The Right Word for the Job

So before I left London I made a point of seeing Les Miserables...twice. I may have developed a slight obsession/burning love for it over the past year or so, and I didn't want to waste my best chance to see it. Needless to say, I had a great time both times I saw it.

But the second time the cast seemed a bit off. They made mistakes in a few places, which weren't huge, but were noticeable if you know the whole play by heart (Did I mention the obsession part?). What I learned from them was that changing a single word can change an entire song, scene, act, or, potentially, play.

This was most noticeable for me in the scene in which we're introduced to Fantine. There's a line in the song in that scene which is supposed to run "Cossette needs a doctor, there's no time to lose." The chorus member singing it screwed up and sang "Your child needs a doctor, there's no time to lose."

This may not seem like a big change, but a few scenes later when we run into a child named Cossette, without any further mention of her, that single mention of her name becomes pretty key to understanding why we should care about her, and why the scene is even happening at all.

Just an example of how simple mistakes can effect a narrative pretty drastically.

Epiphany!

I just finished having about an hour-long phone call with a woman I met playing Warcraft who also happens to be a writer, in which she critiqued the current draft of my novel. Interestingly enough, given my blog post of a couple days ago, she really didn't like my dialogue style--so it looks like I need to take a much harder look at how I'm doing that (and for that matter, ask some of my other readers whether it annoyed them as well). But more importantly, towards the end of the conversation she told me that she just didn't care about the world or the characters in it.

Bad press perhaps, to be posting that someone felt that way on the blog, but it led me to a very important realization about why books do and don't work for certain people. I think it's a fairly well-accepted truth that readers have to like at least one character in a work of fiction, to root for them, to identify with them etc. Even in the best stories, full of great characters, everyone finds one in particular that is their favorite--whose story moved them more than that of the others.

I realized that for my friend, that never happened. Character after character was introduced and none of them spoke to her. None of them grabbed her like they grabbed other people I've had read the book, and without that grip there was nothing to keep her reading.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to do with that knowledge now that I've got it, other than to go back with a more critical eye and make sure that my characters become sympathetic as quickly as possible, but I think it's a very important realization, and one that I'm sure will bear dividends in the future.

Fanfic...Oy.

One of the things I've struggled with is how to get any of my work published before I start shopping my novel around. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for fantasy short stories. And for that matter, I'm still trying to figure out what makes a good one tick, as I haven't read that many. That hamstrings me a bit, as it makes it pretty difficult to get any publishing credits to throw on the old resume.

The only opportunities I've seen, as a matter of fact, are for fanfic. In particular, the developers of MMORPGs seem to enjoy putting their players' fanfic out there. I discovered last night that Blizzard is taking submissions for World of Warcraft fanfic, which would be a great thing to have on my resume, and for that matter, really would get my name out there to a few hundred thousand people or so--nothing to sneeze at.

The only problem is that, well, it's fanfic, and while I don't have anything against fanfic, I've kind of moved on from it. I got my start writing Star Wars fanfic, and while I will always cherish my time working in that universe, adding bits and pieces to someone else's story just doesn't energize me the same way that creating my own does.

I suppose that's a bit snobby, and the professional in me is certainly strong enough to say "Too bad. Write it, and write it damn well, because this could be a huge break for you", but I can't help but be the littlest bit sad that the opportunities for fantasy short stories seem to be centered around writing fanfic.

Developing a Style

So I ended my last post by saying, "that's how I write, and I'm pretty happy with it." That got me thinking it might be a good idea to discuss my thoughts on developing one's own personal style.

I think there are upsides and downsides to it. The upside, obviously, is that it means there's something that differentiates your writing from the other writing out there. For me, it means telling a lot of my story through dialogue (an idea lovingly ripped from the RPGs that have influenced me so heavily), and choreographing my scenes pretty intensely. My characters don't "say" anything. Ever. I don't think you'll find a "xxx said" once in my entire body of work. And when I do put speech tags on (I think I've used "groaned" and "whispered" and such-like words) I rarely use adverbs.

Instead I try to get their emotions across by describing their actions. If they're confused, their face shows it. I'm probably guilty of over-using the phrases "pursed his/her lips" and "knit his/her eyebrows together" to this effect. This is probably lovingly ripped off from the fact that so many movies do so much storytelling simply with body language, and it's something I wanted to try myself.

The downside of trying to develop a style is that if it doesn't work you can get stuck. The preceding two tricks are things that I think work pretty well for me. I haven't gotten many bad comments about them in workshop or from other readers (except one woman who told me that my characters smile too much--but hey, that's a flaw in execution, not in theory ;-p), but I can see that it would be hard at this point to switch tacks if they weren't working and take a speechtag/adverb approach to writing dialogue.

At any rate, for me I think the upside outweighs the downside. I like being able to say that I'm doing something different, and it's fun for me to figure out ways to work in the various storytelling techniques I've picked up in places that aren't books---it's part of why I write. I'd love to hear comments from others on their own styles and how they came about.

Dialogue Contest Pt. 2

Well, I wasn't a finalist. But I still felt very good about the contest, because my dialogue snippet was, in my eyes, just as good as some of the stuff that was chosen. Sure, there's a certain amount of personal bias here, but I've been in the position before of reading other people's writing and saying "Damn...I'm just not that good," and that didn't happen, so overall I'm feeling pretty good about my dialogue. That said, it can't hurt to turn the responsibility for judgment (which, incidentally, should be spelled with two 'e's, in my opinion. Someday, after I'm respected the world over for my writing, I'll write to the Oxford English Dictionary and see about remedying this....) over to others. The following is my dialogue snippet, and below that I'll post my favorite snippet of the finalists, and you guys can let me know whether I'm way off base in thinking I'm not much worse. Hell, if anyone wants to pick apart either or both entries, please do.

___________________________________________________________________

My entry:

Cole's eyes burned and his right hand clenched into a fist. On his left side, Dil snaked her arm through his and leaned against him. Her hand found his and their fingers intertwined. She spoke quietly.

“What's wrong?”

He frowned, staring darkly at the fire. “Everything.”

Beside him, he could feel her shake her head. “Everything but us.” She lay her head against his shoulder, staring with him into the embers of the fire.

His fist relaxed, and after a moment he smiled sadly. “Everything but us.”

He heard a sound to his left and lifted his eyes to see Leramis get to his feet, staring towards the mountains.

Quay immediately stood from where he had been crouching, his eyes darting to face that direction. His voice sounded almost panicked. "What is it, Leramis?"

The necromancer stayed silent for a moment, his eyes narrow. No one moved, and he frowned. "The Renegades' struggle is over. I can't sense any more fighting."

Cole's heart froze and there were a few seconds of silence before Dil spoke, her voice almost shaking. "Who won?"

Leramis shook his head. "I don't know. The only power I can sense now is Sherduan's."

Cole heard only his heartbeat. After a moment, he spoke.

"What does that mean?"

Leramis shook his head again and stared into the night. "I don't know."

My favorite of the finalists, from a writer whose blogger name is Polenth:

"Davie, dearest? That's a very bad idea."

"Why?" asked Davie. He stopped the drill an inch from his head.

"Dying is terribly unpleasant."

"I won't die. My mind isn't bound to my physical form. This will prove my independence from mortal flesh!"

"I'm sure it will, dear," I said. "But you'll get blood on your clothes. What would your mother think?"

He lowered the drill. "She'd be angry."

"Exactly. Why don't we prove your independence from mortal flesh some other way?"

"There isn't another way."

I sighed. "You could go on a quest or sing about it, like a normal young man. You're making my job very hard."

He scowled. "You just don't understand."

"Of course I do, poppet. Come on, let's get some doughnuts. You'd miss doughnuts without a body, wouldn't you?"

"I suppose." Davie looked at the drill. "Fairy Godmother? Can I drill holes in the doughnuts?"

"Yes dear. If it stops you drilling holes in yourself, go right ahead."

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Let me know your opinions. If anything, I think mine probably just had too much description and not enough speaking for a straight-up dialogue contest---but hey, that's how I write, and I'm pretty happy with it.

Popularity and Quality

Okay, so today I'm shamelessly stealing from myself. There's a discussion over at Kristin Nelson's blog about whether or not a popular book is automatically a good book---or as she puts it, whether or not millions of readers can be wrong. It's a subject that I've given a good deal of thought to, and after I reading through the comments I decided to weigh in. I liked what I wrote, so I'm posting it here as well.

First, about the theory that marketing money=success: That's not always true---there are examples of publishing companies throwing money behind books that did miserably. I can't name any, because the books did miserably, but I have heard publishers in editorial meetings talking about "making sure it's not another xxx". Also, the books that get money get it because the publishers liked it. They generally, in their list, have a bunch of good books---books they think will sell, have an audience, and are written well enough. They select the most likely to succeed of those books. So by the time a book gets selected for a big marketing push, it's been through two intensive screening processes---first to get picked up at all, then again to get picked as a lead title. Having gone through all that and come out on top, of course it's likely to succeed once it gets a marketing push.

Second, about whether popularity=quality. I don't know that it does, but I'd add the caveat that I've never seen quality without popularity. People are talking about how time gives us our classics, weeds the good books out from the bad, etc. If we look back a few hundred years, are there any classics that weren't popular with the unwashed masses? Shakespeare created the "blockbusters" of his day, but we revere him. Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters wrote what was, at the time, pulp fiction--but try to find an English course on their time period that doesn't feature them on the reading list. Just another point to consider.

The Interweb and Formatting

So agent Nathan Bradsford is running a contest on good dialogue over at his blog. The rules are that entries must be less than 250 words, including both dialogue and supporting description. It's a pretty cool idea, and I can't wait to see the winning entries (there are over 200 for him to choose from so far, so they should be pretty good), and see him pick 'em apart to describe what's good about them.

Naturally, since there are some good prizes in the mix (partial critiques, query critiques, a 10-minute phone call) for the winners, I figured I'd enter. After combing through my various short stories and my novel, I finally found an appropriately sized entry that's decent. Not spectacular--my dialogue tends to be a lot of exposition followed by good, memorable short phrases, a formula that doesn't lend itself well to the 250-word length format, but I figure there's nothing to lose.

I struggled like hell with formatting though. He's only taking entries as comments in his blog, meaning that normal formatting just doesn't work, because the lines are so short, and to indent a paragraph would be to lose like half a line. So I had to try to rework my snippet for the internet, which I've done before (I got my start writing on message boards, actually), but not for a looooong time.

Eventually I got it looking halfway decent and fairly readable, but I realized that it just doesn't flow the same way it does on the page. An unfortunate realization given that it's a contest about good dialogue, and flow is key, and one that also made me gulp as I look ahead towards the day when my novel gets typeset and the formatting gets all fubared again, with much more important consequences. I don't know whether authors get a chance to re-edit after their book is typeset (and I imagine that policy changes from publishing house to publishing house and even book to book), or even how much format can change from manuscript to book form, but they seem like fairly important things to know. More questions for my next internship, I suppose.

Pictures vs. Words

So, everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes at any rate. I suppose that's true in many ways---particularly when it comes to things that aren't central to the focus of a scene. For instance, in a picture of a person standing in front of some monument, you can see all the people milling around them, which nobody is usually interested in. To describe all of these people in words would take forever and waste the time of everyone involved, but in a picture they're easily accessible for anyone who for some reason is interested in them.

There are some things, however, that cannot be captured in a picture. I discovered this when visiting St. Chappelle in Paris. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's an old royal chapel covered in huge stained glass windows located right near Notre Dame , and one of the most beautiful churches in Europe.

I had the good fortune to visit it at sunset, which meant that the sun was pouring directly in through the western windows of the chapel, causing them to glow almost as if they were producing the light themselves, and casting rainbow-like projections of them on the stone wall opposite.

No picture can reproduce this effect. I tried about ten thousand different ways with my camera while I was there, and so far searching the internet hasn't yielded results either. None of them even come close to reproducing that glow. The only things that can approximate it are my old, oft maligned words. Good news, I think, since I'm trusting my career and dedicating my life to that medium.

Fruit Trees

So, as discussed in my last blog post, I saw some fruit trees in Rome. More specifically, as I was wandering through the forum I noticed not only what looked like an orchard, but also a few random lemon trees scattered around the place.

And at that point I realized that the world of my novel was completely lacking in fruit trees. Maybe it's because I grew up in Colorado, where we don't have many fruit trees, but I never really noticed that in warmer climes they have 'em scattered around all over place, or gave any thought to the idea that different regions specialize in producing different kinds of fruits (vegetables too, I suppose).

It then occurred to me that these are the kinds of things that Creative Writing degree programs are woefully lacking in teaching you to notice. Creative Writing with a capital CW, i.e. what they teach in high school and college (college moreso than high school), is meant in most cases to prepare you to write literary fiction--as I've been told a decision that resulted from the fight to get universities to offer degrees in the subject at all. That's all well and good, but writers of literary fiction don't often need to worry about whether the world they're creating has fruit trees. This means two things: that fruit trees are mostly irrelevant to the curriculum, and that most of the teachers of said curriculum have never had to worry about fruit trees anyway, and might not even know about their merits.

I say these things a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's some truth to them. I think the most valuable part of my Creative Writing degree track has been to teach me that I shouldn't have bothered with it in the first place---most of what I learned in my Creative Writing classes isn't applicable to what I write, and most what I've learned in college that is I learned from other classes, or from bending the curriculum by sheer force towards projects that I knew would benefit me.

Just a bit of advice for those thinking about studying Creative Writing, as opposed plain old, lowercase 'w', writing.

I'll take "Things Found in Europe" for 500, Alex.

Man that's a clever title! Also self-explanatory, so as promised on Tuesday, here are some of the things I discovered that I could use whilst on my adventures in Europe, and where I found them:

Rome
1. A cultural sense that everything must fall someday for my dwarves.
2. A sense that everything will last forever for some of my humans.
3. A culture that builds religious buildings that show their own glory, rather than that of their God, for my elves.
4. The realization that I should really draw maps of my cities, even if only for my own benefit
5. Fruit trees (to be discussed in a later blog post)

Paris
1. The realization that some beauty simply cannot be captured in photos, and even words will struggle with it.

Germany
1. Some windows for a house in my novel

Prague
1. Cliffs covered in yellow flowers--don't know where they'll go, but they'll fit somewhere.

Stockholm
1. (While looking out the window of the plane as it took off) A good description for the River of Souls that's so important to my book.
2. The realization that I need to go on a tallship cruise

It doesn't seem like a lot for three weeks, especially what with so much being front-loaded in Rome, but on the whole I still came away feeling like I got a lot out of it---especially given all the distractions I was dealing with, and the things I did get were very valuable.

Arrogance

Alright, this is one of those "stop-the-presses-I-need-to-speak" moments, so I'll get back to the things I learned on my travels tomorrow.

While doing my daily blog reading, I came across one of my favorite blogs in which the blogger went to iUniverse (apparently a vanity publisher) and picked out some particularly bad books to laugh at. To be fair, most of them looked pretty bad. Like, spelling and grammar errors on the cover bad. The blogger came up with some subtitles for them that were funny, it was a funny post and I felt a bit bad for the people who had spent their money on vanity publishing only to be laughed at.

Then I opened up the comments section, intending to post something along the lines of "I feel bad for these people." What I found was grown-up, educated adults acting like the 12-14 year olds whose comments I have to see scrolling down the annoying sidebar chat features on every website that lets you watch Anime. "I feel bad for those people" is arrogant enough. Some of the things I read in there made me cringe with their self-righteousness. I won't reproduce them here, but suffice to say they were unashamedly mocking enough to make me quite sad.

As people in the know, writers who understand the publishing process and can write grammatically correct, if not always good, prose, are we really that much better than those who don't and can't? There was a point in every writer's life when they wrote a bad story full of mistakes and loved it, even if that time was as a child. There was a time when a stupid title sounded good to them, and they didn't understand why their book wouldn't sell, and they thought they were a much better writer than they were (most people, I think, remain in this boat--even some of the best authors).

When did we forget the lesson learned in grade school that those who mock others tend to do so to cover up their own insecurities? Has the grind of writing, criticism, revision, and rejection driven the humanity out of the writers of the world? Or have we simply wrapped ourselves in our painfully gained knowledge like a cloak, from the safe confines of which we can hurl sticks and stones at those without one that matches it?

Not Everything Has a Place

This is the next in my series of "things I learned whilst traveling" posts. Hopefully these will fill the space between now and the time I start my internship in New York City (June) quite nicely, with a few spur-of-the-moment posts likely to spring up.

One of the things that jumped out at me while I was on my three week sojourn through Europe was that not everything I saw would fit into my novel. And I don't just mean "everythings" like the Paris metro or the pizza place I went to in Rome, I mean things that seem fitted to high fantasy like roman columns, fountains, emerald green grottoes, big ruined castles, and a surprising amount of medieval weapons and armor that just didn't look right. One thing that I found particularly disappointing was to not be able to find a culture in my world that was suited to having close animal companions (this set off by the Germans and their love for their dogs).

That surprised me. I guess I've had such good luck at times (Cumbria, for example), that I assumed that everything that seemed relevant would be. On the other hand, I'm also glad to discover that I'm a discerning enough writer to leave out things that clearly don't fit. I wouldn't want my novel to become a patchwork of cool-looking stuff I'd seen lately, which, in retrospect, is a distinct risk when you're actively looking for material for your writing.

On the whole I did get a lot of good material for my book, however, and I'm also smart enough to know that no experience is a useless experience when it comes to writing. I don't plan to leave the world of Guedin (where my novel takes place) for the first ten years or so of my career, but where I'll go after that I have no idea...and maybe it will have big green grottoes, ruined castles, and dog-loving cultures.

I'll write more tomorrow about some of the things I did find, and where I found them.

Backstory

So today, in addition to doing some revisions, I finally sat down to hash out the backstory to my dwarves, which has been marinating in my mind for a few months now. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It isn't quite as well-developed as that of the humans, but it has just as many seeds for great stories, which is half of what backstory is all about, in my mind.

I discovered after I finished it, however, that it has very little bearing on the events of my novel. The setting of the chapters that take place in the dwarflands has changed a bit, as has the character Len (well, not his character so much as his place in the world. Those of you who've read past drafts will scratch your heads and think "Was he really...?" when you read the finished version. The answer is no, he wasn't), but there are no huge changes to be made.

In the end I suppose that's good, and is yet another indicator that my novel really is getting close to finished, but it makes me feel a bit silly putting so much thought into something that has such a small immediate impact, even though I know it's important (the backstory does have much more far-reaching implications for book two, for instance).

In other news, I look at the sidebar of the blog and cringe. Have I really only posted once in all of May? Ouch. All I can say is that I promise to do better in the future, which shouldn't hold any more trips and internet interruptions, and that my goal is to have a solid 25-28 posts in June. We'll see how I do.

Distractions

Apologies again for not writing for so long, but I've been up in Scotland (the Orkney Isles, specifically, very cool place) and haven't had internet access. Luckily for the blog (not so much for me), the last of my travels is coming up tomorrow. I spend a few days in Majorca in the Mediterranean (because, of course, I needed to research a warm water port for my book ;-p), and then I'm done! Which means frequent blogging and no more vacations for who knows how long while I restore my depleted bank account.

But my life story aside, I thought I'd take this time to discuss distractions, and how they can creep up on you without you noticing, especially while traveling.

This was a lesson learned during my 3-week sojourn to Europe, during which I had planned to learn all kinds of things from the various places I visited. Initially, I stuck pretty well to my plan. My journal from the first week or so is filled with little notes of things to include in my books. This, of course, was during the easiest part of my journey, while I was still well-rested and had local acquaintances to stay with and usher me around the various places I was visiting.

The second half of my trip, however, was strangely devoid of inspiration. I blame most of this on various distractions I ran into--everything from struggling to speak French all day to exhaustion to homesickness. Scotland was much the same way, I was either so busy or so exhausted from traveling all day the whole time that I didn't find much time to sit and ponder how I could use what I was seeing in my work, other than a few brief mental snapshots of the cold-water northern ports in the Orkneys (which were, naturally, invaluable).

So I guess my point is that, for me at any rate, these sort of travel distractions crept up on me by surprise, and I think because I wasn't prepared for them, or at any rate wasn't prepared to sacrifice the time and goodwill of my traveling companions necessary to properly combat them, I lost out on a lot of valuable inspiration. A thing to watch for, I guess, if you're traveling with the intent of picking up material for your writing.