Howard Andrew Jones's Blog, page 63

Absent Presents

I’m not a particularly religious person, nor were my parents, but I was brought up celebrating Christmas as a kind of cultural tradition. We put up a tree and sang carols and exchanged gifts. My mother always emphasized that we were to take pleasure in picking out gifts for others, moreover, that this was more important than awaiting for gifts yourself.

That was a harder sell to little kids, but I think something must have stuck with me because as I got older the choosing of gifts became my chief joy at Christmas season.

At this stage of my life I am fortunate enough to possess most of the material things that I truly want (as these are usually books or music my wants have rarely broken the bank). It’s been a long time since I was waiting eagerly to see what awaited me under the Christmas tree, but I’ve been able to get excited about getting things for the rest of the family, and watching their surprised and pleased expressions.

This year, though something odd has happened. The kids are old enough that they suddenly don’t seem either as interested or as covetous. For instance, it was hard to get lists from them of possible presents. And my wife and I have had to make some home-related purchases (more needs than wants, like replacing the dangerous 40-year-old gas fireplace that heats our family room with a modern safe one) so that we’re not really planning on more than a small exchange this year.

I can’t tell if this is a fluke, or the sign of things to come. Still, even if I’m not really looking forward as much to watching the gifts being opened this year, I look forward to several days of relaxing with the family, playing games and sharing family favorite movies. It’s not too many more years before the kids head off to colleges, probably far from home, and then things will really change. I suppose I sense that we are on the verge of transitioning into a new stage of life and it has me feeling a little morose. I’m trying to remind myself of how lucky we’ve had it, and how lucky we still are, and hold on to the moment.

Writing Conference Scenes

When you’re writing a scene where characters discuss the plan — no matter if it’s how to pull off the heist or how to save the ship, or where the killer might strike next — there’s always a danger of going into character overload. By that I mean you create a scene with so many characters that the reader (and maybe you , the writer) can’t keep everyone straight.

If you’re working with established characters in a TV show, it’s different. The original Star Trek had briefing room conferences all the time, but because these moments were usually with the series regulars, knowing who they were wasn’t much of an issue. If you were to write a briefing room scene on a whole new starship, though, think about all the shorthand you couldn’t do. Who’s that guy, and what’s his specialty? How do I introduce this woman’s important tactical information without having to go into pages of detail about who she is? These kinds of writing challenges used to drive me crazy.

I just read a virtual blizzard of Richard Stark Parker novels, and while they’re pretty far away from the “save the ship” briefing room scenes I grew up watching, they serve as models in many ways for the crafting of a good conference.

As always, I don’t think there are absolutes, so I think of these points I’m about to lay down as guidelines, not rules.

1. Don’t start your story with the conference room scene. There are just too many characters to introduce all at once.

2. Begin with the events in motion. If the important details happened in the meeting earlier, then do a flashback. Or start the story BEFORE the conference scene is necessary.

3. Introduce at least one principal character BEFORE the conference. That way we know someone before we’re tossed into a room full of people. If that character is on her way to the meeting, she can be thinking about one person she dreads being there or someone she’s pleased who WILL be. But she shouldn’t be thinking about ALL the people who are going to be there, because then we’re back to character overload again.

4. Have that character meet with one of the other characters outside the room of the conference. That way the reader gets some sense of their relationship and what our principal character thinks of them. AND we now know two people who will be in the room talking.

5. Once the conference starts, tag the new characters with a distinctive concern. Scotty’s worried about the drain on the engines. McRuff is worried about the criminal’s next move. Grofield inserts an occasional wisecrack. Sundance just wants the money.

You can’t weigh things down with a whole lot of description or give detailed backgrounds. If this is the first time the principal meets many of the characters, she’s mostly going to be getting first impressions and you can get more in depth about what they look like later  (plus paragraphs of detail about each character as they’re introduced really bogs down pacing).

The purpose of these conference scenes is to show how the characters work together, to explore their relationships, and to inform the reader about what’s going on. There may be all kinds of subtext — perhaps McRuff doesn’t like Scotty for some past transgression, and a little hostility comes out when they talk. This probably isn’t the place to explain the history, which can be dolled out later. Mystery is good. It leaves a reader wanting to know why those characters interact like that and leaves you with material to explore.

Speaking of exploring material, I’m off to write. Hope this helps someone out there!

One of Those Days

It’s been one of THOSE days. This morning as I was getting the kids ready for school I had a nice little writing post composed in my head, but then I discovered we had no Internet service. Before that got resolved, my wife discovered she’d left her work calendar at home with a bunch of important papers, so I ran that in to her.

Then, because we MAY need passports for the kids in the coming year I looked in the appropriate place for their birth certificates and found that they were gone!

A frantic search ensued which involved much mess that will now have to be cleaned up. In the end, though, the birth certificates were right where they were supposed to be and I’d actually been LOOKING at them earlier. They are so different from mine, issued in the late ’60s, that for some reason I didn’t recognize them for what they were and assumed I’d done something stupid and put them in the wrong place.

In the old days, assuming that I’d not put something back where it belonged was always the most logical conclusion, but I’ve gotten more organized now and need to remember to step back before I naturally accept blame and run off to put out a fire.

Anyway, it’s after 1o and I still need to feed the horses, so there’ll be no fascinating site update today, because as soon as I get back in from the windswept snowscape that is currently our yard, I need to write some prose. All is well, no one here at Jones central is hurt or in any danger. We’ve got it good. A little smoother sailing would have been nice, but I’ll just move forward.

December Status

It’s been a hectic few days here, although the kids certainly enjoyed multiple days cancelled (or delayed) by snow. It looks like there’s at least one more. On the plus side, that’s meant more time to spend with them, AND we finally got the gas fireplace replaced. The thing dated from the construction of the house  in the early ’70s and for safety reasons we’d been advised to stop using it altogether. As cold as our living room can be in the winter, the new gas burners are an absolute necessity. (And the new logs and fire look a LOT more realistic than the old ones.)

In the evenings lately I’ve been playing Battle Academy (for Mac, PC, or iPad), which enables me to command divisions of armor and infantry against various WWII Axis powers. So far I’m quite enjoying the game, although I do wish there were more short scenarios. That’s probably more of a feature than a bug for most people, but I don’t have that much spare time. To this newbie war game player, the interface and graphics seem pretty swell.

There have been so many interruptions for the last week that writing slowed to a crawl, but I hope to get in some good work today and finally finish patching part 2 back together following a minor POV change. Then I’ll set it aside and get back to fleshing out some of the other, simpler parts of the book.

And later this week I’ll get back to discussing some more hard writing lessons I’ve learned.

On Dialogue Tags PLUS Bells for the Dead

The fourth of four parts of my short story, “Bells for the Dead,” is now live over at the Paizo site. You can find the whole thing by clicking here, which means it’s about time for me to take the character description sheet of the story’s main character live, which I’ll be doing tomorrow.

Right now I’m hard at work tinkering with the most problematic section of my new monster-sized fantasy novel. All the other parts seem to be clicking along nicely, and this one is ALMOST there. I’m getting to be able to trust my instincts with this stuff. These days when I feel something isn’t quite working I FINALLLY have enough experience that I can twist and turn it a bit to figure out why. Usually, as with here, it stemmed from not being enough in a character’s head.

My writer friend Myke Cole pointed his Facebook pals to an interesting and helpful essay on ways to level up your writing, by Delilah S. Dawson. Apart from step 1., which I think can be over utilized (avoiding all dialogue tags but said) it has pretty excellent advice. In Ms. Dawson’s defense, that whole “avoiding all dialogue tags but said” thing stems from editors and instructors who’ve seen all kinds of awful writing where everyone’s always shouting and declaiming and hectoring, constantly, usually with layers of adverbs.

I happen to believe that other dialogue tags are perfectly fine in some instances, and I don’t have an objection to adverbs to describe my character’s vocal tone sometimes, either. But some people seem to feel pretty religious about it, and I’ve actually found a few reviews out there docking my own writing because the reviewer has found an adverb in one of my descriptive phrases, or because Asim shouted for Dabir to get down rather than said it. Ah well.

I suppose I could go on about this in greater detail, but I need to get some breakfast and make some phone calls and then get to writing. For the record, I LOVE that our mortgage company can just sell our mortgage to some other place without our say-so our approval. It’s happened four times now, and the new company seems to be messing everything up. One of my goals today is to get some mortgage refinancing going with a company that will NOT sell it. I think there ought to be laws against that, but this is Howard’s writing blog, so I’ll leave that grumbling for my non-existent “the way things are going to be when I become king” blog.

 

Bells for the Dead

I’ve either been very busy doing family things or very busy relaxing for the last few days, so I’ve made no time for updates even though I’ve got a couple of writing technique posts I want to draft. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how good “conference room” style scenes are written in part because I’ve been reading a lot over the last few days, and I happened to see a lot of good conferences.

For now, though, I must get back to writing fiction, because I have a December deadline I need to hit. I did want to mention this, though. With everyone here in the states (well, nearly everyone) busy with Thanksgiving stuff last week, I forgot to mention that part three of four of my new Paizo Pathfinder story went live last week. You can find it here.

More in a day or two.

The Best of Harold Lamb

If you’re been reading and loving the Harold Lamb collections put out by Bison Books (edited by yours truly) and wanted to convert a new reader to the glories of Lamb’s prose, what stories would you want to hand over?

I’m thinking about putting a “best of” volume together and while I have some definite opinions on what stories are best, I wanted to throw this discussion wide and see what other people thought. For instance, I know my friend Deuce Richardson thinks the third volume of Cossack stories is when the series shines most brightly. What does everyone else think?

Name your favorite stories here, and if you like Harold Lamb, spread the word around to sites where other Lamb fans might be and tell them to report back here with their opinions on favorite stories. And yes, if I do this, I’m wanting to do a complete Durandal trilogy at the same time, although there are still some copyright issues to iron out.

Thanks!

 

Leveling Up

Look at that — part 2 of my 4-part short story, featuring Lisette from Stalking the Beast, just went live. I hope you’ll drop by and take a look. Part 1 is here.

I’ve been joking with John O’Neill lately that I feel like I’ve leveled up as a writer — meaning that all of the sudden the process isn’t taking as long for me.

Now it may be that I’m just in a good patch again. Creative types go through patches of good or bad. For a good long while (TOO long) writing has been an upward struggle so — bad patch. All the sudden it’s fun again, and it’s happening quickly. And unless I delude myself, I’m producing some of my best work ever.

So is it just a mood thing, or a cyclical bit out of my control? Maybe. But I’d like to think that I’ve finally got enough experience under my belt, or made enough mistakes, (or the same mistakes often enough) that I’ve finally learned something. I was going to try and wax eloquently about it today and create a really useful post about writing, but instead I burned about fifteen minutes watching every one of these Wednesday Adams mini-shows.

It’s time to get to writing my prose, because I’m a writer, not a video watcher or blogger, and I’ve exceeded my self-alotted NON-writing time this morning. Still, there’s a lesson there for you. During writing time, don’t look at other stuff (although you should visit, because Melissa Hunter — actor and writer — has clever stuff).

Besides, it’s Thursday.

 

Three

Three quick things today, as I’m picking up more and more speed on the current project and don’t want to step away from it for too long.

First, I’m over at Suvudu all this week. Matt Staggs invited me to Take Five and talk about my new book, Stalking the Beast. So I did, and you can find what I said over there.

Second, I found a really interesting article about character construction and what looks like a bevy of more essays all about writing techniques over yonder. Take a look, and if you like what you find, come back and point out the best to me.

Third, Lou Anders sent me a link to a great article — with additional extra links to some swell looking reference material — all about adding verisimilitude to your fantasy setting. Get ye forth and read it.

More on Character Strengths and Weaknesses

A book by “John Benteen” a some-time pseudonym for the late, great Ben Haas.

As long as we’re on the subject of reading outside the genre, I want to point once more to an excellent, excellent essay about the structure of adventure stories. Follow this link to the site of the illustrious James Reasoner, where he posts an essay contributed by the Joel Haas, the son of the talented Ben Haas.

Sure, it’s an essay about writing westerns, and you may just turn away as soon as you hear that. But if you’re interested in the technique of adventure writing, this here be gold, matey. Pure gold. Four pages of honest truth and structure advice that you’d be unlikely to get in several years worth of writing classes.

Go read it, now. I just re-read it myself. Now it’s time to feed the horses and get to writing.