Patrick LeClerc's Blog, page 4
August 17, 2017
Finding Your Tribe
It’s a difficult thing to write in isolation.
For one thing, it’s not easy to find motivation ti write when nobody’s reading what you’ve written. Just having a group pf writers who exchange works on a deadline can help push you to buckle down and be productive. It’s almost like the prospect of an empty liquor cabinet, the idea of not dealing with that just isn’t thinkable. Any writer worth his salt can come up with a rationalization to not write today, but it’s harder when you have to admit to your colleagues that you didn’t write today.
The second thing is that you need somebody else to run an eye over your work. Someone who isn’t too close, the way you are. We know what we mean, even if we don’t convey it. You need somebody else to let you know if your making yourself clear. To call you out of you get too head over heels in love with the sound of your own voice.
So we rely on our writers’ groups. My author friends were invaluable to me getting my books to a state where they were worthy of publication. I can’t thank them enough.
Today, with the ubiquity of the internet, it’s easy to find your tribe. I had friends on three continents reading my manuscripts and offering helpful feedback.
‘Twas not always so.
My first writer’s group, which I renamed the Worst Writers’ Group Ever, formed about 20 years ago. We were all local and met at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore coffee shop to exchange hard copies of our latest works in progress.
And to totally miss one another’s point.
Since we were working with a limited pool of writers, we didn’t share a genre. That’s not a complete deal breaker. Writing is writing, and if it’s unclear it doesn’t matter if it’s hard s/f or romance, any reader can tell you where he or she loses the plot, but it helps if your audience is familiar with the conventions of your chosen genre.
This group ended up being a group of people who would never see one another socially who sat around a table over overpriced lattes and took turns slagging one another’s passions. I tend to sum it up as “This story is called ‘The Walking Dead’ and I don’t like walking, or the dead, so I don’t see why anyone would read it.”
I disbanded the group in December as Christmas present to myself.
Fortunately, today we have better options. The Web abounds with online writers’ groups and there’s no excuse not to find people who are both familiar enough to get where you’re coming from, but honest enough to tell you when you’ve gone too far up your own backside.
So get out there and find your tribe.
For one thing, it’s not easy to find motivation ti write when nobody’s reading what you’ve written. Just having a group pf writers who exchange works on a deadline can help push you to buckle down and be productive. It’s almost like the prospect of an empty liquor cabinet, the idea of not dealing with that just isn’t thinkable. Any writer worth his salt can come up with a rationalization to not write today, but it’s harder when you have to admit to your colleagues that you didn’t write today.
The second thing is that you need somebody else to run an eye over your work. Someone who isn’t too close, the way you are. We know what we mean, even if we don’t convey it. You need somebody else to let you know if your making yourself clear. To call you out of you get too head over heels in love with the sound of your own voice.
So we rely on our writers’ groups. My author friends were invaluable to me getting my books to a state where they were worthy of publication. I can’t thank them enough.
Today, with the ubiquity of the internet, it’s easy to find your tribe. I had friends on three continents reading my manuscripts and offering helpful feedback.
‘Twas not always so.
My first writer’s group, which I renamed the Worst Writers’ Group Ever, formed about 20 years ago. We were all local and met at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore coffee shop to exchange hard copies of our latest works in progress.
And to totally miss one another’s point.
Since we were working with a limited pool of writers, we didn’t share a genre. That’s not a complete deal breaker. Writing is writing, and if it’s unclear it doesn’t matter if it’s hard s/f or romance, any reader can tell you where he or she loses the plot, but it helps if your audience is familiar with the conventions of your chosen genre.
This group ended up being a group of people who would never see one another socially who sat around a table over overpriced lattes and took turns slagging one another’s passions. I tend to sum it up as “This story is called ‘The Walking Dead’ and I don’t like walking, or the dead, so I don’t see why anyone would read it.”
I disbanded the group in December as Christmas present to myself.
Fortunately, today we have better options. The Web abounds with online writers’ groups and there’s no excuse not to find people who are both familiar enough to get where you’re coming from, but honest enough to tell you when you’ve gone too far up your own backside.
So get out there and find your tribe.
July 31, 2017
I Didn't Choose the Thug Life. The Thug Life Chose Me.
I, along with several of the Quantum Muse Books staff were on a panel recently entitled “So You Want to be a Writer,” where we tried the old “scared straight” approach to save aspiring authors from this life. Not sure we did a very good job. Anyway, it made we think about why somebody would choose to follow this path. About why I did.
After careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that you shouldn’t, and that I didn’t. I never made a conscious decision to write. It was just something that I was going to do, whether or not I got success or money or praise. Which is convenient, because there is no guarantee that you will get any of those.
If you are thinking of writing as a career, or as a source of additional income, there are almost certainly better choices. You will put in thousands of hours before you get a penny. If everything goes perfectly, it will be a year between sitting down to write and seeing the book for sale. Probably longer. The average payout is less than if you spent those hours doing almost anything else for money. And you may never be published. And if you are, you’ll do even more work promoting your work if you want to sell any books.
Becoming a best selling author is like becoming an A list actor. It happens, but for every start who gets a million dollars per movie, there are thousands who still wait tables between gigs. Even a solid mid list writer makes less money than an electrician. You can more or less live on a writing income, but modestly unless you have a day job or a pension or some other income than writing.
Yeah, J K Rowling is doing alright, but not everybody is J K Rowling. And you can write a good book, but unless you write a good book and get lucky and hit the right spot in the market at the right moment, you won’t be J K Rowling. Even a success like George R R Martin, who is doing well enough with his Game of Thrones checks, wrote for four decades, making a modest, mid-list income before the big TV deal. A Game of Thrones itself was published in 1996, so it took almost 20 years before the big payday.
So we don’t do it for the money.
I do it because I can’t stop. Writing is almost pathological, really.
Some of us just need to tell stories. And we’re going to do it anyway. So if you’re going to do it anyway, you should strive do it well. And then you should strive to get it out there where it can be seen.
So, if you want a stable, successful life, with a solid income and financial security, learn a trade.
But if you are one of us, one of the Misfit Toys, just embrace the life and excel at it.
And know that the rest of us will be here for you. Because we were chosen as well. As the great philosopher said: I’m pulling for you. We’re all in this together.
And keep your stick on the ice.
After careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that you shouldn’t, and that I didn’t. I never made a conscious decision to write. It was just something that I was going to do, whether or not I got success or money or praise. Which is convenient, because there is no guarantee that you will get any of those.
If you are thinking of writing as a career, or as a source of additional income, there are almost certainly better choices. You will put in thousands of hours before you get a penny. If everything goes perfectly, it will be a year between sitting down to write and seeing the book for sale. Probably longer. The average payout is less than if you spent those hours doing almost anything else for money. And you may never be published. And if you are, you’ll do even more work promoting your work if you want to sell any books.
Becoming a best selling author is like becoming an A list actor. It happens, but for every start who gets a million dollars per movie, there are thousands who still wait tables between gigs. Even a solid mid list writer makes less money than an electrician. You can more or less live on a writing income, but modestly unless you have a day job or a pension or some other income than writing.
Yeah, J K Rowling is doing alright, but not everybody is J K Rowling. And you can write a good book, but unless you write a good book and get lucky and hit the right spot in the market at the right moment, you won’t be J K Rowling. Even a success like George R R Martin, who is doing well enough with his Game of Thrones checks, wrote for four decades, making a modest, mid-list income before the big TV deal. A Game of Thrones itself was published in 1996, so it took almost 20 years before the big payday.
So we don’t do it for the money.
I do it because I can’t stop. Writing is almost pathological, really.
Some of us just need to tell stories. And we’re going to do it anyway. So if you’re going to do it anyway, you should strive do it well. And then you should strive to get it out there where it can be seen.
So, if you want a stable, successful life, with a solid income and financial security, learn a trade.
But if you are one of us, one of the Misfit Toys, just embrace the life and excel at it.
And know that the rest of us will be here for you. Because we were chosen as well. As the great philosopher said: I’m pulling for you. We’re all in this together.
And keep your stick on the ice.
July 22, 2017
Beware the Soapbox
Our writing will always be shaped by our values, our opinions and our politics. That’s inevitable. It’s even more evident in fantasy or s/f where we are creating a world of our own, not just showing our current one through our lens. It’s very tempting to write a story that justified our own beliefs.
Resist that impulse.
Now, it’s not like you can hide your feelings and write from your heart at the same time. I’m not advocating that you stop thinking slavery was bad while writing your Civil War historical fiction. Just try to remember you’re writing a story, not a manifesto.
This applies only to fiction. If you are trying to write a manifesto, well, go fight the power. But readers are smart enough to spot the heavy handed stuff for what it is. Reading Atlas Shrugged will never convince a socialist to stage an anti tax rally and start voting for Rand Paul. It’s just going to make people who already agree with it feel vindicated and those who disagree roll their eyes.
If you paint every politician as corrupt, or every cop as crooked, or all protesters as violent or naive, then you’ve written a political speech or an after school special.
S/F has long been a genre where authors built utopias and dystopias, using them to justify one political philosophy or another. The problem is that we have too much power. If we think all taxation is theft, all we have to do is make all tax collectors thieves and we’ve proven our point.
At the same time, it’s more than OK to paint a fascist government as bad or the resistance as overall on then right side of history. False equivalence isn’t much better than jingoism.
People will see political agenda. Sometimes they’ll see one even when you aren’t trying to push it. I was called out by reviewers of my near future s/f In Every Clime and Place because I had several women as characters in a Marine infantry unit. Now, I put them there because that’s how things are going even today, and I can’t see a military in 75 years that still segregates units by gender. I put them there because it makes sense for them to be there. Hell, look at Aliens from 1986 or the film version of Starship Troopers. We expect a more diverse future, because that’s the trend. I think writing about an all male infantry in 2075 would be like writing about a racially segregated military in 2017. It would seem a strange omission.
What I didn’t do was get on a soapbox about it. If I’d had them constantly underestimated and marginalized by their make peers despite being better and smarter, and then had them save the day unassisted, that would have been Making a Point. Just as if I’d had them be overly emotional, dependent and a weak link that hurt the unit cohesion and cost lives in combat, that would have been Making a Point.
What I did do was try to be faithful to real life. I had a relatively small proportion of women in infantry roles, as that tends to reflect the fact that fewer women seek those assignments, and qualify for them than men. I didn’t make them Wonder Woman, not did I make them a weak link who had to be bailed out and carried and rescued. I made them competent Marines who did their jobs. I addressed the issues with squadmates who didn’t like serving with women, and had characters voice concern about how it changed the dynamic.
I didn’t make it black and white where everyone who disagreed with my opinion on the subject was wrong and a bigot or naive and a threat to my beloved Corps. I didn’t make it the central theme of the story, but I wove it in as a thread.
I wrote them as characters, not as caricatures. People, not symbols.
So I think the answer is not to ignore the issues, and not to just give everyone a black hat or a white hat. Make your characters people with depth and facets and motivations. And understand that there are noble impulses and base impulses on all sides, and the book will read like a real story, not a fairy tale with handsome prices and wicked witches.
Readers aren’t idiots. Don’t treat them like they are.
Resist that impulse.
Now, it’s not like you can hide your feelings and write from your heart at the same time. I’m not advocating that you stop thinking slavery was bad while writing your Civil War historical fiction. Just try to remember you’re writing a story, not a manifesto.
This applies only to fiction. If you are trying to write a manifesto, well, go fight the power. But readers are smart enough to spot the heavy handed stuff for what it is. Reading Atlas Shrugged will never convince a socialist to stage an anti tax rally and start voting for Rand Paul. It’s just going to make people who already agree with it feel vindicated and those who disagree roll their eyes.
If you paint every politician as corrupt, or every cop as crooked, or all protesters as violent or naive, then you’ve written a political speech or an after school special.
S/F has long been a genre where authors built utopias and dystopias, using them to justify one political philosophy or another. The problem is that we have too much power. If we think all taxation is theft, all we have to do is make all tax collectors thieves and we’ve proven our point.
At the same time, it’s more than OK to paint a fascist government as bad or the resistance as overall on then right side of history. False equivalence isn’t much better than jingoism.
People will see political agenda. Sometimes they’ll see one even when you aren’t trying to push it. I was called out by reviewers of my near future s/f In Every Clime and Place because I had several women as characters in a Marine infantry unit. Now, I put them there because that’s how things are going even today, and I can’t see a military in 75 years that still segregates units by gender. I put them there because it makes sense for them to be there. Hell, look at Aliens from 1986 or the film version of Starship Troopers. We expect a more diverse future, because that’s the trend. I think writing about an all male infantry in 2075 would be like writing about a racially segregated military in 2017. It would seem a strange omission.
What I didn’t do was get on a soapbox about it. If I’d had them constantly underestimated and marginalized by their make peers despite being better and smarter, and then had them save the day unassisted, that would have been Making a Point. Just as if I’d had them be overly emotional, dependent and a weak link that hurt the unit cohesion and cost lives in combat, that would have been Making a Point.
What I did do was try to be faithful to real life. I had a relatively small proportion of women in infantry roles, as that tends to reflect the fact that fewer women seek those assignments, and qualify for them than men. I didn’t make them Wonder Woman, not did I make them a weak link who had to be bailed out and carried and rescued. I made them competent Marines who did their jobs. I addressed the issues with squadmates who didn’t like serving with women, and had characters voice concern about how it changed the dynamic.
I didn’t make it black and white where everyone who disagreed with my opinion on the subject was wrong and a bigot or naive and a threat to my beloved Corps. I didn’t make it the central theme of the story, but I wove it in as a thread.
I wrote them as characters, not as caricatures. People, not symbols.
So I think the answer is not to ignore the issues, and not to just give everyone a black hat or a white hat. Make your characters people with depth and facets and motivations. And understand that there are noble impulses and base impulses on all sides, and the book will read like a real story, not a fairy tale with handsome prices and wicked witches.
Readers aren’t idiots. Don’t treat them like they are.
July 19, 2017
Villains by Necessity
Last time, I talked about what makes a great hero. This month I decided to look at the other side of the coin. What makes a really memorable villain?
If the hero’s job is to give you somebody to root for, to invest in, then the villains job is to provide the motivation for that hero. The villain drives the story. Without a villain, our hero has no chance to show his growth, his virtues, his strengths. He has no obstacle to overcome, no wrongs to right, no murder to solve, no world to save, no kidnapped children to rescue, no family to avenge.
Without a villain, there is simply no story.
In addition to the essential function of providing a conflict, the villain also sets the tone and the stakes. How violent and dark the story is, or how light-hearted and funny, all hinge on the villain. If the villain is the hero’s rival in a romantic comedy, it will be a very different story than if the villain is a Gestapo officer hunting the hero. The villain might be the opposing attorney, trying to convict an innocent man. That’s bad, but it’s not Sauron or Voldemort bad.
Are the stakes who gets to be employee of the month or head of the PTA, or the survival the world?
Likewise, the tone of the story is dictated by many things, but by none so much as the villain’s behavior. How far will he or she go to obtain his or her goal? Is the antagonist a professional rival who will fight hard against the hero, but fairly? Or will he cheat? Will she destroy evidence? Blackmail or intimidate officials or witnesses? Torture suspects? Exterminate villages? Destroy a planet? Is he a cold, unyielding tool of the State, enforcing draconian laws, or a moustache-twirling caricature tying innocents to the railroad tracks?
This will also help to decide how far the hero should go to oppose the villain. How hard our protagonist is willing to bend the rules, and what that does to both the reader’s opinion of him, and his own, are heavily influenced by the forces stacked against him, the focus of which should be our villain.
The final job of the villain, and the one that makes us remember the great ones, is the villain’s relationship to the hero. The best villains have a chemistry with the hero. It’s just as important as the relationship between the hero and a love interest or a partner in crime. The best protagonist/antagonist pairs push one another’s buttons, get under one another’s skin. They get invested in one another. This isn’t just another case to be tried or race to be run, or even a battle to be fought. This is personal.
So while it is the function of the hero to carry the reader through the story, it is the villain that gives the hero a story through which to carry us.
If the hero’s job is to give you somebody to root for, to invest in, then the villains job is to provide the motivation for that hero. The villain drives the story. Without a villain, our hero has no chance to show his growth, his virtues, his strengths. He has no obstacle to overcome, no wrongs to right, no murder to solve, no world to save, no kidnapped children to rescue, no family to avenge.
Without a villain, there is simply no story.
In addition to the essential function of providing a conflict, the villain also sets the tone and the stakes. How violent and dark the story is, or how light-hearted and funny, all hinge on the villain. If the villain is the hero’s rival in a romantic comedy, it will be a very different story than if the villain is a Gestapo officer hunting the hero. The villain might be the opposing attorney, trying to convict an innocent man. That’s bad, but it’s not Sauron or Voldemort bad.
Are the stakes who gets to be employee of the month or head of the PTA, or the survival the world?
Likewise, the tone of the story is dictated by many things, but by none so much as the villain’s behavior. How far will he or she go to obtain his or her goal? Is the antagonist a professional rival who will fight hard against the hero, but fairly? Or will he cheat? Will she destroy evidence? Blackmail or intimidate officials or witnesses? Torture suspects? Exterminate villages? Destroy a planet? Is he a cold, unyielding tool of the State, enforcing draconian laws, or a moustache-twirling caricature tying innocents to the railroad tracks?
This will also help to decide how far the hero should go to oppose the villain. How hard our protagonist is willing to bend the rules, and what that does to both the reader’s opinion of him, and his own, are heavily influenced by the forces stacked against him, the focus of which should be our villain.
The final job of the villain, and the one that makes us remember the great ones, is the villain’s relationship to the hero. The best villains have a chemistry with the hero. It’s just as important as the relationship between the hero and a love interest or a partner in crime. The best protagonist/antagonist pairs push one another’s buttons, get under one another’s skin. They get invested in one another. This isn’t just another case to be tried or race to be run, or even a battle to be fought. This is personal.
So while it is the function of the hero to carry the reader through the story, it is the villain that gives the hero a story through which to carry us.
July 15, 2017
We Can Be Heroes
What makes an effective hero?
You know what, that word is too loaded. What makes an effective protagonist?
Some people will insist that the protagonist be likable. I don’t think that’s really true. We have a stable full of what used to be called anti heroes running through most media. Early fantasy had Conan and Elric, neither of whom were exactly warm and fuzzy, and popular entertainment today has given us Tony Soprano and Walter White. So I don’t think likable is a requirement.
What is a requirement is that we care about the hero. His or her job is to keep us reading, keep us watching. Make sure we’re invested in his fate. Usually, to make you root for her, but a well written protagonist can keep you riveted even as you root against her.
And generally, you want readers to identify on some level with the hero. We can empathize with Harry Potter’s struggles as he grows up, because we’ve struggled through those years. We can feel for Tony Soprano as he deals with conflicts in his family while trying to run a crime syndicate. We understand Walter White because we know the feeling of being powerless, and we see how feeling powerless in his marriage, powerless in his job, his financial situation, and finally, being powerless in the face of his disease makes him take a stand. Makes him cross so many lines, not for the money, not for the financial security of his family after he dies, but because he needs to be respected, damn it, and forcing the world to respects his brilliance takes becoming a drug kingpin and destroys countless lives, so be it.
Now, most of us aren’t going to battle evil wizards bent on world domination, or run a crime family or build a drug empire, but we have all been awkward teenagers, or battled with family or felt powerless and for just one moment wanted to put on a pork pie hat, spit in the world’s eye and demand some God damn respect.
So, yes. You can write a flawed protagonist. One that you wouldn’t bring home to meet mom. But I need to care about what happens to that protagonist. Once I stop caring, it’s not long before I stop reading.
And the final piece of keeping a reader invested, is you need your hero to retain some shred of humanity. Have some line he won’t cross. Drug empires and mob hits are one thing, but he can’t kick a puppy or it’s over.
As with most things, the appeal of the protagonist and readers’ willingness to go along are on a spectrum. Every reader draws the red line in a different place. Which is why not every hero is for5 every reader.
The best example of this is Stephen R Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant. It’s open to interpretation whether you stop caring before you actually hate him, or hate him before you stop caring.
So, the literary world is filled with a wide variety of protagonists. It’s up to the writer and the reader to negotiate where on the spectrum they can be successful.
Except for Thomas Covenant.
Screw that guy.
You know what, that word is too loaded. What makes an effective protagonist?
Some people will insist that the protagonist be likable. I don’t think that’s really true. We have a stable full of what used to be called anti heroes running through most media. Early fantasy had Conan and Elric, neither of whom were exactly warm and fuzzy, and popular entertainment today has given us Tony Soprano and Walter White. So I don’t think likable is a requirement.
What is a requirement is that we care about the hero. His or her job is to keep us reading, keep us watching. Make sure we’re invested in his fate. Usually, to make you root for her, but a well written protagonist can keep you riveted even as you root against her.
And generally, you want readers to identify on some level with the hero. We can empathize with Harry Potter’s struggles as he grows up, because we’ve struggled through those years. We can feel for Tony Soprano as he deals with conflicts in his family while trying to run a crime syndicate. We understand Walter White because we know the feeling of being powerless, and we see how feeling powerless in his marriage, powerless in his job, his financial situation, and finally, being powerless in the face of his disease makes him take a stand. Makes him cross so many lines, not for the money, not for the financial security of his family after he dies, but because he needs to be respected, damn it, and forcing the world to respects his brilliance takes becoming a drug kingpin and destroys countless lives, so be it.
Now, most of us aren’t going to battle evil wizards bent on world domination, or run a crime family or build a drug empire, but we have all been awkward teenagers, or battled with family or felt powerless and for just one moment wanted to put on a pork pie hat, spit in the world’s eye and demand some God damn respect.
So, yes. You can write a flawed protagonist. One that you wouldn’t bring home to meet mom. But I need to care about what happens to that protagonist. Once I stop caring, it’s not long before I stop reading.
And the final piece of keeping a reader invested, is you need your hero to retain some shred of humanity. Have some line he won’t cross. Drug empires and mob hits are one thing, but he can’t kick a puppy or it’s over.
As with most things, the appeal of the protagonist and readers’ willingness to go along are on a spectrum. Every reader draws the red line in a different place. Which is why not every hero is for5 every reader.
The best example of this is Stephen R Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant. It’s open to interpretation whether you stop caring before you actually hate him, or hate him before you stop caring.
So, the literary world is filled with a wide variety of protagonists. It’s up to the writer and the reader to negotiate where on the spectrum they can be successful.
Except for Thomas Covenant.
Screw that guy.
July 12, 2017
Serial Killers
Series are a double edged sword. If you are an author or publisher who depends on sales of your books, series are the way to go. Readers who like one book in a series will generally buy more, so once you land a reader, it’s much easier to sell to him or her again than if you have a bunch of stand alone works.
If a book or movie makes money, people will ask for a sequel. And I get that. From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense. It’s low risk to make a sequel to something that has already proven its popularity.
The problem is that some stories lend themselves to series better than others. It’s easy to thrown another murder at the main character if that character’s job is to investigate murders. It becomes forced when terrorists take over the airport every single time out hero takes a flight, or kidnap every new girlfriend, or a body falls out of the closet every time our protagonist checks into a hotel. This makes even less sense if the character is a florist or pastry chef as opposed to a spy or mercenary or someone who would attract enemies and moves in a world of violence.
Looking at you, Jessica Fletcher.
So, yes, we can easily have Spenser or Mike Hammer or Anita Blake solve new mysteries every year without unduly straining the suspension of disbelief. But what about the non-episodic story? What about the quest that never ends or progresses? This is a problem with a lot of fantasy authors. You start a series and really think it’s great, but by the time you read "The Dental Hygienist of Shanara" or volume 75 of The Wheel of Time, things have gone a bit stale.
A long series that tells a story can makes sense, but only if there is progress. The Harry Potter series takes six books, but they follow the characters through their time at school. They age, they mature, they change. At some point, that series has to end.
Remember, all good things must come to an end.
But sometimes bland and trite things don’t.
If a book or movie makes money, people will ask for a sequel. And I get that. From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense. It’s low risk to make a sequel to something that has already proven its popularity.
The problem is that some stories lend themselves to series better than others. It’s easy to thrown another murder at the main character if that character’s job is to investigate murders. It becomes forced when terrorists take over the airport every single time out hero takes a flight, or kidnap every new girlfriend, or a body falls out of the closet every time our protagonist checks into a hotel. This makes even less sense if the character is a florist or pastry chef as opposed to a spy or mercenary or someone who would attract enemies and moves in a world of violence.
Looking at you, Jessica Fletcher.
So, yes, we can easily have Spenser or Mike Hammer or Anita Blake solve new mysteries every year without unduly straining the suspension of disbelief. But what about the non-episodic story? What about the quest that never ends or progresses? This is a problem with a lot of fantasy authors. You start a series and really think it’s great, but by the time you read "The Dental Hygienist of Shanara" or volume 75 of The Wheel of Time, things have gone a bit stale.
A long series that tells a story can makes sense, but only if there is progress. The Harry Potter series takes six books, but they follow the characters through their time at school. They age, they mature, they change. At some point, that series has to end.
Remember, all good things must come to an end.
But sometimes bland and trite things don’t.
July 11, 2017
A Death is a Terrible Thing to Waste
As authors, we control the things that happen to our characters. We put them through the wringer, because we need to show what they are made of, how they react and change when tested. It wouldn’t be much of a story without a conflict, an obstacle to overcome, adversity to struggle against.
And sometimes, we have to kill one of them. Because the story demands it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But it shouldn’t be done lightly. Killing a character is losing any potential that he or she might have had. As Clint Eastwood’s William Munny said in Unforgiven “Hell of a thing, killin’ a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
If you are going to take all that from a character that you created, you should get some bang for your buck. Death needs to mean something or it loses its sting. If readers get to the point where they meet a character and just know this one’s not going to make it, they won’t form a deep connection. My friends and I sometimes will play “spot the redshirt” when we watch a movie. You get to know the signs. The soldier who gets a letter from home and shows it to the whole squad, letting them all know he’s going to get married or be a father. The cop who mentions how close he is to retirement. The guy who says something like “Looks pretty safe” or “I think we’re gonna make it.”
These are all worn out tropes. They are attempts to create a bond so we’ll feel something when the character dies, or attempts to make us feel that the character is safe, so we’ll be shocked when they die. But unless your readers just fell off the turnip wagon, they can see the deaths coming up Main Street.
Death happens. And sometimes, predictable death happens. If you’re writing a war or a horror story, we know some of these people aren’t likely to see the end. But treat the audience with some respect.
Don’t kill important characters offstage. It’s insulting. If you’re taking everything they have and all they’re ever gonna have, give them a scene. And get your money’s worth out of that death. Let it be memorable, let it tell us about the character, and about the world and about those who survive and how that death affects them. Make the death advance the story and character development, but don’t hang a lampshade on it as a cheap plot device.
There is an argument to be made that life isn’t neat, death can be random and cruel and pointless. That’s plenty true of life, I know that well enough from my day job as a paramedic.
But life doesn’t need to make narrative sense. Life is pretty bad at that. That’s why you can’t return life or exchange it for a different one, and while you can theoretically just give up on it, that’s a lot messier than doing so with a book.
People want stories to mean something, to entertain, to provoke.
Death is a big deal. It’s one of the most powerful tools in your box. Use it wisely.
And sometimes, we have to kill one of them. Because the story demands it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But it shouldn’t be done lightly. Killing a character is losing any potential that he or she might have had. As Clint Eastwood’s William Munny said in Unforgiven “Hell of a thing, killin’ a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
If you are going to take all that from a character that you created, you should get some bang for your buck. Death needs to mean something or it loses its sting. If readers get to the point where they meet a character and just know this one’s not going to make it, they won’t form a deep connection. My friends and I sometimes will play “spot the redshirt” when we watch a movie. You get to know the signs. The soldier who gets a letter from home and shows it to the whole squad, letting them all know he’s going to get married or be a father. The cop who mentions how close he is to retirement. The guy who says something like “Looks pretty safe” or “I think we’re gonna make it.”
These are all worn out tropes. They are attempts to create a bond so we’ll feel something when the character dies, or attempts to make us feel that the character is safe, so we’ll be shocked when they die. But unless your readers just fell off the turnip wagon, they can see the deaths coming up Main Street.
Death happens. And sometimes, predictable death happens. If you’re writing a war or a horror story, we know some of these people aren’t likely to see the end. But treat the audience with some respect.
Don’t kill important characters offstage. It’s insulting. If you’re taking everything they have and all they’re ever gonna have, give them a scene. And get your money’s worth out of that death. Let it be memorable, let it tell us about the character, and about the world and about those who survive and how that death affects them. Make the death advance the story and character development, but don’t hang a lampshade on it as a cheap plot device.
There is an argument to be made that life isn’t neat, death can be random and cruel and pointless. That’s plenty true of life, I know that well enough from my day job as a paramedic.
But life doesn’t need to make narrative sense. Life is pretty bad at that. That’s why you can’t return life or exchange it for a different one, and while you can theoretically just give up on it, that’s a lot messier than doing so with a book.
People want stories to mean something, to entertain, to provoke.
Death is a big deal. It’s one of the most powerful tools in your box. Use it wisely.
July 10, 2017
Just Wing That Mother
I don’t plan my novels. Allegedly, one is supposed to. There are all these things like outlines and three-act structure and character arcs and so on. If you want to waste tons of free time, you can go to any writers’ forum online and read all the very important reasons you need, vitally, goddam need these things.
But I have better things to do. Like make shit up.
Sitting down and writing an outline kills my drive completely. If I want to lose a day staring at a blank page, I just say I’m working on an outline.
I start with an idea. Usually a character and a situation, and I write that. Then I wonder how that character got into that situation, and what they have to do to get out of it. Questions I hadn’t thought to ask before I sat down to write answer themselves. Characters grow and develop through the story, and I discover things about them that I’d never have thought to put in an outline.
I’ve seen enough movies and read enough books that the basic shape of plot and structure, the core truth of the concepts is there. I don’t have to plan that. The basic format of situation, conflict and resolution is like muscle memory now.
Now, this is first draft stuff, and the whole point of the first draft is to get it on paper. Reach the end. I call it my Blitzkrieg approach, where I just push to the sea and cut off the BEF. I go around tough spots and potential writer’s block areas and let the follow on forces clean those up in the second draft.
Once my first draft is finished, it will have inconsistencies and plot holes and issues. But it’s all down, and moving scenes, changing or combining supporting characters, clarifying messy spots is easy when you have a rough draft with a beginning, middle and an end and characters you care about because you watched them take shape and grow and gain depth as they struggled alongside you on the page.
Maybe not everyone can do this. I don’t think there’s necessarily one true way to write. Maybe some people need an outline the way some people can do math in their heads and some need to write it out longhand. I’m not suggesting everybody should throw away the outline and just wing it. I’m just saying it’s a viable strategy. It’s worked for five novels, and no reviewer has lamented a lack of structure. And it makes writing fun.
I remember reading the first draft of a friend of mine who uses the same method. I got to a scene with a big plot twist, one that really helped define the story, explained the protagonist’s motivation and tied a lot of threads together. I wrote in the margin “Wow. Didn’t see that coming.”
“Neither did I,” he replied.
And that’s the happy surprise you’ll never get from an outline.
But I have better things to do. Like make shit up.
Sitting down and writing an outline kills my drive completely. If I want to lose a day staring at a blank page, I just say I’m working on an outline.
I start with an idea. Usually a character and a situation, and I write that. Then I wonder how that character got into that situation, and what they have to do to get out of it. Questions I hadn’t thought to ask before I sat down to write answer themselves. Characters grow and develop through the story, and I discover things about them that I’d never have thought to put in an outline.
I’ve seen enough movies and read enough books that the basic shape of plot and structure, the core truth of the concepts is there. I don’t have to plan that. The basic format of situation, conflict and resolution is like muscle memory now.
Now, this is first draft stuff, and the whole point of the first draft is to get it on paper. Reach the end. I call it my Blitzkrieg approach, where I just push to the sea and cut off the BEF. I go around tough spots and potential writer’s block areas and let the follow on forces clean those up in the second draft.
Once my first draft is finished, it will have inconsistencies and plot holes and issues. But it’s all down, and moving scenes, changing or combining supporting characters, clarifying messy spots is easy when you have a rough draft with a beginning, middle and an end and characters you care about because you watched them take shape and grow and gain depth as they struggled alongside you on the page.
Maybe not everyone can do this. I don’t think there’s necessarily one true way to write. Maybe some people need an outline the way some people can do math in their heads and some need to write it out longhand. I’m not suggesting everybody should throw away the outline and just wing it. I’m just saying it’s a viable strategy. It’s worked for five novels, and no reviewer has lamented a lack of structure. And it makes writing fun.
I remember reading the first draft of a friend of mine who uses the same method. I got to a scene with a big plot twist, one that really helped define the story, explained the protagonist’s motivation and tied a lot of threads together. I wrote in the margin “Wow. Didn’t see that coming.”
“Neither did I,” he replied.
And that’s the happy surprise you’ll never get from an outline.
October 19, 2016
Review of Escapology by Ren Warom
Escapology is a vivid, unique and engrossing work of dystopian cyberpunk. In a future where most of the lands we know have sunk, where survivors eke out an existence on “land ships’ of floating islands, or the overcrowded, unforgiving city on the single remaining piece of dry land, run by either a rigid social order […]
October 16, 2016
To My Conservative Friends: He Won’t respect You In the Morning.
Because I care about you, I feel I have to speak up. It’s like being in a bar near closing time and seeing a friend hanging on the words of a smooth talking douchebag. I know he’s telling you things you want to hear, and there’s something in his swagger, but I know he’s lying, […]
