Ken Hughes's Blog, page 8

Character Interview with Mark Petrie (THE HIGH ROAD)

(Mark Petrie settles into his chair, moving slowly and tiredly for someone nineteen years old. Then he turns on a friendly smile that pushes the fatigue away from his face.)

Mark: Right off, I’m not sure I can help you here. I guess you heard about my bragging how I’d be the best bicycle courier in Lavine. But, well, I don’t have that job any more.

author: It’s not about that. I wanted to talk about you, and the belt.

Mark: What? I don’t know what you mean.

author: The belt the Dennards had. The one that had you floating over Rosewood Park. The Blades gang hunting down Joe Dennard. And what you’re going to do about it.

Mark: So… you know about all that. Then, maybe you should tell me what you’re going to do. How’d you find out? Are you going to help us? Hell, just give me a straight answer why Angie hasn’t gotten the belt’s magic to work for her. I only found the thing, but it’s her family’s, isn’t it?

author: I’m afraid I’m not here to help you. I’m here because I wanted to get to know you better, and what it’s like being you, before and after this happened.

Mark: Come on, not even a hint? (Mark tries another smile, and then he closes his eyes for a moment to think.) I guess I can’t make you answer. So, ask me what you want. Maybe when we’re done, you’ll want to return the favor.

author: All right. Let’s start with: what part of what’s happening has made the biggest impression on you?

Mark: Good start, I like that. And the answer’s easy, it’s knowing there’s a whole gang of punks out to kill us, and all the plans we started yesterday with are history. That and… under it all, finding out I was right about what happened when we were kids, that Angie’s father didn’t just save her and me from the Blades, he went on to attack them right when he could trigger a gang war. I always thought he must have done it except there was no way to get there in time… and now I know the missing piece is that he flew there! Crazy as it gets, it’s one thing that makes more sense now—too much sense for Angie, that her father really did that after all. Say, I wonder…

author (quickly changing the subject): Sounds like it really bothers you, to see Angie in pain like that.

Mark: Of course it does! We’ve known each other since we were kids, even before that moment with the gang. But that doesn’t matter now; what matters is that she and Dennard get out of the city before Rafe and the rest of the Blades try something else, because the gang will never stop, and you can’t fight something like that. The sooner both of them just disappear, the sooner we can all try to start something like normal lives again.

author: So you think you can get things back to normal?

Mark: They’ll be alive, won’t they? And I know I’ll have to keep looking over my shoulder, but the gang’s not after me, so I hope that’ll die down. It should, right? (Mark pauses, hoping for a hint from the author.) Sorry, I had to try. What’s your next question—work, family, my feelings about flying, or what?

author: I’d like to know about what you were like before this happened. How would you describe yourself?

Mark: You mean yesterday? I’d say… I was trying to figure myself out; that’s what you’re supposed to do when you get out of school, right? So I was working different jobs and scrambling to get shifts when I could, and keeping track of everyone I’d worked with. I’d drove and ridden around town so much I guess I had to try being a bike courier next, until the Blades moved in and blew that away. –And you know, I think I was dating on the same plan, just looking around, and the latest thing got shut down by the same problem. You can’t exactly tell Lucy I was late because I was floating over the city! But… I’d say things had been good, until then.

author: Good? Were they always that way for you?

Mark: Good enough. First with my uncle and aunt, then when my cousin Henry stepped in—

author: First? I think you’re skipping something.

(Mark’s teeth clench, for a moment.)

Mark: You do know a lot.

author: I’m trying to get the whole picture of what it’s like for you.

Mark: Yeah. And I’m trying to come clean here… So yes, my father sold drugs and my mother died from them. He’s been in jail almost all my life; mostly I remember Uncle Stan and Aunt Maria. I don’t know if they even liked kids, but they took me in, and I guess they did the best they could. Then when they split up, my mother’s nephew Henry took over—just in time for me to hit teenager.

author: Ouch.

Mark: I mean, I was grateful for the chance and all, but there were a few days that… But we got through that, and now I’ve got my own tiny place where I can cover the rent—well, almost—and I try to think by now I’ve learned a bit about looking after myself and remembering who I can trust. Now I’ve got all the time I need to figure out what I want to do, I’ve got my friends, I’ve stay in touch with Angie and her father… and I admit, sometimes I’m just trying to impress Henry.

author: (The author can’t resist grinning.) Only Henry?

Mark: I don’t know what you’re trying to say. But of course with all this now, it’s not about impressing anyone any more. Well, maybe convincing the police, but we don’t think they’ve got any kind of protection that’s permanent enough for what Dennard did. So he and Angie have to get far away and make sure they never leave any traces back. I just wish I knew how the Blades found out what he’d done all these years later. Just our kind of luck, right? (Mark pauses, trying to get the author to answer.) Come on, you have to give me something.

author: Since you keep asking, I can tell me this… don’t give up on Angie.

Mark: Don’t give up on… sure, you tell me not to do one thing I’d never do anyway? Is that a way to make me stop trying to make you talk?

author: (says nothing)

Mark: I know when I’m beat. And I guess that’s what this is all about, with the gang—I hate quitting, but I know enough to change the rules in a game I can’t win. And Angie… she’s stubborn, but she really just does the same thing, she finds a way. And if it wasn’t all the Blades, I’d be putting my money on her, even without the belt.

author: Yes, the belt. The thing we haven’t talked much about.

Mark: Because it doesn’t change things. –Oh, sure it changed everything, that Angie’s family had a secret like this, but none of them will tell us a thing about it. And just knowing it’s possible, that somehow, somehow an old belt lets you fly… Or it’s more like, I float on the wind, or I jump, but it’s still defying gravity. I even think it was the magic that let me lift Dennard up when the Blades had hurt him, and run all the way to safety carrying him. And the way that felt… or the moment up there when I forget I’m not sure why I’m not falling, and all I see are the night sky and the streets I’d been biking through laid out as line of lights… a sight like that ought to mean something.

author: Something like what?

Mark: (Mark shakes his head.) What it really means is that I’m in over my head—yes, even if I’m floating above it all. I don’t know how the belt works, or if there are any other impossible things out there about to jump out at us. I just want to send Angie where nobody can find her, and so I can stop thinking what a better person than me could do with a power like this.

author: A better person?

Mark: Yeah. Me, I could make one slip and ruin everything for us, and I’m not going to let that happen. Whatever it takes. –Anyway, I think that’s it. Is there anything else you want to know? Anything else you want to cover before we stop?

author: I think that’s just the note to leave it on.

 

(Chronology note: this interview would be set in the middle of THE HIGH ROAD’s Chapter Four. Mark has no idea what he’s in for.)

 

On Google+

 

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Lorem Ipsum is simply

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the

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Dummy

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

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World

Different fantasy worlds and counting (Seven Circles of Hell, Vows of Blood, and Symphony of Magic), and the two of us have been bouncing her nuggets of writing advice all over the

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Book

Different fantasy worlds and counting (Seven Circles of Hell, Vows of Blood, and Symphony of Magic), and the two of us have been bouncing her nuggets of writing advice all over the

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Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

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Interview with Ciara Ballintyne

What drives a writer, and what drives a story?

I’ve been interviewing Ciara Ballintyne—

How do I describe Ciara? She’s the creator of three different fantasy worlds and counting (Seven Circles of Hell, Vows of Blood, and Symphony of Magic), and the two of us have been bouncing her nuggets of writing advice all over the Twitterverse. She likes to tell how she “sings American country music with an Australian accent,” and she’s a financial lawyer who can ride a horse and tell you how to remove an arrow from your arm.

No, scratch all that. She’s a writer.

And someone with a passion like Ciara’s always makes me wonder, just how does she see storytelling, and what do her findings mean for the rest of us?

 

You say you’d settled on your love of epic fantasy when you were ten, with authors like Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind. So why epics, what draws you to that kind of story?

Ciara: It’s the battle between good and evil. It’s heroes doing what’s right and what needs to be done, even when it’s not fair. It’s great love and great sacrifice. It’s totally about the good guys always winning.

We see so much misery and pain and suffering and evil in the news it’s downright depressing. I’ve stopped watching or reading as much as I can, because there never seems to be anything I need to know or want to know. Just terrible reminders of how depraved humanity can be. And then I start thinking dark and terrible thoughts indeed – like how hard would it really be to take over the world?

So the villains in epic fantasy are less interesting to me than the heroes. The world is full of villains, and probably heroes too, but the heroes are less visible. So villains are really just a necessary foil for the hero.

The fact that people read and write epic fantasy gives me hope -@CiaraBallintyne
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The fact that people read and write epic fantasy gives me hope that maybe humanity as a whole isn’t as much a waste of space as the majority of the news might lead you to believe.

I have no time, on the other hand, for so-called ‘gritty fantasy’.

And for your own writing? What kind of feeling or themes do you see in other writers (or maybe missing from them) that you’re driven to capture in your own stories?

Ciara: Heroines with real women’s issues. I don’t mean angsty romance, I’m more alluding to the fact that often women in fantasy are one of two things – useless, or if written strong, they often read like a man in a woman’s skin. So I try to capture a strong woman, who still has all the vulnerabilities of her gender. These are the vast majority of the women I personally know, so the other kinds don’t resonate with me. Also, there are no chain mail bikinis.

Personal villains. Epic fantasy is so often the clash of great good against great evil that it’s a little faceless or its motivations don’t ring true. Evil for evil’s sake and trying to destroy the world…. For what? What does the bad guy do after a triumph that makes everything cease to exist? What’s in it for him? I’ve seen this complaint in a lot of reader forums, too. I think you can still have conflict on a global scale that threatens to ruin everything for everyone while still making it personal to the hero and having villains with genuine motivations. Terry Goodkind did this well, I think. Jagang had global ambitions, but oh man did you hate him on a very visceral level, and the things he did to Richard made it all so very personal.

The last theme is embodied in my tagline – that all of us can be evil or do evil if placed under enough pressure. So when we suffer, our soul cracks, and the more damaged our soul, the more likely we are to lose our way and do bad things. I have a lot of anti-heroes because of this theme – people who have suffered and crossed the line and who are now trying to find their way back, but who are prone to relapse. There are many elements of tragedy in my books because of this theme.

You’ve got a marvelous motto, “The cracks in our souls bleed darkness,” and your works are full of both demons or undead that people can call up and human traitors ready to call them. How do you go about setting up a story where someone stirs up that much trouble?

Ciara: For me it all comes from the characters. A story usually starts from a seed. What would happen if a man fell head over heels in love with a woman sworn to the goddess of death? A line like ‘The tentacles hardly ruin it at all’ (that was Confronting the Demon). What happens when you save the world but everyone still blames you for everything that went wrong? That seed usually comes with a main character, perhaps a love interest, and a villain.

Upping the stakes to create all the trouble you’ve mentioned is done in the nitty gritty. I outline and I use GMC charts (goal, motivation, conflict) to find where all the various characters intersect in their goals, because those are points of conflict. As I write, I add in any inspiration I have along the way. But above all, I live by this rule – make things as hard for the protagonist as you possibly can, and then make them a little harder again.

One question every writer wonders: when you have a vision of storytelling like that, how does it help you get the story written?

Ciara: My tagline embodies the kinds of stories I like to read, and therefore write. My best and most favourite stories are always those most true to that idea. Not sure why it fascinates me so much – maybe because my personality type, INTJs, are said to be susceptible to the lure of becoming an evil mastermind. Though I’d call myself ‘chaotic good’, I can see the potential to go bad bad bad in the right circumstances. A friend even gave me a card once that read ‘She had not yet decided whether to use her power for good or evil’. Circumstance dictates so much for us all.

I have one story idea that at the moment doesn’t tie in strongly to this notion, but the story concept itself, the world and the magic, is novel – but until I find a main conflict that resonates, I suspect it will sit there languishing. It has time though, I have plenty of other ideas to go on with.

Once that overarching idea beds down into a plot outline, though, it’s full steam ahead. The more detailed the outline, the less likely I am to go astray and wander off into story porridge.

Ultimately, it’s being in love with the story that gets it written.

If there’s one thing you simply have to put in a story, what would it be? 

Ciara: I’d like to say dragons, but it’s not – as you know, there are no dragons in Confronting the Demon, although I did obliquely add them as part of the world-building in the sequel. It’s not tentacles either – they’re only in The Seven Circles of Hell.

Probably it’s magic. I can’t think of a story I’ve written off-hand with no magic. I regard magic as a very integral part of the epic fantasy genre, which is part of why Game of Thrones is fun but not one of my all-time favourites – not enough magic. I like to give my villains magic because destroying the world or taking it over with purely mundane armies is so boring and tedious – and so is writing that many battles. Magic is fun and opens unexpected doors and plot possibilities, so long as you put limits on it, otherwise it sucks the conflict out of your story. I also like to give my heroes magic, but usually it’s something they never wanted and need to learn to control, so it acts as a major disruptor and source of conflict in their lives.

Magic makes so many opportunities for plot twists and emotionally torturing your characters.

Do you ever think of experimenting with that, trying that out in a different kind of story and seeing how they mix?

Ciara: I’ll be honest and say I’ve never wanted to write anything but epic fantasy and I wouldn’t know how. So far, the only stories in me are epic fantasy. You can see from what we’ve been talking about that my story preferences, my passions, all put me squarely inside that genre. One of my reviews says that I tried too hard to sound ‘epic fantasy’ in Confronting the Demon, but the honest truth is that I’ve been reading almost nothing but epic fantasy for 23 years, I’ve been writing nothing but epic fantasy for almost as long, and on top of that I’m a lawyer with an expansive vocabulary. I don’t try to write that way – I would have to try very hard to not write that way. And no other genre really has that same sound. I would sound pompous in any other genre.

But if you put magic in another genre, that’s paranormal isn’t it? I’ve been called paranormal, by readers in that genre who are apparently unfamiliar with epic fantasy. While I’m thrilled they enjoy the book, it’s definitely not paranormal by my definitions.

All that aside, I do have a potential joint project on the side where I’m co-authoring a kind of sci-fi thriller. It’s paranormal in the sense that it involves werewolf-type elements, but they are not magic-derived, so that’s why I say sci-fi thriller. I’ll be relying on my co-author to keep my pompous wordiness in check, while he’s relying on me to add some vivid imagery to the story.

So now, what’s the next thing you have for us, and how does it show some of that in action?

Ciara: In the Company of the Dead is the next project I expect to release. It is not another instalment in The Seven Circles of Hell series, although there will be more coming in the future. This is an entirely new fantasy in an entirely new world and currently clocks in around 100,000 words. It’s got magic (and dragons), gods, and battles, and politics, and love. There’s a brave hero drowning in grief, and a tragically lonely heroine, set apart by her power over death and feared by everyone. An insecure prince makes trouble for the hero, and an ambitious duke makes trouble for them both, while in the background the black priest of an evil god is manipulating everyone like chess pieces on a board. There are quite a few people who all want different things, so that creates loads of opportunities for conflict. While the evil god could be regarded as the villain, it’s really the prince and the priest, both of whom have very personal motivations. Both the heroine and the hero have flaws and issues in their lives that push them down darker paths.

Sounds definitely dark – and with dragons too, finally!

Thank you again for sharing a little of your vision, Ciara. Knowing you, your hero and heroine will show us all how they’ll have to earn that victory. Can’t wait!

 

On Google+

 

Click on pen to

Interview with Ciara Ballintyne

What drives a writer, and what drives a story?

I’ve been interviewing Ciara Ballintyne—

How do I describe Ciara? She’s the creator of three different fantasy worlds and counting (Seven Circles of Hell, Vows of Blood, and Symphony of Magic), and the two of us have been bouncing her nuggets of writing advice all over the Twitterverse. She likes to tell how she “sings American country music with an Australian accent,” and she’s a financial lawyer who can ride a horse and tell you how to remove an arrow from your arm.

No, scratch all that. She’s a writer.

And someone with a passion like Ciara’s always makes me wonder, just how does she see storytelling, and what do her findings mean for the rest of us?

 

You say you’d settled on your love of epic fantasy when you were ten, with authors like Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind. So why epics, what draws you to that kind of story?

Ciara: It’s the battle between good and evil. It’s heroes doing what’s right and what needs to be done, even when it’s not fair. It’s great love and great sacrifice. It’s totally about the good guys always winning.

We see so much misery and pain and suffering and evil in the news it’s downright depressing. I’ve stopped watching or reading as much as I can, because there never seems to be anything I need to know or want to know. Just terrible reminders of how depraved humanity can be. And then I start thinking dark and terrible thoughts indeed – like how hard would it really be to take over the world?

So the villains in epic fantasy are less interesting to me than the heroes. The world is full of villains, and probably heroes too, but the heroes are less visible. So villains are really just a necessary foil for the hero.

[Tweet “The fact that people read and write epic fantasy gives me hope –@CiaraBallintyne“]

The fact that people read and write epic fantasy gives me hope that maybe humanity as a whole isn’t as much a waste of space as the majority of the news might lead you to believe.

I have no time, on the other hand, for so-called ‘gritty fantasy’.

And for your own writing? What kind of feeling or themes do you see in other writers (or maybe missing from them) that you’re driven to capture in your own stories?

Ciara: Heroines with real women’s issues. I don’t mean angsty romance, I’m more alluding to the fact that often women in fantasy are one of two things – useless, or if written strong, they often read like a man in a woman’s skin. So I try to capture a strong woman, who still has all the vulnerabilities of her gender. These are the vast majority of the women I personally know, so the other kinds don’t resonate with me. Also, there are no chain mail bikinis.

Personal villains. Epic fantasy is so often the clash of great good against great evil that it’s a little faceless or its motivations don’t ring true. Evil for evil’s sake and trying to destroy the world…. For what? What does the bad guy do after a triumph that makes everything cease to exist? What’s in it for him? I’ve seen this complaint in a lot of reader forums, too. I think you can still have conflict on a global scale that threatens to ruin everything for everyone while still making it personal to the hero and having villains with genuine motivations. Terry Goodkind did this well, I think. Jagang had global ambitions, but oh man did you hate him on a very visceral level, and the things he did to Richard made it all so very personal.

The last theme is embodied in my tagline – that all of us can be evil or do evil if placed under enough pressure. So when we suffer, our soul cracks, and the more damaged our soul, the more likely we are to lose our way and do bad things. I have a lot of anti-heroes because of this theme – people who have suffered and crossed the line and who are now trying to find their way back, but who are prone to relapse. There are many elements of tragedy in my books because of this theme.

You’ve got a marvelous motto, “The cracks in our souls bleed darkness,” and your works are full of both demons or undead that people can call up and human traitors ready to call them. How do you go about setting up a story where someone stirs up that much trouble?

Ciara: For me it all comes from the characters. A story usually starts from a seed. What would happen if a man fell head over heels in love with a woman sworn to the goddess of death? A line like ‘The tentacles hardly ruin it at all’ (that was Confronting the Demon). What happens when you save the world but everyone still blames you for everything that went wrong? That seed usually comes with a main character, perhaps a love interest, and a villain.

Upping the stakes to create all the trouble you’ve mentioned is done in the nitty gritty. I outline and I use GMC charts (goal, motivation, conflict) to find where all the various characters intersect in their goals, because those are points of conflict. As I write, I add in any inspiration I have along the way. But above all, I live by this rule – make things as hard for the protagonist as you possibly can, and then make them a little harder again.

One question every writer wonders: when you have a vision of storytelling like that, how does it help you get the story written?

Ciara: My tagline embodies the kinds of stories I like to read, and therefore write. My best and most favourite stories are always those most true to that idea. Not sure why it fascinates me so much – maybe because my personality type, INTJs, are said to be susceptible to the lure of becoming an evil mastermind. Though I’d call myself ‘chaotic good’, I can see the potential to go bad bad bad in the right circumstances. A friend even gave me a card once that read ‘She had not yet decided whether to use her power for good or evil’. Circumstance dictates so much for us all.

I have one story idea that at the moment doesn’t tie in strongly to this notion, but the story concept itself, the world and the magic, is novel – but until I find a main conflict that resonates, I suspect it will sit there languishing. It has time though, I have plenty of other ideas to go on with.

Once that overarching idea beds down into a plot outline, though, it’s full steam ahead. The more detailed the outline, the less likely I am to go astray and wander off into story porridge.

Ultimately, it’s being in love with the story that gets it written.

If there’s one thing you simply have to put in a story, what would it be? 

Ciara: I’d like to say dragons, but it’s not – as you know, there are no dragons in Confronting the Demon, although I did obliquely add them as part of the world-building in the sequel. It’s not tentacles either – they’re only in The Seven Circles of Hell.

Probably it’s magic. I can’t think of a story I’ve written off-hand with no magic. I regard magic as a very integral part of the epic fantasy genre, which is part of why Game of Thrones is fun but not one of my all-time favourites – not enough magic. I like to give my villains magic because destroying the world or taking it over with purely mundane armies is so boring and tedious – and so is writing that many battles. Magic is fun and opens unexpected doors and plot possibilities, so long as you put limits on it, otherwise it sucks the conflict out of your story. I also like to give my heroes magic, but usually it’s something they never wanted and need to learn to control, so it acts as a major disruptor and source of conflict in their lives.

Magic makes so many opportunities for plot twists and emotionally torturing your characters.

Do you ever think of experimenting with that, trying that out in a different kind of story and seeing how they mix?

Ciara: I’ll be honest and say I’ve never wanted to write anything but epic fantasy and I wouldn’t know how. So far, the only stories in me are epic fantasy. You can see from what we’ve been talking about that my story preferences, my passions, all put me squarely inside that genre. One of my reviews says that I tried too hard to sound ‘epic fantasy’ in Confronting the Demon, but the honest truth is that I’ve been reading almost nothing but epic fantasy for 23 years, I’ve been writing nothing but epic fantasy for almost as long, and on top of that I’m a lawyer with an expansive vocabulary. I don’t try to write that way – I would have to try very hard to not write that way. And no other genre really has that same sound. I would sound pompous in any other genre.

But if you put magic in another genre, that’s paranormal isn’t it? I’ve been called paranormal, by readers in that genre who are apparently unfamiliar with epic fantasy. While I’m thrilled they enjoy the book, it’s definitely not paranormal by my definitions.

All that aside, I do have a potential joint project on the side where I’m co-authoring a kind of sci-fi thriller. It’s paranormal in the sense that it involves werewolf-type elements, but they are not magic-derived, so that’s why I say sci-fi thriller. I’ll be relying on my co-author to keep my pompous wordiness in check, while he’s relying on me to add some vivid imagery to the story.

So now, what’s the next thing you have for us, and how does it show some of that in action?

Ciara: In the Company of the Dead is the next project I expect to release. It is not another instalment in The Seven Circles of Hell series, although there will be more coming in the future. This is an entirely new fantasy in an entirely new world and currently clocks in around 100,000 words. It’s got magic (and dragons), gods, and battles, and politics, and love. There’s a brave hero drowning in grief, and a tragically lonely heroine, set apart by her power over death and feared by everyone. An insecure prince makes trouble for the hero, and an ambitious duke makes trouble for them both, while in the background the black priest of an evil god is manipulating everyone like chess pieces on a board. There are quite a few people who all want different things, so that creates loads of opportunities for conflict. While the evil god could be regarded as the villain, it’s really the prince and the priest, both of whom have very personal motivations. Both the heroine and the hero have flaws and issues in their lives that push them down darker paths.

Sounds definitely dark – and with dragons too, finally!

Thank you again for sharing a little of your vision, Ciara. Knowing you, your hero and heroine will show us all how they’ll have to earn that victory. Can’t wait!

 

On Google+

 

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The Two Laws of Backstory (and why Superman breaks both)

It’s one of the hardest moments in writing—knowing that even though you’ve picked a perfect character or an ideal plot complication, you have to write in so much more to justify it. But with so many kinds of backstory you could explain it with, how do you pick the one that fits? Or make it do more than fit, so it opens up new depth and possibilities to the story?

It’s not as hard as it seems.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Understanding backstory really comes down to two things, and they’re so simple that I thought I’d demonstrate them using a few of my favorite comic book heroes, just to show how big a curve we can grade “realistic” on.

We could call those two rules looking forward and looking further back from the time of the backstory idea you’re trying out… or we could simply say “does it do enough, and does it do too much?” But I think I’ll call them “the seed” and “the worms”.

 

The Seed: does it grow what you need?

You’ve got such a simple question to start with: what do you need this history to do? Then, find an idea that seems, logically or at least intuitively, like it relates to that.

Call Superman’s origin a classic example of how not to cover things. Since these are comics, I don’t mean how hard it is to justify the raw amount of power he has. The goal is still to explain physical strength.

What does being an alien have to do with picking up mountains? #Superman
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No, if you want personal power, a better backstory would be someone trying to give himself personal power, like the experiments used for Captain America or the modern Hulk. (Come to think of it, the original Superman simply came from an “advanced” people, and he only lifted cars.) Wonder Woman or Thor make even more sense; we have thousands of years of storytelling saying the universe just makes gods that much stronger. The Flash does the same thing, tapping into a cosmic power source. Aliens, not so much.

Still, we all know “alien powers” can play better when they’re like Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy: focus on how different their tree- or flying- or whatever evolution is from human. (That and, give the creature whatever offworld training or enhancements you want to raise that to a real asset.)

But it depends on your story goal. Say, instead of needing raw personal power, your character can have a weapon or device that does the job. Now your choices might be anyone who builds those, meaning anyone with a brain and the drive to create. Hawkman doesn’t claim “alien=superpowered,” he simply uses his planet’s gear; Green Lantern puts a human in the center by giving him the aliens’ weapon. And so many human heroes (and villains) invented their own arsenal.

And of course we’ve got Batman, whose “powers” are so limited that determined training and the Wayne fortune really are all he needs. (Plus, Batman Begins takes it even further to show that he doesn’t dream up his gadgets as much as discover and adapt tech that’s already out there. Then Dark Knight reminds us just how far he can adapt it if he’s desperate enough.)

–We’ve looked through types of power here, as examples of how to make a story’s facts able to do what you want. Let’s start shifting toward how to make characters want to do what the story needs.

Aliens do work best in Guardians of the Galaxy’s main tale of simply treating them as people; just people with more different beliefs and homelands, plus better-than-Earth laser guns. They can be especially fun for an invasion, “abduction,” or exploration story that wants to contrast human motives and interests with a people that seems different—whether they turn out to be as powerful as H.G. Wells’s Martians or as vulnerable as E.T.

For Superman’s motives, though, his story works. To build a driven but optimistic hero, some salt-of-the-Earth role models like the Kents might be just the thing, while having his original home blown up at least gives Clark an extra reason to protect his new one.

But it isn’t always the scale of tragedy that makes it mythic; Batman’s drive goes much more into the “orphan” theme than Superman’s. It’s so spot-on it would be cliché if it didn’t have enough details to be specific:

'A crook killed his parents, so he fights crime.' Sometimes writing’s the art of the obvious....
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Spider-Man has a tragedy that hits closer yet: instead of being helpless to save his family, he considers Uncle Ben’s death his own fault for not getting involved earlier. No punches pulled there. And the core of the Hulk isn’t fighting evil at large; he only wants to get through a day without being hunted for what he might do, and stop his enemies from exploiting his power. (I’ve called those the only two core options for creating character conflict.)

For real precision writing, though, take a look at the cinematic Iron Man. The first movie makes a decent case that Tony Stark didn’t invent a hundred comic-book technologies, he invented one, the game-changing power source that let him pump every other weapon up to a whole new level—at least when you’re smart enough and rich enough to build the rest to take advantage of it. He gets a precise motivation too: creating a one-man army calls for vastly more money and effort (and personal risk!) than equipping an actual army, which is what power brokers usually do… unless you’ve already done that and just had your nose rubbed in how you might lose control of any weapon you let out of your own hands. Face it, if you’d escaped that cave (yes, “with a box of scraps”) and you were as proud and gifted as Tony, what else could you have done?

Speaking of “what else,” there’s the other side of backstories.

 

The Can of Worms: what ELSE would it mean?

Even if you think you’ve got a backstory that does the job, you’re just getting started. And the other step might be even more work, but it’s also the one that can unlock whole new dimensions for a story: ask what other ripples the idea could create.

The basic backstory test is: does this take the story where you want spend time writing?
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Superman’s alien origin not only isn’t enough for his powers, it’s definitely too much to let the rest of his adventures happen the way the comic wants. A whole other planet, of god-strong beings, just blown away before the story even starts—what a WASTE of story material! Bringing out just the occasional General Zod, or a Lex Luthor grumbling about alien influences, doesn’t come close to what an origin like that ought to root the rest of the storyline in. Even the fact that he looks human… we chuckle at Star Trek’s “planets of the pointy-eared folk,” but this Strange Visitor blends in so well a human woman both idolizes and ignores him depending on his clothes?

All of these could have been glorious opportunities for a darker or more thoughtful superhero (a bit of X-Men, a bit of Contact), but they all come down to the same way that they don’t work: they aren’t the story the writers wanted to tell.

Consider this: how often does a modern-day writer even use the word “alien” with a straight face? Sure, aliens work just fine in a story that’s set up to do it justice—invasions, Roswell and so on. But otherwise, we tend to save the word for the silliest of all silly ideas a character might spit out at random, and I’d say it’s just because the implications are too huge to take halfway. If we aren’t ready to handle a story idea’s implications, “out in left field” just means “the idea got lost.”

Of course, standard comic books and their heroes are an odd place to look for backstory concepts. Ideas there rush by so fast you can find hundreds of promising thoughts, but how many other cans of worms do they take a pass on? It may be the number of implications, more than the powers themselves, that make superheroes so different from the harder SF and fantasy they borrow from.

Still, I can see a few more careful examples we can learn from:

One alternate version of Superman has already hinted at what might be the perfect origin for him, in the Red Son comic: Make him a literal “Man of Tomorrow” by making Krypton the doomed future of Earth. It would have been so much more elegant, with less baggage from a missing planet and making him not such a total misfit around here… and amping up the pressure on the hero. Instead of knowing that a planet could destroy itself, he has to protect and inspire this world to change what might be its destiny.

(Wait, wouldn’t that mean that every planetary threat until then is guaranteed to fizzle out? We could crib from Star Trek and say Superman’s own passage through time attracted the “attention” of certain history-changing forces. So if Darkseid invades Earth it would be Superman’s fault for coming here first… Over to you, DC.)

Or, The Avengers movie gets more careful use out of its aliens. The Chitauri do bring a proper invasion, but only at the film’s end, so we don’t have time to ask the larger questions of why they’re after Earth or what makes them tick—instead we focus on Loki and their other allies. Once the battle begins, we don’t have to deal with too many questions either: since they invade through a dimensional gate (set up by our visible foe and a MacGuffin power source), they can only send so large a fleet, and no more once the door’s shut. This skips the classic Alien Invasion problems of “That was all a planet could send? And now, how long till the next wave, and the next twenty?” Instead the gate’s closed, done—for now.

(It doesn’t hurt that Joss Whedon has written his share of stories about demons. For many writers, the word itself is a perfect shorthand for “hordes that can only fully invade through their particular Hellmouth.”)

Batman does make a lot of this look easy (he does that for everything), with his down-to-earth heroics making fewer ripples. But even for him, The Dark Knight was one of many stories to look into just what a vigilante might mean for the Gotham public. (And, even with the Christian Bale Batman borrowing more tech than he built, it did have its fun with who might notice where those toys had been borrowed from. “And your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck with that.”)

Look at how hard both film versions of Spider-Man worked to keep Peter Parker from being a web-inventing super-genius; the first had webbing as just another of his organic powers, the second stole it from the Sinister Lab that’s wound up with all the schemes. Meanwhile Iron Man 2 looked into how Tony didn’t create his Arc Reactor completely from a standing Stark (sorry), and who else might have been involved in it and have his own agenda.

For more about watching an idea’s implications, see Brandon Sanderson’s Third Law of Magic: “Expand what you already have before you add something new.” The master makes a fine point: doing justice to what you have is usually better than the work and the problems of adding whole new wrinkles on top of it. Best of all, keeping closer to home leads to a final picture that’s more complete and yet more elegant than just adding more.

 

One last tip: if you want a true master class in smart world-building, watch Stargate SG-1. Most of its off-worlders really are human (all explained), their alien masters use human bodies too, and the blaster staffs actually have a reason they’re inferior to machine guns. YES!

 

On Google+

 

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The Two Laws of Backstory (and why Superman breaks both)

It’s one of the hardest moments in writing—knowing that even though you’ve picked a perfect character or an ideal plot complication, you have to write in so much more to justify it. But with so many kinds of backstory you could explain it with, how do you pick the one that fits? Or make it do more than fit, so it opens up new depth and possibilities to the story?

It’s not as hard as it looks.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Understanding backstory really comes down to two things, and they’re so simple that I thought I’d demonstrate them using a few of my favorite comic book heroes, just to show how big a curve we can grade “realistic” on.

We could call those two rules looking forward and looking further back from the time of the backstory idea you’re trying out… or we could simply say “does it do enough? does it do too much?” But I think I’ll call them “the seed” and “the worms.”

The Seed: does the backstory grow what you need?

You’ve got such a simple question to start with: what do you need this history to do? Then, find an idea that seems, logically or at least intuitively, like it relates to that.

Call the Superman origin a classic example of how not to cover things. Since these are comics, I don’t mean how hard it is to justify the raw amount of power he has. The goal is still to explain physical strength.

What does being an alien have to do with picking up mountains? #backstory #SupermanPowered By the Tweet This Plugin[image error]Tweet This

No, if you want personal power, a better backstory would be someone trying to give himself personal power, like the experiments used for Captain America or the modern Hulk. (Come to think of it, the original Superman simply came from an “advanced” people, and he only lifted cars.) Wonder Woman or Thor make even more sense; we have thousands of years of storytelling saying the universe just makes gods that much stronger. The Flash does the same thing, tapping into a cosmic power source. Aliens, not so much.

Still, we all know “alien powers” can play better when they’re like Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy: focus on how different their tree- or flying- or whatever evolution is from human. (That and, give the creature whatever offworld training or enhancements you want to raise that to a real asset.)

But it depends on your story goal. Say, instead of needing raw personal power, your character can have a weapon or device that does the job. Now your choices might be anyone who builds those, meaning anyone with a brain and the drive to create. Hawkman doesn’t claim “alien=superpowered,” he simply uses his planet’s advanced gear; Green Lantern puts a human in the center by giving him the aliens’ weapon. And so many human heroes (and villains) invented their own arsenal.

And of course we’ve got Batman, whose “powers” are so limited that determined training and the Wayne fortune really are all he needs. (Plus, Batman Begins takes it even further to show that he doesn’t dream up his gadgets as much as discover and adapt tech that’s already out there. Then Dark Knight reminds us just how far he can adapt it if he’s desperate enough.)

–We’ve looked through types of power here, as examples of how to make a story’s facts able to do what you want. Let’s start shifting toward how to make characters want to do what the story needs.

Aliens do work best in Guardians of the Galaxy’s main tale of simply treating them as people; just people with more varied beliefs and homelands, plus better-than-Earth laser guns. They can be especially fun for an invasion, “abduction,” or exploration story that wants to contrast human motives and interests with a people that seems different—whether they turn out to be as powerful as H.G. Wells’s Martians or as vulnerable as E.T.

For Superman’s motives, though, his story works. To build a driven but optimistic hero, some salt-of-the-Earth role models like the Kents might be just the thing, while having his original home blown up at least gives Clark an extra reason to protect his new one.

But it isn’t always the scale of tragedy that makes it mythic; Batman’s drive goes much more into the “orphan” theme than Superman’s. It’s so spot-on it would be cliché if it didn’t have enough details to be specific:

[Tweet “‘A crook killed his parents, so he fights crime.’ Sometimes writing’s the art of the obvious. #Batman”]

Spider-Man has a tragedy that hits closer yet: instead of being helpless to save his family, he considers Uncle Ben’s death his own fault for not getting involved earlier. No punches pulled there. And the core of the Hulk isn’t fighting evil at large; he only wants to get through a day without being hunted for what he might do, and stop his enemies from exploiting his power. (I’ve called those the only two core options for creating character conflict.)

For real precision writing, though, take a look at the cinematic Iron Man. The first movie makes a decent case that Tony Stark didn’t invent a hundred comic-book technologies, he invented one, the game-changing power source that let him pump every other weapon up to a whole new level—at least when you’re smart enough and rich enough to build the rest to take advantage of it. He gets a precise motivation too: creating a one-man army calls for vastly more money and effort (and personal risk!) than equipping an actual army, which is what power brokers usually do… unless you’ve already done that and just had your nose rubbed in how you might lose control of any weapon you let out of your own hands. Face it, if you’d escaped that cave (yes, “with a box of scraps”) and you were as proud and gifted as Tony, what else could you have done?

Speaking of “what else,” there’s the other side of backstories.

 

The Can of Worms: what ELSE would the backstory mean?

Even if you think you’ve got a backstory that does the job, you’re just getting started. And the other step might be even more work, but it’s also the one that can unlock whole new dimensions for a story: ask what other ripples the idea could create.

[Tweet “The basic backstory test is: does this take the story where you want spend time writing?”]

Superman’s alien origin not only isn’t enough for his powers, it’s definitely too much to let the rest of his adventures happen the way the comic wants. A whole other planet, of god-strong beings, just blown away before the story even starts—what a WASTE of story material! Bringing out just the occasional General Zod, or a Lex Luthor grumbling about alien influences, doesn’t come close to what an origin like that ought to root the rest of the storyline in. Even the fact that he looks human… we chuckle at Star Trek’s “planets of the pointy-eared folk,” but this Strange Visitor blends in so well a human woman both idolizes and ignores him depending on his clothes?

All of these could have been glorious opportunities for a darker or more thoughtful superhero (a bit of X-Men, a bit of Contact), but they all come down to the same way that they don’t work: they aren’t the story the writers wanted to tell.

Consider this: how often does a modern-day writer even use the word “alien” with a straight face? Sure, aliens work just fine in a story that’s set up to do it justice—-invasions, Roswell, and so on. But otherwise, we tend to save the word for the silliest of all silly ideas a character might spit out at random, and I’d say it’s just because the implications are too huge to take halfway. If we aren’t ready to handle a story idea’s implications, “from out in left field” just means “the idea’s going to get lost.”

Of course, standard comic books and their heroes are an odd place to look for backstory concepts. Ideas there rush by so fast you can find hundreds of promising thoughts, but how many other cans of worms do they take a pass on? It may be the number of ignored implications, more than the powers themselves, that make superheroes so different from the harder SF and fantasy they borrow from.

Still, I can see a few more careful examples we can learn from:

One alternate version of Superman has already hinted at what might be the perfect origin for him, in the Red Son comic: Make him a literal “Man of Tomorrow” by making Krypton the doomed future of Earth. It would have been so much more elegant, with less baggage from a missing planet and making him not such a total misfit around here… and amping up the pressure on the hero. Instead of knowing that “a” planet could destroy itself, he has to protect and inspire this world to change what might be its destiny.

(Wait, wouldn’t that mean that every planetary threat until then is guaranteed to fizzle out? We could crib from Star Trek and say Superman’s own passage through time attracted the “attention” of certain history-changing forces. So if Darkseid invades Earth it would be Superman’s fault for coming here first… Over to you, DC.)

Or, the Avengers movie gets more careful use out of its aliens. The Chitauri do bring a proper invasion, but only at the film’s end, so we don’t have time to ask the larger questions of why they’re after Earth or what makes them tick—instead we focus on Loki and their other allies. Once the battle begins, we don’t have to deal with too many questions either: since they invade through a dimensional gate (set up by our visible foe and a MacGuffin power source), they can only send so large a fleet, and no more once the door’s shut. This skips the classic Alien Invasion problems of “That was all a planet could send? And now, how long till the next wave, and the next twenty?” Instead the gate’s closed, done—for now.

(It doesn’t hurt that Joss Whedon has written his share of stories about demons. For many writers, the word itself is a perfect shorthand for “hordes that can only fully invade through their particular Hellmouth.”)

Batman does make a lot of this look easy (he does that for everything), with his down-to-earth heroics making fewer ripples. But even for him, The Dark Knight was one of many stories to look into just what a vigilante might mean for the Gotham public. (And, even with the Christian Bale Batman borrowing more tech than he built, it did have its fun with who might notice where those toys had been borrowed from. “And your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck with that.”)

Look at how hard both film versions of Spider-Man worked to keep Peter Parker from being a web-inventing super-genius; the first had webbing as just another of his organic powers, the second stole it from the Sinister Lab that’s wound up with all the schemes. Meanwhile Iron Man 2 looked into how Tony didn’t create his Arc Reactor completely from a standing Stark (sorry), and who else might have been involved in it and have his own agenda.

For more about watching an idea’s implications, see Brandon Sanderson’s Third Law of Magic: “Expand what you already have before you add something new.” The master makes a fine point: doing justice to what you have is usually better than the work and the problems of adding whole new wrinkles on top of it. Best of all, keeping closer to home leads to a final picture that’s more complete and yet more elegant than just adding more.

One last tip: if you want a true master class in smart world-building, watch Stargate SG-1. Most of its off-worlders really are human (it’s all explained), their alien masters use human bodies too, and the blaster staffs actually have a reason they’re inferior to our machine guns. YES!

 

On Google+

 

The post The Two Laws of Backstory (and why Superman breaks both) appeared first on .