to stop in the midst of some thrilling action, to make it easier to jump start the flow when you get back.

I know so many good writers, really good writers, who never seem to finish anything. There is always the bright and shiny, the exciting, the better, the not-so-damn-hard, calling to us. There is even the dreaded siren call of maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer. But if you truly want to finish a book, or story, or poem, you’ve got to do the slog and wrestle the demons of doubt to the ground.

And then you write. Slow, fast. Doesn’t matter. Just don’t quit.

Tagged: creative process, Novel Writing, writing, writing habits

Our Stories Can Save Us, by Eric Witchey

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Our Stories Can Save Us, by Eric Witchey

Human survival depends on how we manage our relationship with four, fundamental variables. The variables aren’t really in dispute, but the amount of time we have in which to change our relationship to them is. Simply put, the four variables are as follows:

We live in a fragile, closed system, a little blue marble called Earth.
Earth has finite resources: biodiversity, air, water, minerals, fossil fuels, etc.
We have unchecked population growth.
We rely on growth-based economies.

Yes, yes… I know. Solar radiation enters the system. There’s some hope there. However, we aren’t making new materials. We aren’t adding iron ore to our planet. We aren’t increasing the amount of natural gas and oil in the ground. We aren’t somehow magically manufacturing more water to add to the poisoned water and water ecosystems in a way that will fundamentally change the direction of the deterioration arrow.

The four variables stand, but we argue endlessly about what we should do to lengthen the time we have before those four variables result in an extinction level crash.

Note that I say extinction level crash and not the end of the world. As my astute Physicist brother once told me, “Human beings aren’t going to end the world. We will only end ourselves. The planet was here long before we were, and it will be here long after we are gone.”

And now you’re wondering how the four variables relate to writing.

Well, it’s like this. Telling stories is an ancient tradition that goes all the way back to the beginnings of language use. We erect monkeys have always told stories. We tell them to ourselves to justify stealing bananas from one another. We tell them to our friends and family to create bonding in social systems. We tell them to one another to make sure mistakes aren’t repeated and to ensure that our tribe thrives. One of the most common themes in the stories we have told throughout time is the theme of our village being better than their village. Every hero has a nemesis.

Want to see that theme playing out in a modern social context in America? Go to any Friday or Saturday night high school football game in the country. Observe the cheering, the colors, and the parking lot fights.

Harmless, right? Maybe. The value of team sports debate isn’t what this little blog is about. The point is that the “us vs. them” story is there to see. You can even observe the symbolic battle over land resources playing out on the field.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I love a good game. That’s really not the point. The purpose and value of story is the point.

Story telling is the easiest thing we do. It is also the most complex thing we do as human beings. Putting together a solid narrative, especially on paper, has more in common with interacting wave forms on the surface of the Pacific Ocean than it does with the linear, deceptive advice given to creative writing students. We put the little black squiggles in a row, and that creates an illusion of linear activity; however, the squiggles are just the medium of transfer for the story. The story in one mind is transferred through the little black squiggles into the mind of another person. Minds, unfortunately, are not so linear. They are messy places. They are endless impulses layered and ever changing, arranging, and rearranging into patterns that somehow magically become mind—thought, personality, memory, dreams, hopes, beliefs, learning, and maybe even soul.

Okay, I’m not all that sure about the last one. I have some opinions on what soul is, but I won’t go there in this blog entry. Maybe another time.

Story is, however, the human mind generating a dream-like experience based on sensory input. No two people read the same story quite the same way. No two people write a story quite the same way. Let’s just set aside the fact that no two people have the same life experiences. That, by itself, is enough to prove the last point. However, the endless shifts in levels of neurotransmitters, the organization of dendritic networks, the infinitesimal distances between axons and dendrites, the hormonal and electrical potentials, and the endless layering of all of these things and many more means that it is impossible for each of us to experience what any other person is experiencing when we hear or read a story.

Yes, we all tell stories. We all know that stories are essential to our survival. We all know that we are alive today because someone, somewhere way back in the dim past figured out how to tell a story that included the idea that a sharp stick held at the dull end can keep you alive a little longer than no stick at all.

We told stories to keep our families alive. We told stories to keep our tribes alive. We told stories to make sure everyone in our tribe knew how to behave to ensure that we would thrive. We told stories to explain things that made us uncomfortable because worrying too much about the bright lights in the sky meant we weren’t planting and reaping and breeding. We told stories to make sure that members of our tribe didn’t kill other members of our tribe, but it was totally okay to kill members of any other tribe trying to kill our mammoths.

These stories are part of who we are. They must change if we want to survive.

Every person on Earth lives in a closed system with finite resources, unchecked population growth, and growth-based economies. Any decision, personal or political, that does not mitigate or eliminate one or more of those four variables is a tacit agreement to genocide.

Sadly, we still tell ourselves stories that reinforce tribal behaviors like breeding means healthy tribes, acquisition of resources means more for us, control of territory means we are strong, and us vs. them.

Yet, as there has always been, there is some hope because of story tellers, shamans of the written word, wizards of the wave form and the mind.

If a corporation, government, or individual is telling a story that supports the use of growth-based economy in an ever-shrinking world, they are telling a story that asks millions of people to sacrifice their futures for short-term profit. If any organization tells a tale of policy that will increase population growth without providing compensating increases in resources for the new human beings, they are telling a tale of death for others. If we see a story on the news or on our feeds and it talks of the terrible crimes of protestors attempting to stop pollution, then we are seeing mercenary story-tellers attempt to shorten the time of humanity on this little rock.

For those of us who tell stories for entertainment and edification, fiction writers, we have an obligation to create stories that become viral in a way that suggests new modes of survival.

Heroism has at times been described as the successful search for the grail, and the grail has always been associated with healing and abundance. The stories of today, no less than the stick-holding stories of ten thousand years ago, are about creating visions for survival of the tribe. The only real difference is that the tribe is larger and more complex than it has ever been. We are one tribe that spans the entire Earth.

Story telling and story receiving are more complex than the interaction of wave forms on the surface of the Pacific Ocean. However, human beings have always been built to do this amazing thing—to share tales that will help us all survive. Those of us who tell the tales must step up and tell the stories that lead the imaginations of the members of our tribe to an understanding that holding the blunt end of the new pointy stick means having the ability to embrace people who don’t, and physiologically should never be expected to, think the way we do. We must tell the tales that show that every drop of water on this planet is sacred, that every hole we dig hurts us, that every child we force into the world must be fed, and that taking in order to have more means hurting people who will, by direct causal effect, have less.

Look carefully at every story produced and presented. Find the four variables in each tale. Does that story help slow population growth? Does that story reduce our dependence on the market growth that drives economies? Does that story slow the rate of use of nonrenewable resources? Does that story open the world to distant horizons so that our system, and the minds within it, are no longer closed?

-End-

Tagged: actors, anxiety, art, beauty, blogging, Characters, creativity, culture, curiosity, Dark, Dreams, entertainment, Environment, Eugene, faith, fiction, film, genre, humor, ideas, kindness, life, literature, love, motivation, Night, novels, Plot, poem, politics, prayer, productivity, Reading, regeneration, religion, research, sci-fi, science, Sex, short stories, silence, spirituality, stories, story, Stress, success, travel, Violence, Voice, work

Words

Words—A meaningful unit of language sounds. By Cheryl Owen-Wilson

Of late, I have been contemplating the power of words, to an even larger degree than the fact that they consume my writing life. I particularly like the above definition of “words” and pondered if I consider each word I utter, or write as a meaningful unit? Do you? In further thinking about the use of “words”, I found I had many questions. Could answers to these questions improve my writing?

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To Express Something

Do the people who populate your stories choose their words wisely—are they a man or woman of their word—as good as their word? Or, are they someone who just blurts out what is on their mind, without thought, no matter the consequence—a person who bandies words about?

Worded Correctly

I’ve known people who sit paralyzed at the thought of stringing sentences together for fear they will portray the wrong words. Many an author has shared the horror they feel at the thought of a first draft manuscript falling into the wrong hands.

Then there are those writers who break all the rules and intentionally use words incorrectly. In my writing I use southern slang and cadence, which results in many incorrectly spelled words. Can you think of an author who uses words incorrectly?

To Provide Information

I believe this particular use of “words” is what has had me so intently contemplating the immense power of words. How important is accuracy when using “words” to provide information? Do our readers hold us responsible for said accuracy? Should they? Does it depend on the genre your writing? In fantasy, for instance, must elves always have pointy ears? Do you as a reader take the time to research the information provided to you?

To Command

In using words to command, do the words themselves have to hold an element of control? Couldn’t the intent of a command come through without the commonplace words used, by the sheer nature of a character’s personality alone?

To Promise

In romance novels the unspoken promise of the word love is always present. Then there are the many definitions for the one word—love. In your story is it romantic love, love of a child, etc.? Then there is a broken promise. The use of words to relay whether the people in your stories keep or break promises, can be used to give your readers a deeper look into their personalities.

To Spread Rumor

The use of rumor can be used to plant false information in a story, without actually lying to our readers. After all we aren’t saying it’s true or false are we?

To Elicit an Emotional Response

We as writers strive tirelessly to accomplish this particular use of the written word—to elicit a response from our readers. It is our hook. It is how we draw them in and take them on the journey of story. When you know your characters well enough to care about them, then your readers will do the same. The emotional connection must always be present.

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To Put Words in Someone’s Mouth

I’ve always enjoyed the visual of this phenomenon. In my visual, I see someone actually shoveling words, from a pile kept in a wheelbarrow, into someone’s mouth. But more importantly, wouldn’t those words then enter that person’s psyche and alter their view of the world? For instance, negative words. Let’s feed our protagonist only a negative view of their world.   So when they are finally introduced to a kind or positive word, would that not elicit a momentous emotion from them as well as your reader?

The Turn of a Good Phrase

We as writers move words about like pieces on a chessboard as we edit and re-edit our stories. We also quote other authors written words. I often wonder if the writers I quote had the same tingling sensations I receive when I know a sentence I’ve written might be quote worthy. However, if something I wrote were ever to be quoted back to me, I’m pretty sure I’d faint dead on the spot.

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Words—They have the power to topple or rebuild empires.   For the creation of story, they are the only building blocks in our procession. Through them, we can reinvent and influence worlds from past, to present, to future. What words spoken or written have most affected your lives; your writing?