M.A. Ray's Blog, page 15

Down the Rothganar Road

Perhaps fewer people than usual will be interested in this post, but if you’re reading this, and you’re a fan of Menyoral, I thought you’d like to know what’s coming.

First, in September, Saga of Menyoral #3: Oath Bound, which is thus described.

“Dingus Xavier has been a Knight-Junior for all of ten minutes when his Master drops him off in the tree city of Windish to fend for himself. When Dingus strikes up a friendship with the tiny pickpocket Tai, he gets in over his head with a vicious criminal organization he never knew existed.

“When Dingus needs his Master most, though, Vandis is halfway around the world trying to budge immovable principalities into taking action against the slaughter of hundreds of Knights in neighboring Muscoda—and trying to survive to return to Windish.

“Dingus promised to keep his nose clean, but he takes his oath to help the weak and the poor in deadly earnest, and his actions will shake a city to its foundations.”

The next release in the main series will be Saga of Menyoral #4, with a working title of Summary Justice. I’m working hard to finish it, and hoping to have it available in early 2015. In the tradition of the series so far, it will be longer than the previous installments.

You won’t have to wait that long for your Rothganar fix. I’ll be releasing some shorter books along the way under the series title Tales from Rothganar. They won’t be necessary to understand the main continuity, but I’m having lots of fun writing a story about Dingus’s maternal grandfather, the famous ranger Eagle Eye, which I’m calling The Periapt of True Seeing. It’s taking a lot of inspiration from the oral tradition in the southern US, and from classic fantasy tales of adventuring parties. I’m shooting for November with that one.

I’m working on another in that line also, about Wallace MacNair, Evan Grady, and what happens to them between The Service and Summary Justice. Like I said, it won’t be strictly necessary to understand the main series, but it should be more fun that way. The title for that is Live Free or Die, and it’s another story of what it means to be a Knight of the Air.

By popular demand, I’m also working on a short story collection comprised of the stories the Knights tell. I’m not sure when that will be finished.

I ought to have Hard Luck available in paperback by Christmas. The other physical thing will be the dawn of merchandise: I have a mug design ready with the coffee-loving Sir Vandis Vail on it, and that should be available soon. It’s mostly for me, because I want one, but I figure it’s only fair to offer.

It’s going to be a busy few months. Are you ready to walk down the road with me, friends?

6 Things You Can’t Learn Without Finishing

I finished a manuscript for my third book.

Excited. I’m satisfied with the work (and panicking, because it’s off to the editor, and I can’t help that little niggle of what-if-it-sucks), and so I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about finishing. Here are six things you can’t learn without finishing your manuscripts. There are more, I’m sure, but these are the ones I can come up with.

1. Pacing

If you’ve never written an ending, you can’t learn how to write a middle. How do you keep pushing? Keep building tension? How do you write a climax? You’ll never know until you write an ending. You can’t go back and study the shape of your work without having a completed piece.

2. Theme

You can decide on theme beforehand, I suppose, but I feel as if what the story is about isn’t always clear until you write it, and if it’s consciously there in the first draft, a lot of times it can feel heavy-handed. You’re writing a story, not a sermon.

3. Discipline

If you can’t keep control of your mind (and your writing time) long enough to finish a project, you won’t be a professional writer. End of story, and pardon the punnage.

4. Revision

You can rewrite those first six paragraphs for the rest of your life, sure, but that isn’t revision. I’m talking about taking first draft to novel here. This flexes absolutely every writing muscle you’ve got. What to cut? What to keep? What to change? Learning this is absolutely vital. Shaping your raw material into a book is hard work, but you’ll never get to try your hand until you have a completed draft to work with.

5. What It’s Like to Work with an Editor.

This is a really interesting and wonderful experience, which I highly recommend. I’ve heard some horror stories, don’t get me wrong, but working with my editor to produce a highly-polished and publishable product is immensely rewarding. I’ve learned a lot about writing from him, and he always shows me how much more I have to learn—which is both terrifying and wildly exciting. Exciterrifying?

6. Satisfaction

I think this goes without saying. It’s an amazing and indescribable feeling. The only other times I’ve felt greater satisfaction were when I held each of my kids for the first time. It is incredible, but if you want to feel it, you’ve got to finish.

 So what are you waiting for? Go! Finish your draft.

Why I Love My Writers’ Group

Today I want to talk about one of the greatest joys of being a writer: talking to other writers in a writers’ group. A short post, and probably filled with oozy emotional stuff, but here it is.

I love my writers’ group. It would be nice if we could all meet in person, but we’re spread out from the East Coast to the Southwest. We use Facebook to communicate and post work for critique. I can’t say enough about what reading their pieces has done for me—or their reading of my pieces. The artist’s life, the writer’s life, is constant becoming. Getting better. Doing new things. Unrelenting learning and growing and becoming more than one was yesterday. With the group I’m in now, I am learning faster than I ever have before—becoming a better writer, faster.

I think the main reason it’s working for me is like-mindedness. We all write fantasy, with occasional forays into horror and sci-fi; there’s no explaining that this is not The World We Live In, but rather the assumption that the rules are going to be different and we’ve got to hang on for an explanation. We are all serious writers, wanting to turn this thing we do into a career, and invested in constant improvement.

If something isn’t working, I can trust them to tell me. If something worked really well, I can trust them for that, too. Feedback is like sugar to writers, and I’m getting enough that I feel like a hopped-up hummingbird. It’s fantastic.

The other wonderful thing about my writers’ group is the great pieces I’m getting to read, every single week. These are people I respect, and whose work I enjoy. Everybody has a different combination of strengths; everybody’s writing from a different point in his or her life and a different point of view. I learn so much just from reading everyone else’s stuff. I want this power, I want that power. It’s like a smorgasbord.

This is without a doubt the best thing I’ve done for my craft. Maybe it’s tough to find people near where you live, or you don’t know anyone. I urge you to reach out with social media and find other writers. Like Chuck Wendig says, the part of the Internet that isn’t cat pictures is made up of writers. We are here in droves, pushing words like we love to do, and chances are you can find people you respect, and who are doing work you can learn from. We are here and you can find us. Mostly, we don’t bite.

It might take some time to find—or to build, because if you’re not getting what you need, you’ve got to find a way—a place where you can say, “Look at this thing I have done. Does it work?” Where you can speak like a serious writer speaks. But it’s worth it.

I’m excited about what we’ve been doing lately. The fiction is getting ever more amazing, and now we’re doing a corporate blog. I’m looking forward to seeing what everybody has to bring to the table from a different standpoint, tips and nonfiction rather than their fiction (and you can find us here, if you want to take a look).

But seriously. Find one. Make one. Whatever. You need a writers’ group. I never knew what I was missing.

Blood and Bone: Why People Don’t Like Indie Books

It’s hard work, this writing thing. If you want to improve, if you want to write better each time, even if you’re only writing for yourself.

Publishing, though. That’s a whole different animal. There are certain standards, you know? Or there should be. And for self-publishers, the standards are …well, nonexistent, and a good book is hard to find. Even the very basics, fundamentals of grammar, spelling, and usage, don’t matter anymore—anyone can finger-paint.

If you slap your finger-paintings on KDP, you’ve lost my respect. The cover doesn’t matter as much to me as the “Look Inside.” If I find even one error on your first page, I look at the rest of your sample with a jaundiced eye. More than one? Forget it. You know what that says to me? It tells me that YOU ARE NOT COMMITTED TO YOUR WORK. I’m not talking about creative choices here. I’m talking about plain, simple laziness. Shallowness. Greed.

Is this how you act at your day job? Do you expect to be paid for sitting around on your hind end, making mistakes from the moment you walk in the door? Do you seriously expect me to pay for an artistic product in which you have invested no work whatsoever? I could find better on fanfiction.net, people. To produce something worth your readers’ time, worth my time, and you’re not a total genius (psst—you’re not), you’re going to have to bust your ass. Even if you are a genius (I know a couple, and they’re not me or you), having hit Ctrl+S on your first draft doesn’t count.

Get an editor—at the very bare minimum, get some readers—who know better than you. Make sure they actually do know better than you, and be willing to admit that they do. MAKE A COMMITMENT. Bleed into it! Weep into it! I don’t care how many five-star reviews you have, or how pretty your cover is, or how high your sales ranking is, or anything else. I care about your writing. If your sample is punk, I’m not going to buy, and you’re going to disgust any smart person who does.

Listen to me. It’s not just your reputation on the line here. It’s everyone’s. All of us who self-publish. “Oh, I never read indie books. They’re so full of mistakes.” Are you part of the problem? Are you not committed? To make good art, you must construct it from your own blood and bone, and you don’t get that in something smashed together in a week. Carve it. Cut it. Put in the work, and then you can complain about bad reviews or slow sales. Until then, I don’t want to hear it.

Please don’t mistake me. I’m not anti-self-publishing. I do it myself. I’m anti-lazy.

Oh, and yes—I am a snob. But if this pissed you off, maybe you should take a look at your latest. Kisses, Em

Whoa, I’m a Writer

Let me be honest with you. I promise I’ll go back to giving advice and telling stories next time, but I’m eyeballs-deep in revisions for #3, and struggling with it, and there are some things I need to say. Bear with me, please.

This thing, this writing thing—this art thing—doesn’t get easier. My experience has been that the farther you go along the road, the harder it gets. The more aware I am of How Writing Works, the more difficult it is. The more aware I am of how many choices there are to convey the message, the more aware I am of what I’m doing in a particular section …it’s just harder. Harder to get the words flowing. Harder to choose them.

Some of this might be particular to writing a series like I am. One of the problems I keep running into, if it is actually a problem, is that every word I write, every pass I make, I’m getting pulled more deeply into the characters’ minds and hearts. I love them so much—and it hurts me when they suffer. I can’t back down, but it hurts more.

Some of it might be that I’m sharing my private brain playground with so many others that, just a few months ago, I wasn’t. They’re not really mine anymore, these people I love. And it was easier when they were. The love other people bear for Dingus and Vandis, for Kessa and Krakus, is still surprising and new for me; I am still used to having them all to myself. As high as my own standards were and are, they are higher now that I have people reading whose opinions I care about and whom I desperately want to please.

Oath Bound is the end of an era, in a lot of ways, and when I am finished I’ll turn and dive where the dark things live. I’m nervous about it. I’m nervous about the whole thing, and on top of that the writing is harder. The characters are hitting more challenges. That means I am, too, and I’m learning as I go, learning—I think, I hope—a lot. But it doesn’t get easier.

I have so much more to learn. There’s so much more I want to show you. Do you know that? I’m pulling up from the depths of my internal landscape, and I don’t even know how deep it goes. There’s more. But #4 has been taking me ages to draft. I’m trying to do so many things with it. It’s the most intimidating project I’ve ever taken on. I don’t know that I’m even halfway done. So that won’t be coming right away.

There are some other Rothganar projects I’m working on. I’m doing a shorter book, a novella, about Wallace MacNair, to release in between. People need their fix, I need to tell this story in particular, and I need to build backlist, because this is my job now.

Holy crap. It’s my job. The dream that I’ve dreamed, in the back of my mind and in front of it, for as long as I can remember, is true.

I’m a writer. So really, all of this is worth it.

Five Protips That Sound Like Advice for Beginners

Here are five of the most obvious-sounding writing tips in the entire world. You’ve probably heard most of these a quadrillion times, but they’re not the beginner tips they sound like. These things inform my entire writing life, and I want to share them with you here. If you’re not doing these five things, you should, and I’m not going to qualify that statement. You should.

Read your work out loud.

This is Numero Uno for a reason. It’s the biggest, best way to polish your own fiction. When you think it’s finished, read it out loud. Whether you read it only to yourself or to another, your own voice is a great tool—and don’t trust dictation software, either. Reading aloud does a few different things for you. One is that it helps you to judge flow and euphony; if your words taste good in the mouth, they’ll feel good in the minds of your readers. Another is that it slows down your eye on the page and ameliorates some of the tricks your brain plays when you read your own writing. Did you really write what you thought you wrote? Are there typos, missing words, or clunky spots? Reading aloud can really help you pinpoint this stuff. It’s a pace change, a change of format, and sometimes that makes all the difference.

 

Read.

The speed at which you read doesn’t matter. You can be the slowest reader on the face of the earth, and you should continue to read. Taste others’ words. Read what you love and find new phrasing, techniques, things to try. Read what you hate and find the same things, plus what not to do. In your genre. Out of it. Nonfiction. Fiction. It’s okay if someone else’s voice bleeds a little. It really is. You’ll hit that on the edit if you see it, and either take it out or work it into your own tapestry. Read old books. Read new books. You can’t be state-of-the-art unless you know what the art is. It doesn’t matter how hard you’re going at the writing, either. Take an hour or two every day and fill the word well.

 

Study grammar.

This should go without saying. It is impossible to overstate the importance of grammar to good writing. Even if you’re a bad-ass grammarian, you could use a refresher course, couldn’t you? Your preferred styleguide doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter how well you think you know it. Whether you like Strunk & White or Grammar Girl—study it. If you are insecure about grammar, do the same. Study it. If you think it’s boring, study it anyway. This is your passion, right? It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you didn’t pay attention in middle school, now is the time to teach yourself. Get a workbook if you have to. There’s no shame, absolutely none, in gaining a new skill. None. The only shame is in not learning what you need to know.

 

Use a thesaurus.

Yes, that’s right. Be aware that a thesaurus will not teach you the connotations, or even the definitions of words. They just offer alternatives, and that’s sometimes really helpful—so yes, use one. Sometimes you can’t think of the right word at a certain point, and the covers are falling off of mine. But be in love with words. Learn new ones. Big ones. Little ones. Smaragdine and futhorc and casein. Love how they look and how they sound.

 

Rewrite.

I don’t mean copy-and-paste what you like and fiddle with the rest. I mean type out every last word over again. Revise from hard copy. I can’t say that enough. I know it sounds like a pain in the ass. Writing in general is a pain in the ass. Revise from hard copy. Even when faced with a perfectly decent sentence, you might have something better now, and revising is all about making it better. Revise from hard copy!

There it is. Try one. Trust me.

 

A Sense of Place

A SENSE OF PLACE

Setting puts flesh on your stories. The way it’s described can work for you or against you, and it can be the difference between bringing the reader into the story and leaving him or her out in the cold.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about building delicious descriptions of setting. I hope you all find them helpful.

Use vivid words. I’ll use southwestern Oklahoma as an example, since I live here. I could say, “It’s flat with occasional hills, and very windy and dry.” But so what? Does that convey the feeling of being there? Not at all, and it’s a little boring, too. What if I said this? “The stinging wind whips hair and dust around my face.”
Choose telling details. What am I going to see here that I wouldn’t see anywhere else? Near where I live, it’s a bizarre mix of pines, deciduous trees, cacti, and grasses. I’ve never seen this anywhere else, so I’m going to talk about that. “This place is strangely magnificent, desolation butting heads with explosive life: patchy grass broken by occasional stands of trees, in the low spots, pine needles browning in the sun. Around the bases of the oaks, the earth lies naked and brick-red, and clumps of cacti avail themselves of the shade beneath twisted little pagoda trees.”
Choose more than one sense to describe through. I’ve already used tactile and visual cues, so I’m going to add olfactory cues as well: “I smell ozone, the dark tang of a distant wildfire.”
Filter through the senses of the character whose point of view you’re using. In this case, I’m using my own POV, so I’m going to add: “Hot. Too hot, and nose-bleeding dry.” This gives additional tactile cues, and also clues the reader into how I feel about the scene before me. If we were in the body of a native Okie, one who loves the land, the description would probably feel very different. I could talk about bright sunshine and wind that stirred the blood, for example.

 Now let’s organize the sentences.

“Hot. Too hot, and nose-bleeding dry. The stinging wind whips hair and dust around my face, and I smell ozone, the dark tang of a distant wildfire. This place is strangely magnificent, desolation butting heads with explosive life: patchy grass broken by occasional stands of trees, in the low spots, pine needles browning in the sun. Around the bases of the oaks, the earth lies naked and brick-red, and clumps of cacti avail themselves of the shade beneath twisted little pagoda trees.”

I can continue to sprinkle different details through my narrative as I tell you the story, not too often, but every few paragraphs or maybe once per page, to keep where we are at the front of your mind. Maybe I’ll talk about how sweaty I’m getting, or about a tarantula legging it past me, or about how I can feel a sunburn coming up on my skin as I stand. Another way to frame this sort of thing, if I have more than one character in my scene, is to point something out or have it pointed out to me. Even if there aren’t any other characters, I could think of someone I’d like to show something to. If my kids were with me, I’d definitely point out the tarantula, and if they weren’t, I’d think of how they’d like to see it.

The important thing is to give a sense of a particular person having the sensations that come with a particular place. Whether it’s being a prisoner in a dungeon or attending a birthday celebration in the royal palace, standing on a plain in Oklahoma or gazing up at the Chicago cityscape, for me the most effective way to describe setting is to place the character, and therefore place the reader.

Cat-A-Cloak

Here’s a little fairy tale I wrote. The story is mentioned in Menyoral more than once, and I thought it was time I wrote it.

I hope you enjoy Cat-A-Cloak.

~*~

Once upon a time, so long ago that names sounded funny and Traders’ was hardly a language at all, there was a maiden. Her name was Eadburga—see? I told you they were funny—and she was real pretty. Her arms were strong from kneading the bread and running the house for her father the miller, and she had eyes as blue as the sky and hair that shone like thick sheaves of wheat, skin so fair and freckled she looked like a dish of sweet cream with cinnamon on top, but the prettiest thing about her was the kindness that beamed from her face and warmed everything around her.
The miller had an apprentice name of Jakab, and he was small and dark. His body was whipcord-lean and stronger than it looked, from his pushing the quern-stone all the day long, but he knew Eadburga would never love him. She brought him cool mint water every day, summer to winter and back again, and he’d stop for a moment, running with sweat, to drink it. He hated mint. But the water came, always, with kind words and gentle smiles, and his heart went to her a little more every day, even though she already had the whole thing. More and more he loved her, without any hope of return or prayer for anything other than mint water.
The young men from the village, and even some of the older ones, would pass the door to the mill all the time, on their way up to the house to see Eadburga. She never did step out with any of them, except for Aethelstan the farmer’s son. Aethelstan was big and strong, fair and handsome, the kind of person Jakab couldn’t be, with a warm laugh and a smile as kind and friendly as Eadburga’s. She belonged with Aethelstan and Jakab knew it, but he couldn’t help wanting all the same, and it hurt so much he felt like his breastbone would crack and split.
Jakab had one afternoon a week to himself, and he’d go into the village and spend some of his little pay on a new pair of stockings, or maybe a beef pasty. This week he went just the same, and he bought himself a cherry pocket pie, on account of it was near Longday and the cherries were plump and sour and delicious. He sat on the edge of the green, eating it slow, thinking of Eadburga’s shining braids, and licking every bit of honey from his fingers as he ate. The three roads in the village were all busy. It was market day and people came in from all ’round, walking with their baskets and carting their wares to sell in the village.
While he sat eating he happened to see an old lady on the other side of the road struggling by with all her shopping. Mother Sunngifu was her name, and she was real old for sure, so old that her little wizened body bent over deep. At first he thought about helping her and decided not to; she seemed okay and he didn’t want her to think that he thought she was too old to do for herself. But then, right when she was turning down the track to her little house, she stumbled in a pothole. All her weight lurched to the side, and she fell. Her packages scattered everywhere.
Nobody else noticed, but Jakab hurried over to her, dodging a cart. She might’ve gotten hurt when she fell—old people were like that sometimes—and now it wouldn’t shame her at all if he helped. He rescued an onion just before a horse stomped it flat, almost losing his hand in the process, but he earned a smile for it, missing teeth, but no less beautiful for it. “Are you okay, Mother Sunngifu?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” she said, waving him off when he tried to help her up. He gathered up her shopping, only a few things, because she lived alone at the edge of the village and besides that, had a little garden. When she’d gotten up, he offered his arm and carried her things, and they went up the track to her tiny cottage—slow, but it wasn’t like he had anything better to do. She was walking funny, and wincing, and eventually Jakab made her stop. He picked her up in his arms strong from pushing that quern-stone and carried her home.
Her cottage had the most beautiful flowers planted all around it, delphiniums and tulips and marigolds and peonies all bright in the sun and filling the air with fragrance. It wasn’t as neat as some of the gardens around, but it made the little hump of a wattle-and-daub house seem wonderful. “You must work hard on your garden,” he said, and she smiled again.
“Yes, but not as hard as I used to be able to.”
“I could weed it for you,” he offered, looking around at the shaggy grasses in among the flowers as he took her up to her door. He didn’t have to be back ’til dark, and that was a long time yet, especially long since it was almost Longday.
“Will you, lad?”
“Sure I will,” he said, and he put her shopping away before he went out to weed. After a little while she came out to watch him and talk to him, and stretched her old hurt leg in front of her into the sun. She told him stories from when she was a girl, all afternoon, and it didn’t seem the least bit long with that nearby. When he finished the Bright Lady had started to hide her face, and he knew he’d better get home, but she insisted he should come inside, just for a minute.
“Bring me that chest, if you please, young Jakab,” she said, when she’d gotten settled on her stool by the hearth, and he brought it to her. It was as wonderful as her garden, carved over with animals and birds. It locked with a little brass key, and she opened it up now, lifting the lid to show more than should’ve fit inside: tiny bottles blown of real glass in different colors, a big fat green gem, and a pile of clothes and shoes that, when she reached down into it, swallowed her whole arm, even though the chest wasn’t that deep. “I have a present for you,” said Mother Sunngifu.
“I don’t need a present,” he said. “I liked hearing your stories.”
She winked and told him, “That’s why I want to give you one. Here it is!” She pulled a long cloak out of the chest, pulled and pulled until she could lay it out, with a snap, over her legs. “What do you think?”
“Oh, Mother, that’s too much,” he said. It was dark, softly-shining fur, and even though it shed hair when she ran her knobbly hand over the surface, it looked way too impressive for a miller’s apprentice.
“Take it. I want you to have it. Promise me you’ll put it on after everyone’s gone to bed—then you’ll have an adventure.”
He took it, and thanked her, kissing her cheek that was all thin skin and wrinkles, and ran back to the mill. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have an adventure, but that night he tossed and turned on his pallet out in the mill shed, and finally his curiosity got the best of him and he draped the cloak over his shoulders. As soon as it settled, he heard a little pop and saw a glittery spray, and there in place of Jakab wearing the cloak—what do you think?—was a little cinnamon cat, small but strong.
Well, that was strange, but after he ran around for a little while, he got used to seeing and feeling like a cat and came to like it. And night after night he rambled all over the village and fields. He beat up some other cats, and he ate some mice, maybe a bird or two. After all, he was a cat. The part of him that was a man thought that was a little gross, but he didn’t mind too much, because his stomach stayed full even after he took off the cloak and changed back. It wasn’t like the miller starved him, but he was hungry all the time anyways—and after he put on the cloak that changed with his body.
One bright morning a few weeks after Mother Sunngifu had given him the cloak, Eadburga was in the mill shed with him, and he’d taken a break to swig mint water and pretend he liked it. She was telling him about a bird that, lately, had been singing in the tree outside the kitchen window, and how pretty its voice was. It had, she said, the smoothest shiny brown plumage, and she loved to hear and see it. And it happened to be Jakab’s free afternoon later that day. After she left, he thought how much he’d like to get that bird and give it to her for a pet.
As a man, he couldn’t do it, but as a cat—he could do it as a cat. And it also happened, when he ran down to Mother Sunngifu’s to see if she needed anything, that she wasn’t home. He ran all the way back to the mill and sneaked into the cloak to become the little cinnamon cat. Nobody was expecting to see Jakab the man, so he could run around as a cat no problem.
The bird sang in the tree, just like she’d said, a crooked tree just outside the kitchen window with its trunk branching off here, there, all over, and shaggy-looking green leaves. The window stood open, and Eadburga’s humming along with the sweet birdsong drifted through. Jakab bellied up the tree, claws here, claws there, quiet as he could climb.
He came onto the same branch with the bird, not so very high, and hid himself in those shaggy leaves. Beautiful Eadburga worked in swirling puffs of flour, almost to the elbows in bread dough, with her strong arms kneading, and even though he was a cat, Jakab sighed inside. What wouldn’t he give her, even with no hope but mint water?
He turned his eyes on the bird and watched, watched until there was nothing but the bird and the branch and the cat, and his body coiled back, tighter and tighter, so tight his tail twitched—until a split-heartbeat moment came, a moment he couldn’t miss, and he was on the bird in the same moment, struggling wings under his paws, feathers on his tongue. Midair tumbling, and he landed on top and bit, lickety-split, right on the spine. The bird went still, not dead but still, and it couldn’t breathe. After all, he was a cat.
Jakab backed away a cat-step, blood on his chops. He stared at the limp little bird; his cat-self wanted to eat it while its insides still quivered. He dabbed it with a forefoot, and just then Eadburga came storming out of the kitchen, shouting and sweeping at him with a twiggy broom. “Oh, you bad cat!” she yelled, and his man-self knew she cried, and he ran from the broom and her tears to cower at the base of the tree.
Eadburga went on her knees next to the bird and picked up its little body, and she looked so sad his conscience ran him right through. Jakab crept toward her, slow, and put his paw on her leg—oh! touching Eadburga!—to make her look at him with her blue-sky eyes, full of rain and clouds from her weeping.
He straightened and stretched, tall, taller than the cinnamon cat could be, and let the cloak fall off his shoulders. The cat fell away to reveal the man, and while Eadburga gaped, because if she spoke he would never get it all out, he said, “Eadburga, I’m so sorry. I only wanted to give you the bird for your very own, and maybe you could have kept it in your bedchamber, and it would’ve sung all the time to make you smile; but I killed it. I killed it, and I’m sorry, but all I want is for you to always smile.” And by the end his words all tumbled over each other and he ran away, frightened because he’d almost told her that he loved her with every corner of his heart; and he left the magic cloak behind.
Jakab ran back to the quern-stone, which he knew best, and where he had a place and a purpose. He threw himself into the work and cursed his own foolishness, cursed the cloak that had made him a cat, cursed everything. He even cursed the day, so long ago, that he had met Eadburga, that first day of his apprenticeship when he was a little, dark boy and she was a fair lovely girl beginning to bloom. From the first moment he had loved her, and he cursed that moment he’d seen her with her braids shining like wheat in the morning.
There he was, pushing around and around in circles, sweat running into his eyes and soaking his shirt, when in padded a white cat with pale orange stripes. It sat and watched him for a long time out of odd blue eyes, and at last it rose—straightened—and Eadburga let the shedding cloak slide from her body. “Jakab,” she said, “why did you think I wanted to put that bird in a cage?”
“I thought you’d want to hear it sing just for you,” he said, dull and miserable, and kept on pushing the quern-stone.
“But the bird didn’t belong to me,” she said. “It didn’t belong to anyone but itself. In the winter, it would leave anyway, or some other cat would’ve killed it—sometimes beautiful things are more beautiful because they don’t last.”
Jakab slowed to a stop, pulling back on the handle of the quern, and he looked at her. “Sometimes,” he said. “Only sometimes. Sometimes they stay. And they get more and more beautiful every time you look.”
She looked back at him like she’d never seen him before, and Jakab, shaking his head, turned back to his work; but before he could get the stone moving again she laid her hand on his arm, and a slow sweet smile worked onto her face. She caught him in her strong arms, up to the soft curves of her, and she kissed him until his toes curled. “Tonight, if you make yourself into a cat, I’ll be waiting,” she said.
He did, but he didn’t wear the Cat-A-Cloak for long. And if nine months later she had a litter of triplets, well, no bother about that. They lived happily ever after.

Fatal Flaws

From Achilles to Frodo Baggins, all the best literary characters are deeply flawed and truly human, and no matter that they might be hobbits. Today I want to talk about how to bring that to your fiction. By “flawed characters” I mean characters with honest-to-goodness character flaws: things about themselves that hamper them from doing what they need to do.

If you want to build a character who’s flawed in a great, human way, look to his or her strengths first. Maybe you have a confident person in your work. Nobody’s going to deny that confidence is a good thing, but take it all the way out to its extreme and you’ll end up looking at arrogance. This can show up in a number of ways. Maybe the confident character believes that he or she knows best for everyone. Maybe he sticks firmly to the adage, “If you want something done, best to do it yourself,” and can’t delegate responsibility. Maybe she’s even angry with people who can’t do a thing as well as she can, or pities them. Maybe he simply believes the world owes him something.

A character who’s strongly moral might be rigid. A character who’s a great talker and socializer might be completely lost when left alone. These are superficial examples, so try to let your characters’ backstories guide you in your choices. How will their histories affect their strengths, and the way those strengths express themselves as weaknesses?

Any way you decide to go with it, remember that it’s not enough to simply tell us, “she’s confident, but that sometimes leads to arrogance.” The true test of a character’s flaws is to show them. As writers, we love our heroes, and it’s sometimes difficult to throw them against a real challenge to their personal power. A flaw isn’t a flaw unless it, and the character, is constantly tested—and sometimes, they’re going to fail.

I plead your indulgence while I use an example from my own work, because I know best what I was trying to do. In the beginning of The Service, I wrote a scene that pits one of the heroes, a talented young ranger, against the head physician of his order. Dingus is great in the wild, but he’s terrible socially, awkward to the point that he doesn’t like to be touched. It isn’t particularly fair to knock him into the supremely confident Reed Westinghouse, bearing an old, arrogant grudge against his Master, but life isn’t fair. The scene is a challenge for both of them, and the two bring out the worst in each other.

To write effectively flawed characters, you’ve got to allow them to fail, over and over. Let their flaws affect their lives and the people around them as much as their strengths do. Where Dingus fails against Reed, Reed fails when he slams into Dingus’s Master, a man with similar flaws to his own, but more authority and a strongly charismatic personality.

These character flaws can work for you in the most powerful way when it comes to including character development in your fiction. Some characters remain relatively static, and that’s not always a bad thing—a writer doesn’t always want to give a supporting character a strong arc—but your protagonist(s), I believe, ought to have one. When a character butts against his or her flaws and fails, it means much more when he or she succeeds in overcoming those flaws. Even if it’s in the smallest of ways, make it a big moment. Later on in The Service, when Dingus butts heads with Reed again, even if he doesn’t precisely “win” the encounter, he stands up for himself far more effectively, and I think it’s a meaningful scene for his personal development.

If you think of your characters this way, as spectra of strengths and flaws, and allow them to fail at least some of the time—if you allow your burdened hero to fall, or your angry, spoiled warrior to shirk his responsibility and destroy his best friend’s life—you can get more mileage from your people. In real life, the journey of personal growth is littered with backsliding and pitfalls, failures and fainting. The littlest victories can mean the world, and when you bring those elements to your writing, characters begin to breathe. Fatal flaws can kill characters in their fictional world, but for a reader, the right treatment of flaws brings a character to life.

What Narrative Does for a Writer

There are tons of books and articles dedicated to the art of writing dialogue, but unless you’re writing screenplays, the bulk of your fictional word count is more than likely narrative. There are tons of books dedicated to that, too—more, I think—but I want to talk specifically about what narrative does, can do, for you.

I write alternate-world fantasy. Narrative is of particular importance to me, and to writers of fiction not-quite-meatspace, so I’m going to talk about my own work, but even if your fictional flavor is different from mine, I hope you find something of use to you here. I’m going to take apart my opening to Menyoral and try to tell you what I was doing and why.

It was a fair night, the last, perfect night of summer, and the stars shone cleanly down from a sky of blue velvet; but Oda the moon hid His shifting face from the world.

That’s my first sentence. I think it serves in a number of ways. Firstly, it gives information about when we are in time: the last, perfect night of summer, at the dark of the moon. It gives information about the weather: fair and clear. Third, it gives information regarding where we are: somewhere the moon is a god called Oda. Fourth, I think it’s pretty, and I chose words that would immediately create a dreamy mood (though in retrospect I wish I had said “last, lovely”) and then insert an element of doubt.

Six men stood in a fallow field.

This is a short sentence, simply placing the players, and for the rhythm involved when you vary sentence length, but I liked “fallow field” for the alliteration and the very slight old-fashioned feel.

Four, swathed in black, had placed themselves within a great diagram scythed into the grass, one at each compass point around a great gray stone.

Now we know a little more about most of the players in the scene, and can place them a little more firmly. The sentence also says, by connotation (especially if you are a regular reader of fantasy), that the four are involved in a magical undertaking, and raises a question for the reader: why? I have repeated “great” here, again for the old-fashioned feel, and for the rhythm of the piece.

Two wore tonsured heads and clean-shaven faces, carrying brass medallions around their necks; and two wore long beards and runes picked out on their heavy robes in thread of gold.

Here I’m describing the four more thoroughly. I’m also dividing the players into two groups, monks and magi, but in so many words I haven’t said so. I’ve also let you know that in this world, both clergy and wizards have magic available to them—merely with a physical description of the four men in the diagram.

By their tonsures, the last two were monks also, but instead of habits, they wore black armor with their brass medallions.

I also want to give you a hint as to what’s different about this world in particular, so I have added the last two men, partnered to the monks in the diagram, and given you also a broad hint about their skill sets: the armor.

They stood away in the taller grass, watching, faces drawn and fearful in the hard radiance that came from the glassy, polished top of the stone.

Here’s another hint at the armored monks’ skills: they’re not spellcasters. And another about the nature of the ritual going on: that it’s frightening. Beyond that, I’ve told you more about the stone itself, and chosen words that add to the eldritch feeling: “hard radiance,” and “glassy” for euphony.

The tracery etched in the surface burned more brightly than a sunbeam glancing off the whitest snow.

More precise about the exact source of the light, and information about the nature of magic in the world: tracery and diagrams, different ways to tap the power. A simile, for pretty, and to fix a picture in the reader’s mind.

It looked almost as if it might be letters or runes, but from what language? What language, when written, would writhe so that when a man looked away, and then looked back upon it, it had changed?

Going into more detail here, but also, I’ve tried to impart the frightened questioning on the part of the armored monks. Something’s not right here, and this is not the way things usually go. I’m trying to create a mood here, so I’m giving you these details in a way that speaks to the mood.

The section I’ve gone into here is just under two hundred words, but the reader already knows a lot about the world he or she is in, and as well as giving information, I have tried to manipulate his or her feelings toward the scene with my choice of words, punctuation, and even sentence length. By ending the second paragraph with a question, I’ve tried to draw the reader on, deeper into the scene. By using some longer sentences with my shorter ones, I’ve tried to engage the part of the mind that is “hearing” me. This scene took many, many revisions, and I read it aloud to myself several times to make sure the rhythm sang. Don’t be discouraged if it takes you a long time—I spent several hours on just a few paragraphs.

Another one of the choices I made in communicating this scene was my choice of an impersonal, somewhat removed narrator. I did this for a number of reasons, the first being that I wanted to convey reader knowledge that the characters do not possess. I wanted to give the impression that we’re outside observers to a great event. There is no dialogue in this sequence. By that I mean—although later on one of the monks speaks—nobody responds. I wanted to create isolation and distance for the reader, and not to draw him or her too deeply into anyone’s mind just yet, partly because the answers to many of the questions the scene raises are the mysteries of Menyoral, and I didn’t want to ruin the story! (And if you want to read the rest of the excerpt, click here.)

You can leverage everything about your narration this way. Word choice, rhythm, punctuation (though that’s slightly less fluid), point of view/narrator, everything. Say you want to write a first-person story, or a very close third. Keep in mind who’s telling your story, and the cadences of his or her speech. Choose words the character would use, and connote how he or she would see things by your choices. Don’t tell me, “She didn’t like the wallpaper.” (Unless it’s in the rhythm. This is advice, not Do or Die.) Maybe she’s an interior designer. Say instead, “She stared around at the flocked, Harvest Gold wallpaper with a curl in her lip.” Maybe she’s in pest control. “That textured wallpaper could hide a swarm of tiny insects.”

I’m going on a little, so here’s the best thing you can do to help you achieve this kind of effect: learn great big piles of words. Read. Read outside your comfort zone and in it. Increase your vocabulary. Use your new words. Build sentences around great words. Snuggle into them. They’re not just your nuts and bolts: they’re the cells in the wood of your structure.