Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 181

Reading Influences: Narnia

I was so very good yesterday, getting to everything on the to-do list. Today's list is a wee bit more ambitious, so we'll see how I do. I've reached the end of the parts I'm reworking on the current book and will be plunging ahead into the unknown.

I still don't have any reading I'm ready to talk about -- the book for the last couple of weeks wasn't bad, but I don't have anything to say about it and am not sure I'd recommend it, and I haven't finished the current book. So, I'll talk about more books that influenced me.

I guess I'd always read fantasy in some form or another. I had the books that went with the Disney fairy tale movies (what we had to do in the Dark Ages before home video -- there were also records with the songs and a narrator telling the story), and I had "real" fairy tale books. I went through a phase of checking out every book with "witch" or "magic" in the title, but oddly, I don't remember any individual books. I know I read The Hobbit in fourth grade, but at that time, nothing clicked in me to say "this is the kind of book I like," perhaps because I was at the height of Star Wars mania then and was getting into science fiction.

What turned me into a fantasy reader was the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I'd actually read The Horse and His Boy sometime in early elementary school, probably in second or third grade because it came during my horse phase, when I'd check out anything that had anything to do with a horse, but it didn't click with me then, probably because it was such a one-off and I was far more focused on the horse than on the fantasy. But I clearly remember when I started the series and really discovered the world of fantasy. I was in sixth grade and for some reason I had to meet my mom at her office after school instead of going straight home (I don't remember if there was some business thing we had to do or if it was meant as a treat). I had to ride the shuttle bus from the neighborhood where my school was to the post where my mom's office was. She'd bought a copy of The Silver Chair for me, probably to keep me occupied until she got off work. I was instantly hooked.

There was a quest, a long journey, giants, magic and all those wonderful things that come with fantasy. My imagination seemed to totally explode, and my brain went into overdrive imagining more things that could take place in a land like Narnia. I was very disappointed that I had ordinary closets instead of a magical wardrobe. I remember being reluctant to take off my nightgown and embroidered house slippers in the morning because that seemed like an outfit closer to being appropriate attire for a fantasy world. Of course, I had to get the rest of the series, but I rationed them because I knew there were only seven books and the author had died before I was born. To help spread them out, I started looking for other books like that and read The Lord of the Rings (I had no idea at the time that the authors were friends).

The funny thing is, in spite of me having grown up going to church and reading the Bible, I never caught on to all the Biblical allegory until I was in college and taking a "parageography" class. In one of the lectures, the professor got into allegorical worlds, including Narnia, and I had the big "Oooooh" lightbulb moment. I had just read it at face value as fantasy. Now it's hard not to see it. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the most obvious parallel, but the Gospel message is more subtly woven throughout the other books. I have to admit that I really intensely dislike The Last Battle. That book just doesn't work for me, on so many levels. I'd put off reading it for months because I didn't want the series to end, and then when I finally let myself read it, I was very upset and disappointed. I can see what he was trying for, but I think it has the opposite effect on many (if not most) readers. Most of the people I've heard dismissing Lewis entirely have used things from that book as a reason.

As an adult, I've gotten more into Lewis's theological writings, and I think his writing style is actually better suited for that than for fiction. But Narnia is a special place, and it was my gateway into fantasy. I doubt I'd be doing what I am today if I hadn't read that first book. The Silver Chair remains my favorite, perhaps because it's more of an adventure story and less preachy. Jill, our designated "outsider" character does get her "conversion" experience, but she wasn't a horrible person to begin with (unlike Eustace in the book where he played the "outsider" role). She didn't have to dramatically change, just learn to have faith. It seems that the film version of The Magician's Nephew is still in development, and I'd thought it odd that they were going out of chronological order to go back and do that one after Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but part of me kind of hopes that they're letting the kid who played Eustace (who was wonderful) grow up a bit so they can add a teen romantic subplot to The Silver Chair. When I read the book now, they're just kids to me, but when I was eleven, I totally read a romance into it.

Tea and a Book

I had a pretty good weekend. I spent most of Saturday working and finished this pass of revisions, then went on a brief walk/hike (there was some minor "hiking" content on a more rugged trail, but most of it was a paved path). Sunday was deliciously cool and rainy, the perfect day to spend with tea and a book.

There's nothing like coming home from church on a cold, rainy day to the smell of dinner cooking in the Crock Pot -- except that the dinner was timed for the evening meal and was nowhere near done at lunchtime, so I got that smell upon coming home and then had to reheat leftovers for lunch. But dinner was awesome when I got to it. I had a pork loin I was cooking for pulled pork, but I ended up taking some slices off it before I shredded it and just had it as regular meat. I'd planned on slaw to go with the barbecued pork I'd been planning, but since it was cool weather, I braised the cabbage instead. I'll have to get more cabbage to do slaw later because this pork will last me a while. I'm going to have to freeze some of it. Oh, it was good, though. The one problem with Crock Pot cooking is that the house smells like what you're making all day, so you spend the whole day hungry.

Today will be mostly devoted to business-related stuff. I've broken down the big tasks into smaller daily bites, so there's not going to be any one day that will have to be totally taken over by icky stuff. I want to get back to the book I was writing today. I may or may not give the steampunk book another pass before sending it to the editor. Right now, I'm letting it rest. I may go back over the places where I made more significant changes, but I'm not sure if another complete re-read would be worthwhile. And I need to work on my map.

My incentive for getting through the to-do list today is that I still haven't finished the new Terry Pratchett book, in spite of yesterday afternoon's reading session. I think I'm trying to savor it because I keep forcing myself to take breaks.

Too Busy for Fun!

I made a lot of good progress yesterday, so I'm hoping that if I really buckle down, I can get through this round of revisions today and tomorrow, then on Monday I can take a "break" and finish my taxes before I do a round of proofreading.

I have a ton of TV catching up to do this weekend. We get new Grimm tonight and Continuum also returns tonight for some time traveling fun. I'm hoping last night's Once Upon a Time in Wonderland is available OnDemand because we got about fifteen minutes before they interrupted the rest of the hour for storm coverage. It would be a shame to miss the series finale, especially since the storm was nowhere near me (I got about five minutes of rain and one clap of thunder loud enough to make me jump). Game of Thrones returns Sunday, and I still have two episodes to rewatch as a reminder because I get mixed up about what's in the show and what's in the books. I still haven't watched last Sunday night's PBS shows.

It's sad when you're too busy to be properly entertained.

On the other hand, busy is good when it means there's work to do that leads to making money, and I can feel the book getting better, which is nice. Better to have the editor nitpick it while I can still fix it than to have readers nitpicking it and finding flaws after it's published.

Now for a library trip and then work!

Girls in Books

My productivity hit a wall yesterday. I got through the rest of the edits, but then couldn't switch mental gears to work on the other book and wasn't quite up to the focus I'd need to go back to really rewriting this book. So I came up with lesson plans for choir and did some online reading. Today, I'll take the laptop to the sofa, open the blinds to look at the rain (it's going to be a stormy day) and dig into revisions. I'll just have to find a place to move the knitting. The down side of knitting something big like a bedspread is that when it's close to being done, it takes up the whole sofa.

I had a first last night in choir: one of the kids fell asleep on me. A few of the kids were fake sleeping (they claimed that one song was boring, so they laid down on the floor and started snoring loudly), but that didn't last long because fake sleeping means being still. One kid, though, remained slumped against the wall, his mouth hanging slightly open, and he didn't stir during the rest of the session. We left him alone because yay, stillness and quiet, but also if he conked out like that, he was likely very tired and needed the rest.

I've been thinking more about the girls in books issue and the current claim by what one of my friends calls the "social justice warriors" brigade that females aren't represented in books, with a lot of cheering for the dad who changed Bilbo into a girl when reading The Hobbit to his daughter. And, you know, even though I was a kid of the 70s before political correctness was even a thing, and even though I read mostly from the library, so I wasn't necessarily reading the latest things, I never felt any absence of girls in the books I read.

I was reminded not too long ago by some of my kindergarten girls about the Ramona books and the Amelia Bedelia books. There was Harriet the Spy and the Judy Blume heroines. But I suppose they don't count because they're "real world" and not adventure or fantasy. So for adventures, there's Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Cherry Ames and the other girl detectives (Cherry Ames even served in World War II). I have a fat book of "Adventure Stories for Girls" that were all about women flying airplanes, exploring the jungle, etc. For fantasy, most of the books I read when I was on my kick of reading every book with "witch" or "magic" in the title had female main characters or had both male and female protagonists.

If you're going to thinly slice things, what about fantasy quest stories? Well, there's Dorothy in the Oz books, later joined by Ozma in the same series. That whole series was female-driven. Lucy was the primary protagonist in the early Narnia books, and later Jill took on the key role in a Narnia quest story. This may be self-selection bias, but almost every book that stuck in my memory from childhood other than The Hobbit had a major female character.

So I suppose that if you're talking about fantasy quest stories involving hobbits and elves, then maybe you'll have to gender switch a character so your daughter will have someone to identify with. Otherwise, maybe you need to broaden your reading horizons.

I do think females are less well-represented in epic-style fantasy written for teens and adults, but that could also be selection bias because I discovered epic-style fantasy in my early teens, at the age when I was a lot less concerned about having girls in my books than I was about finding a good book boyfriend in every book. Unless there was a hot guy questing with her, I'd have had zero interest in a girl's quest and so either wouldn't have bothered with such a book or wouldn't have loved it enough for it to stick in my memory.

Leaping to Conclusions

I got through my to-do list again yesterday, so yay, me! I just have a few more chapters of edits to get through, and then I'll need to go through the whole book again to do some tinkering. I've got a bit of a problem, though, in that one thing the editor is really confused/concerned about and asking for some rewriting is actually based on an assumption she seems to have made, since I can't find a single place in the text where there's even a hint that what she thinks is going on is going on. Since there's no suggestion there, it's hard to fix. I suppose what I'll have to do is put in specific counter-evidence. In the book, there's a Scarlet Pimpernel-type character who's so highly placed that no one would suspect him of being the secret bandit. This bandit is helping fund the rebels. The editor has decided that since the rebels know they're getting funding from the bandit, they know who the bandit is. There's nothing in there to give that assumption (in fact, they're surprised when they learn who he is, but that's the scene the editor wants rewritten because she thinks they already know), but maybe I can add something to the earlier scene about the rebels being curious about who the bandit is, with maybe some details about how he covers the tracks of his identity.

I suppose if an editor who has read this book multiple times was able to leap to an incorrect conclusion, it's possible that a reader rushing through the book with multiple distractions in the background could come to the same conclusion, so I have to do something to fix it instead of just saying, "You're wrong!"

Tomorrow, I may have to put aside the other book for a while and really delve into this one, but I'm at a good stopping point where I've reached the end of the stuff I'm rewriting and ready to jump forward.

In other news, after reading my way through the Nebula ballot, and especially the teen books, this parody of the dystopian teen novel is almost too true to be funny. I thought the fantasy books were excellent, but all the science fiction books were so bleak and grim. It was hard to judge the quality of the book when I just didn't like the story and when I'm likely to roll my eyes at anything taking place in a dystopian future, especially if there's some kind of sorting into teams or public exhibition in which someone's chosen for something.

I do have this vague idea of a dystopian past-set fantasy book, where the world is like the Dickens London with a Stalinist-type ruler. But without any sorting into teams or public combat, or anything like that. Just people desperate to escape and doing what it takes to be ready to escape.

Finally, I registered for DetCon, so I'll be coming to Detroit this summer. I figure I need to expand my geographic horizons and introduce myself to fans in other parts of the country (and maybe start getting on the radar for being invited to other conventions if I ever make it big enough).

Reading Influences: Nancy Drew

I was rather productive yesterday, doing everything on my to-do list and still having time to spare. Can I do it again today? I've already done a Target/grocery run.

Normally I talk about books on Tuesdays, but I'm in the middle of a very long book, and I'm not even sure I will end up talking about it, so I thought it would be fun to talk about books or series that have been big influences on me as a writer and as a person.

Recently, I've seen a lot of columns/essays/blog posts about women in fiction, or the lack thereof -- a father who made Bilbo female when reading The Hobbit to his daughter so there would be a girl in the story for her to relate to, a woman who realized as an adult that she'd let herself become a "manic pixie dream girl" because she didn't know she could be the hero of her own story, since fiction was always about men. These concepts were foreign to me. For one thing, while it's sometimes fun to have something I can relate to in a story (that seems to work best with comedy), I mostly read fiction to experience something that's different from my own life. And I can't imagine not realizing that you could be the hero of your own story. Then I figured out something that probably accounts for this: Nancy Drew.

The Nancy Drew books are by no means great works of fiction, but I think they had a huge influence on my life. I think I was in maybe third grade when I discovered these books accidentally. The TV series Bewitched was something of an obsession among the girls in my school (it was in weeknight syndication), and as a result, I would read any book with "witch" or "magic" in the title. I saw a book on the shelf called The Witch Tree Symbol and checked it out. It turned out to be about the Pennsylvania Dutch, not magic, but it was my introduction to Nancy Drew.

Nancy was very much the heroine of her own story. Yeah, she's a raging Mary Sue because she's good at everything, but if you're going to read about a Mary Sue, elementary school is the time to do it. Nancy was quite independent, traveling the world on her own or with her close friends, maybe occasionally with her dad. She solved crimes better than the local police force wherever she went. She could dance, sing, paint, play the bagpipes and escape from ropes. From her, I learned to make your captors drop their guard by going limp (which actually worked on the school playground when the bully mean girls ganged up on me) and how to hold your wrists when you're being tied up to make it easier to escape later.

I devoured these books, trying to read them in order (not that order mattered all that much). Even if I could guess the solution to the mystery, the real fun was in the adventure along the way. I preferred the older editions because I liked the 1930s-1950s illustrations. The 70s illustrations were just tacky. And I think because I absorbed so much Nancy Drew during a formative phase, I was able to not care whether or not there were girls in other books I read and it would never occur to me that I couldn't be a heroine in my own right. I've tried re-reading some of these books and can barely stomach them, so I just hold onto the way they made me feel when I was eight or nine.

Soooo Much to Do!

I was unusually social this weekend, getting together with a friend Friday night, then a choir retreat and a Frozen viewing party with some of the choir on Saturday. Which means that today will be mostly a hibernation day, though I may take a walk to the library for the exercise and because I have the new Terry Pratchett book on hold and must go pick it up. Guess what I'll be doing next weekend. Yes, I have that much self-restraint. I want to be able to enjoy it properly, so it will be a reward for meeting my goals this week.

If I'm very good, I'll finish this round of revisions on the steampunk book in the next few days, then I'll let it rest and work on the other book and do some business-type stuff before I do another round of tinkering. I slacked off late last week and now have to get back on track.

I also learned on Saturday that I have to work on the singing daily because singing that high well requires regular conditioning. No one else could tell I was struggling in my solo in the Saturday rehearsal, but it didn't feel good for me. So, daily scales at the very least.

This is when I need to make specific daily to-do lists in order to not panic about how much I need to do. I can do the necessary daily tasks without worrying about the big picture, which would just stress me out.

So, off to tackle the list!

In Deepest Mourning

I got a bit of bad news yesterday that shouldn't be life-altering, but it is. They're closing Television Without Pity, my biggest Internet addiction. This is a site that offers sometimes snarky and usually highly entertaining recaps and reviews of television episodes, but the main thing for me is the forums for discussing television.

Discussing TV is the main reason I wanted on the Internet in the first place. I'd started watching The X-Files, and while I had a long-distance friend who watched it, I didn't know anyone locally who did. It was such a twisty show where all the details mattered, and I wanted to hash out theories about what was really going on. Then I read a magazine article about an online community focused on the show, and I figured out how to use the Internet access at the university where I worked at the time to get on the newsgroup. I soon bought a modem (yes, they came separately then) and signed up for AOL so I could discuss from home. When the show was airing on Friday nights, I didn't want to wait until Mondays to go online and see what people were saying. From there, I got on other newsgroups for other shows, including Angel, where someone posted a link to a recap at a site that was called Mighty Big TV at that time.

I started reading recaps there, and then later found that they had forums. The Television Without Pity forums were heavily moderated -- a huge shift from the Wild West of Usenet -- and that meant there weren't any flame wars, the 'shipping wars were toned down, things stayed on topic, and people were required to write in full sentences with at least an attempt at real spelling (no text speak). That meant that the people who were willing to abide by those rules tended to be intelligent and literate. I felt a little intimidated, so I didn't get an account and start posting until Firefly was on and I had things I just had to say. Soon, I'd migrated most of my TV discussion over there, and I've posted enough over the past decade that I've reached "Stalker" level. Communities have formed there. I've made friends there who've become real life friends and whom I've traveled to meet up with. I've discovered that I was having online conversations with people I knew in real life.

Even though I currently have geeky friends who watch the same things I watch, there's something different about this kind of discussion than I've ever had in real life. My friends and I chat about the cool events that happen in shows. On TWOP, we delve into characterization, character arcs, symbolism, themes, plot developments, etc. I've learned a lot from doing this that I've applied to my writing, so I think it's made me a better writer to look at stories this way.

We have until the end of May with the forums, and people are already making plans about migrating elsewhere. I'm twitching a bit about the loss, but it may end up being good for me because if I use the moves elsewhere to change some of my habits, I should free up a lot of time that I could be devoting to my own work. But I know I'm going to start twitching when I think of something to post at TWOP and it isn't there anymore. I may do something with my Stealth Geek blog that I totally neglect and do some of my own snarky TV commentary there. But none of it will be the same. I'm already twitching.

Singing in Front of People

It was a pretty good choir night. We had the harpists come to teach the kids about stringed instruments and try playing them, which ate up about half our time, and we had only seven kids. I got them to kind of sing for a little while, and we managed to play the quiet game to see who got to be line leader to go see the harps for about two minutes. The quiet game is a thing of beauty. We see who can stay totally quiet the longest. The kids who normally won't shut up get hyper competitive and go totally quiet. They start twitching after a couple of minutes, so the quiet game has to be used sparingly. My co-teacher came up with this, and she's the mother of twins, so I imagine they play that often at their home.

Then at dinner I was sitting with my teen helper, and she found out I was an author. She's basically me at that age, into science fiction and drama and carrying a book around with her at all times. She got all excited and wanted to talk about writing, and I told her about how I use my drama experience in my writing to create characters and to make sure the dialogue sounds like actual speech.

I had to do my solo during choir rehearsal -- twice -- and I think it went pretty well. If I sang that way in the service, I'd be happy with it. This one was kind of scary because much of it is above the staff, and I've been singing second soprano for so long that my upper range was getting rusty and I wasn't even sure I was still using the proper technique. But after rehearsal, the choir director said he didn't detect any rust and that I didn't seem to be doing anything wrong. I've been practicing a lot and working on my upper register, so it's becoming easier. I'd forgotten just how high I can go without even going falsetto. After I sang, there were some comments about how weird it was that I was a second soprano doing that, and one of the other seconds said I should be singing first. But that gets touchy because the fact is that there are three seconds and 6-7 regulars who sing first. I can't really switch without one of the firsts switching to second, and I don't see that happening even if I can sing higher better than some of them. I've got a first soprano voice without the personality to go with it, so I sing second unless the director has something special for me to do, like this solo, since I'm the one willing to sing second. I'm hoping that if I practice this solo a lot in front of the choir during rehearsals, I'll be over the worst of the nerves when it comes time to do it for a bigger audience. The scary thing is that the song is a capella, so the accompaniment for the solo is a long chord being sung by the rest of the choir. We aren't doing it unaccompanied yet. It's a complicated piece that we aren't doing for another month, so there's a lot of rehearsal to go between now and then. Still, I was feeling pretty good about managing to sing really high by myself in front of people. I've generally sung notes like that as part of a choir -- the big finish to a song, usually, and it's easier to be confident surrounded by people.

The juggling of the writing projects is going pretty well. I'm revising about three chapters a day on one book and then writing a scene in the other book. I'm thinking about taking a dance class tonight, but it depends on how much work I get done, how I'm feeling, the weather, and other stuff I need to get done around the house.

Writing Processes

I've got another writing topic from questions asked on Facebook, this time about processes. It's hard to do much of a how-to on process because it's such an individual thing. The only "right" way to do it is the way that allows you to produce a book. There are some situations where one method might be preferable, but if that's not a way that works for you, it's not going to help. I suspect that most writers fall between any extremes, and I know that my process adjusts with each book, sometimes due to the nature of what I'm writing and sometimes due to what's going on in my life. If what you're doing isn't working for you as well as you'd like, it's worth a try to change some part of your process until things click. I'll touch on some of the major process categories, and even if it doesn't change the way you do things, you'll at least have a better idea of what writers mean when they talk about their processes.

Pantser vs. Plotter
The "pantser" or "seat of the pants" writer doesn't outline or plot a book in advance, but rather just starts writing based on an idea fragment, a character, a scene or a bit of dialogue and then figures out what the story's about as it's written. A plotter plans the plot and outlines the novel in advance, often doing in-depth character development, figuring out stages of the hero's journey, etc.

I generally say that I'm the worst of both worlds -- I can't really start a book until I've done a lot of pre-writing work about the characters and have a solid plot outline, but then I don't know what the book is actually about until I've written a draft, and then I do extensive rewriting. But it varies by book or series.

Writers can go to war over these two, with each side claiming superiority. The pantsers often claim to be "organic" writers whose process is pure creativity, while plotters claim to be more efficient. I think the truth is that pantsers may do more plotting than they realize, but it's in their heads instead of on paper. The plotters do their "pantsing" before they start writing. The same things happen. The difference is in how and when they're done. Once you get to the point where you can sell a book on proposal, you'll have to be able to plot at least a little bit because you'll need to be able to write a synopsis before you've written the book.

Linear vs. Non-linear
A linear writer writes scenes in sequence. A non-linear writer writes scenes as they come to mind, and then arranges and links them. I think non-linear writers are more likely to be pantsers who are writing what comes to them and who later realize something needs to happen earlier to set it up. Even if you're very linear, writing out of sequence can be a good way to break a block. If you don't know what happens next but you do know something that happens later, write the scene you do know and then work backward to figure out what needs to happen to get there.

Polish as You Go vs. the Ugly Draft
Some writers revise and polish as they go, making sure what they've written is good before moving on to the next scene, while others just get something written, no matter how ugly, and then go back and revise and polish. Which method works best depends on your other processes. If you're a pantser and non-linear, you're wasting time to polish as you go because there may be a lot of rewriting to do, and there's no point in making the words perfect until the story is right. A detailed plotter who's storyboarded the whole book may be able to polish along the way so that the end of the first draft results in a finished book.

I generally recommend that new writers do the ugly draft and get to the end of the story before revising because it's very easy to get so caught up in making chapters one and two perfect that you never get on to the rest of the book -- and in most early books, you'll probably end up cutting the first two chapters anyway because that's where new writers tend to throw in a lot of set up and infodump that doesn't need to be there. My personal guideline is that I'll go back and fix things that affect the story moving forward -- if something needs to happen to move the story in a different direction or to set up something critical -- but I don't go back and fix the words until the first draft is done. On the other hand, reviewing the previous day's work is a good way to ease into a writing session, and if you spot something obvious then, like an overused pet word, typos or dialogue that could be better, there's no harm in fixing it.

There are a lot of other individual things that go into process, like writing in silence vs. writing with music, working alone vs. working in a coffee shop, writing in short bursts vs. marathon sessions, etc., but that comes down to finding something that works for you and that fits your circumstances. When you get stuck or feel blocked or just have the don't wannas, try shaking things up by working in a different way.