Phew...

"I got hurt feelings, I got hurt feelings..."-Flight of the Conchords, Hurt Feelings

Sometimes life gets so busy it's hard to write, let alone write about writing. Recent thoughts:

1.) Knee pain is no fun, and devilishly hard to find a way to turn into lemonade by working into my writing.

2.) Small things, like chocolate wafers that dissolve in your mouth after you suck cocoa through them, are amazing.

3.) One should never assume that one's camera batteries are fully charged before leaving on a hike.

4.) It can be difficult to write an episode that corresponds too closely to events in your own life too close to the events in question. Sometimes chapters need to simply be flagged "come back later."

It's Sunday in New Zealand and Saturday at home. This still amazes me. Work continues apace on Soulwoven, and all is well.

MARTIIIIIIIN!!

"Somewhere between Jesus and Huey P. Newton," The Flobots, The Rhythm Section

I had two great goals in coming down to New Zealand. Well, scratch that, I had many great goals when coming down to New Zealand, but two of them were to read more and write more. Unfortunately, the first very quickly got in the way of the second. I made the mistake of continuing George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire straight off when I got down here, only to realize that it quickly became very difficult to write in my own voice when I was exposing myself to his for two or three hours every day.

I suppose this was a rather predictable predicament, but it didn't make it any easier on me. I had to shelf my writing for a few days while I finished up the book, which was extraordinarily frustrating to me. That said, now that I have finished it, I was able to come back to my writing feeling very refreshed, and reminded of a few things that Martin's writing has taught me in the past about structure and world-building. So cheers to that.

You, out there in internet-land--do you also have trouble sticking to your own voice when reading an author with a very strong voice of their own? Do you even bother reading at all while you're engaged in a longer project? Tell me. I want to learn.

New Zealand?

"Love on the rocks with a twist of desperation,"- Eve 6, There's a Face

I suppose I should come clean. I'm in New Zealand, embarking upon a 6 month adventure of migrant labour and summer-during-winter before returning to Colorado in the spring to hopefully begin my career in publishing in earnest. It's the sort of adventure a lot of people dream about but never actually live. A co-worker of mine who is also a writer got all excited when I told him about the trip and started talking about Kerouac's On the Road. I've never read On the Road. It's on 'the list' to be sure, but I haven't gotten around to it.

To be honest, this adventure isn't about my writing, it's about me. And therefore it's also somewhat about my writing, as everything that effects me inevitably effects my writing. Case-in-point: with all this unemployed free time I'm enjoying at the moment, I've had plenty of time to write. I just haven't been able to (more on this in a later post...MARTIIIINNN!!!).

And that's all right, I think. I've come a very strange period in my writing process where I don't feel the need to press through too quickly. I'm moving slowly through the revision of Soulwoven, but moving with deliberation and doing it right. I recently spent two weeks writing two chapters only to realize that, in the end, they need to be cut. They're great character development, but the plot does not move in them. At all...not a single sentence, not a single word related to the broader, overarching drive behind the story. They're just characters talking in a coffee shop, although instead of a coffee shop it's the prow of a beaten and battered clipper sailing through the icy north seas of their world. And in the end, characters just talking isn't what Soulwoven is about. So I'll keep the chapters I've written on-hand, maybe to include in a 'director's cut' of the novel someday, or offer for free on my website for those who are interested, but in the end they have to go.

Strange, to spend so long writing something only to cut it, but there was a feeling of "Ahhh, THAT'S what I need to do," that came over me when I made the decision to axe those chapters. And more and more I've come to associate that feeling with the best of my writing. Wonder if it's the same for the rest of you.

Reading Bad Books

"I'm something's broke, I wanna put a little fixin' on it..." - Pearl Jam, The Fixer

So we all know that reading good books is a great way to learn how to write, yeah? I've talked before about how reading George Martin's Game of Thrones gave me the last piece I needed to tell my story the way I wanted to (and when Soulwoven comes out, I bet it'll be fairly easy to see just what that was). Beyond that, it's common knowledge that the monkey-see monkey-do (or rather, monkey-approximate-in-a-way-that-works-for-you) approach to writing works extremely well.

But the monkey-see-monkey-stay-the-hell-away-from approach works very well too.

I've had the opportunity over the past week or so to read a book that, well, isn't as well-written as some others I've read. Part of the learning experience for me has been in figuring out why it was published and popular anyway (about 100 pages in I hit upon it--a marvelous back-to-back plot twist/complication gambit that tossed out the cliches and replaced them with deeper, darker, more likable character traits). The other part has been in recognizing places where the writing really just fails. Unnecessary sentences, explanations of what characters are thinking that aren't needed, etc. etc. And lo and behold, when I go back to my own writing I find the same thing sticking out like sore thumbs all over the place.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing. These are easy edits to make. And since I'm already bumping up perilously close to the 110-125,000 word limit (it's a soft limit, but a limit nonetheless) for debut fantasy, every sentence I can cut out feels like a gift these days.

So go read some bad books. I mean really, find the worst book you can find and read it with an editorial eye. Chances are, when you go back to your own writing you'll find things that need to go. And that's a good thing.

Now here's something everyone can enjoy!

"Eyehole deep in muddy waters..."-Tool, The Pot

Sent to me by one of my workshop-mates last night. Sheer brilliance, really. It's called "The adolescent villain flow-chart."


Sort of what it's all about, eh?

Workshops

"What can I say, what can I do? Send your apologies to me." - Dropping Daylight, Apologies

So for a long time I've been on the fence about the efficacy of workshops. Specifically, it's difficult in a university setting to get a group of like-minded people together. You wind up thrown together with whoever is interested in "Creative Writing"--not necessarily in writing a novel, a fantasy, literary fiction, mystery, sci-fi, short stories, whatever your particular interest may be. And thus it can be difficult to get good, consistent feedback from people who are focused on the same things you are.

But when you do get good feedback it can be incredible, and one just has to look at the most successful writers to see that they often come in groups. Writing in a vacuum, in short, is the long way to getting good. A little help from some like-minded folks can go a long way.

So one of my resolutions upon graduating college was to put together a group of like-minded writers and see where it took me. This impromptu group had its first meeting last night, and it was really everything I hoped it would be---even though there were only two of us and I lost all my notes through some technical difficulties. Even when I wasn't getting great advice, I was given an opportunity to discuss out loud why I was writing the way I was, what I was trying to do in a given chapter, paragraph, sentence, etc...and saying that out loud to someone who not only understands what you're talking about but can offer advice is a really invaluable experience.

So yeah, I think workshops can be a great tool--so long as you own them and not the other way around, if that makes any sense. And it's worth the time and effort to put your own together. Just a few thoughts.

Injuries and Fantasy

"You know there's nowhere else I wanted to be, than be there when you needed me. I'm sorry too, but don't give up on me. And just remember that while you were asleep I got a little bit closer to you..." -The Wallflowers, Closer to You

So we all know that characters get injured in fantasy. It's almost a requirement, right? You can't face danger without coming away scarred from it somehow. Sometimes injuries heal practically without effect (Luke's hand in Star Wars), sometimes the effect is delayed (Frodo in Lord of the Rings), and sometimes injuries are permanent and crippling (Bran in Game of Thrones).

But, without fail, these injuries are catastrophic. A hand is cut off, a hobbit is stabbed by a ringwraith, a young boy is thrown from a tower. Chronic, nagging injuries don't get the same sort of page time.

My questions is, why not? Sure, there's something to be said for the fact that main characters are meant to be special, often in some way a fantastic representation of the reader, and most readers don't like to dwell on the fact that their knees hurt when they go mountain climbing, or they get tennis elbow if they swing a tennis racket, let alone a sword, or they get shin splints from running too much.

But given the verisimilitude that many works of fantasy shoot for, it seems that chronic injuries should pop up a little more often, if not with the same focus that catastrophic injuries often have. The only work I can think of that does it is Dragonlance, and then only with Flint's heart and arthritis---the younger characters are all fit as a fiddle, despite the fact that chronic injuries can start in the teens. (Go visit your local high school training room if you don't believe me).

Just some food for thought.

Drastic Changes

"I feel fine with the sun in my eyes, the wind in my hair, we're falling out of this sky..."-The Wallflowers, When You're On Top

At what point in your manuscript process do you stop making drastic changes? Hopefully, I think, that point is never. Despite having worked on Soulwoven in various iterations for more than eight years, I'm still making huge changes to it in its latest draft. Specifically, I'm evaluating eliminating a point-of-view character. Or rather, not eliminating him, but eliminating his point-of-view.

You see, I discovered through the process of workshopping the first portion of the book that he was boring. And I mean discovered--not was told. I was told, to be certain, but not believing everything you're told is an essential component of workshopping. As I went back and re-read, however, I discovered that this time my friends were right. He was boring.

I kept writing anyway, even though I wasn't quite sure how to fix him. I just filed it away under "to be completed later" and kept on moving through the story. There was enough work to be done in other areas that leaving him a little boring for the moment was alright.

Eventually, I fixed him. His character changed significantly--became more withdrawn, more serious, less troubled. He's much more interesting now---a little mysterious to the others, a little above them, and most importantly practical even to the point of heartlessness.

In short, he's a lot better. Unfortunately, the changes I've made to him will mean completely re-writing and possibly scrapping two chapters from his point-of-view early in the novel that I thought were particularly well done. Specifically, going too deep into his motivations, his demons, and his backstory too early will absolutely destroy the mystery that serves him so well, and I'm not sure I can do these two chapters through his eyes without doing that.

And the reason I'm writing this is because one of the things that has been hardest for me in the past is being willing to let go of great scenes and chapters I've written when they don't serve the story any more, and trusting in my ability to write new ones to take their place, and it's very, very, essentially, important to do.

Besides, as long as you hold on to your old drafts there's nothing to lose. You do hang on to your old drafts, right? ;-p

Publishers Lunch

"Now dance, f***er dance, man he never had a chance..."-The Offspring, You're Gonna Go Far, Kid

Alright. Publishers Lunch is something I've seen plugged and plugged and advertised over and over again on agent blogs. For years, I never took the time to check it out, because I surmised it wouldn't have much to do with me as a writer.

And for the most part, I think that's true. I finally signed up for it a few weeks ago, and discovered that it doesn't have much if anything about writing, and blogs like Nathan Bransford's and Kristin Nelson's (linked on the sidebar) do an excellent job of summarizing and analyzing its more important articles.

BUT...(there's always a but, isn't there?) for anyone looking to get into the publishing industry, I think it's priceless (and coming in at the low, low, price of free, that's pretty good value). Not only does it provide a list of interesting things happening all across the world in the publishing industry (which gives you something to talk about with potential employers), but its job board is second to none. I mean seriously. The major job sites have nothing in terms of publishing jobs, but every week one or two new, legit, non-scam entry-level positions come straight to my inbox. That's pretty incredible.

AND...we all know by now my stance on writers working in the publishing industry for a stint, even if it's just in an entry-level or internship position. To sum up: invaluable.

So don't be like me and wait four or five years to check it out. Go sign up now. Trust me, it's worth it.

If It's Advertised on Facebook...

"You'll always be the next in line..."- Meese, Next in Line

...it's probably not real. Saw an ad on facebook today for a literary agency, requesting writers to submit to it, and thought "Yeah. Sure. Let's go check out this scam and see what their angle is."

Seems their angle is viruses and spyware, judging by the many warnings that popped up from Avast! as soon as I clicked on the link. Lucky my computer wears protection. So yeah, writer beware. Real literary agencies and publishing companies don't need to solicit submissions. They get more than they can handle just by having a website that's searchable by google.

And never trust anything you see in a sidebar ad on facebook, either...although that ad to become a professional bassist in two weeks looks pretty tempting---damn! More viruses!

A Few Brief Thoughts...

"I remember black skies, the lightning all around me..."- Linkin Park, New Divide

on cross-genre pollination. I've been climbing a lot of tall mountains lately. It started in Ecuador with some 19,000 ft. peaks, and now that I'm in Colorado again, surrounded by oodles of gorgeous 14,000+ ft. mountains, I've found myself inexorably drawn to them.

I'm also living with like-minded folks, and, well, it's led me to begin pilfering their libraries. I began with Into Thin Air, last week. Say what you will about Jon Krakauer as a journalist, or about the ethics of writing a book like he did, about what he did (for those who don't know, one day on Everest during which a lot of poor decisions were made that led to the deaths of a number of people), but as a writer it was fascinating to read.

One thing Krakauer does better than most is break down the decision processes of people under stress, in crisis. I know a thing or two about the subject--I've been trained for it as a trip guide myself, and gone through exercises that forced me to make decisions regarding the lives of others, and I've chosen poorly in them. I've also made decisions in the field that had strong reprecussions on the safety of those I was responsible for.

Which brings me to Chapter 18 of Soulwoven, in which some characters in a very difficult situation are forced to make some rather difficult decisions. I don't know if it was serendipity that brought me Into Thin Air as I was working on this section of the novel, but it did work out well for me, both in showing me how one writer had done the decision thing well and in bringing to the surface all of the other knowledge I had about decisions made under duress at the time I needed it most.

So yeah, pollination is the right word for this cross-genre stuff, I think, because it's sure as hell helped pieces of my experience leap-frog from the place they usually live into the place where I write.

Letters

"She said there ain't no rest for the wicked..."- Ain't No Rest for the Wicked, Cage the Elephant

I've begun reading a book titled The Letters of Tolkien which is, well, exactly what it sounds like. I discovered the book in a library while manipulating my college educators into letting me write a term paper on magic in The Hobbit, when I used several of Tolkien's letters as sources for my analysis. Excited by the find, I talked about it to my parents and they bought me a copy for Christmas that year. Then came London and a whole lot of life and the book went unread, until now.

What I find most interesting about the letters so far is that Tolkien's skill as a writer and, especially, a storyteller, shines through so well in them. I haven't yet reached far into his life, and most of the letters themselves are excerpts from his time at Oxford or serving during World War One. The information in them is often esoteric, not directly linked to Middle-Earth at all, and generally not what I picked up the book to read.

And yet I read on anyway, swept up by Tolkien's prose, even when it's misspelled or the editors couldn't decipher his handwriting, and his ability to create scenes and tell stories.

Since graduating college, I've exchanged a number of e-mails with friends and professors of mine whom I'm not likely to see for a long time, and whom I would absolutely have lost touch with without this concerted effort to stay a part of each other's lives. And I have discovered that though I sometimes procrastinate writing my lengthy replies to them, their messages are often the highlight of my day when they come.

I think this is something that my generation misses. It is so easy for us to pick up a cell phone and call someone or to hold conversations instantly with a dozen people at once over the internet, that we miss the anticipation of waiting for a letter to come, lose a sense of the concentration and sheer amount of time it takes to craft a missive for someone else. I have gained a sense of this with the e-mail dialogues I hold now, but I also remember writing love letters to girlfriends as a kid sequestered away in the Adirondacks for summers at a time, beyond the reach of telephones or the internet.

There is a certain amount of respect and humility that comes in taking the time to hand-write a personal letter. It says, "I am willing to dedicate this amount of precious time to you, during which I will not do anything else." I'm not sure if that is always respected by my generation as much as it should be. I know that I, at least, have been guilty of underestimating it in the past. Perhaps if I had taken the time to write letters during one long-distance relationship I had that wound up failing spectacularly, rather than relying on cell phones and instant messages, things would have turned out differently.

So in the future I shall write more letters, and furthermore I am resolved, once I am famous enough that people want to write me (ha!), to take the time to answer every hand-written letter that arrives to me in kind, even if it is not convenient, and to always be available for a rational discussion of just about anything with an interested party via mail. I would encourage others, writers or no, to do the same.

...and he's back!

"She wants to touch me (whoa-oh), she wants to love me (whoa-oh)" - Don't Trust Me, 3OH!3

Hey! I'm back! And in the meantime, Blogger has added a "monetize" button at the top of my blog posting screen. How interesting---it's now easier than ever for me to sell out and make money off of the few people who read this by slapping ads on the blog, you say? Bollocks, I say back.

Anyhoo, college is done, and real life is just starting to gear up. Sad to report no luck so far on finding work in publishing (there isn't much in Denver, so it's sort of a waiting game), but I did find work. Which means I can pay my bills, and write on the weekends. And start blogging again, I s'pose.

Today's topic: life and living, and how it relates to writing.

Having now passed beyond school and into the world of the 40 hour workweek (which, it seems, is more like a 45 hour workweek, given the nine-hour shifts broken up by a one hour lunch, and a 50 hour workweek if you count the time I spend commuting...), the time I have for writing has been significantly shifted. I'm so exhausted when I get home from work most days that I just don't have time for it, and it gets shunted to the weekends.

But the weekends are also when I get to spend the greatest deal of time living. And life breeds art. Last weekend I climbed two 14,000ft peaks. And aside from the raw material that sort of experience gives one to work with, getting out and living life is sort of like a shot of caffeine for the brain. I write better the more richly I live.

So now it's all crammed together, the writing and the living inhabiting a 48 hour space every week when I don't need to show up to work. I'm not sure how tenable the arrangement will be, but I intend to strive to make it work. After all, one thing I've realized is that the best writers tend to be interesting people who do interesting things (read Neil Gaiman's blog sometime if you don't believe me), and that sounds pretty good to me on many levels.

Getting Quiet...

"You will remember the night you were struck by the sight of 10,000 fists in the air..."-Disturbed, 10,000 Fists

So you may have noticed I've grown quiet recently. Like, very quiet. Hardly/not posting at all. There's a reason for that, and it's that my free time has dwindled to next to nothing as I wrap up work on my thesis and try to find a job.

On the downside, things probably won't get louder for another couple of months, until it all gets hashed out. On the upside, once they do I should have lots to talk about---especially if my job-seeking pans out. So better things are coming. I haven't hung up my pen or abandoned the blog, but I don't have time to maintain it right now. Here's hoping I'll see you all on the flip side. :-)

Site Update!

"It's in the blood, I met my love before I was born."-AFI, Love Like Winter

Spent some time today updating the website! Some of the blogs I used to read I no longer read, I've found some other interesting book-related websites, and I've updated all the various sections of must-read or interesting posts on the sidebar. Enjoy!

One year!

"How much longer will I try before I realize I'm desperate in the situation that I'm in again..."-Eve 6, How Much Longer

It's been a year since I started the blog! Hard to believe, for me at least. A year ago I was crammed in a tiny room in London hammering away at writing the backstory for my novel. A year later I'm crammed in a tiny room in New York hammering away at writing the novel itself. A lot's changed, huh?

But of course I kid. In the meantime I've lived through some incredible things, found some amazing stuff to include in my writing, worked two internships in publishing, and learned more than I ever expected to about how to write. Most of it I've shared on the blog, which, by the way, had 1,259 hits from 968 visitors, with 162 returning visitors. Also much more than I expected. I guess even my advice has a place here in vast desert that is the internet. ;-)

Here are a few of my favorites from the 126 posts from the last year:

First Post
Fort Minor Leads Us All to Publishing Gold
Fantasy Worlds
Take a Deep Breath...
Career Building Can Be Fun
Arrogance
Why Every Aspiring Writer Should Work in Publishing
Writing Fantasy
Staying Human
Quick-Dry Characters
Whether 'Tis Nobler...
Sometimes the Pudding Just Sucks
Why Writing Can't Be Taught
The Rules I've Just Made Up
Delta Philosophy
More on Fantasy vs. Literary Fiction
Oh for a School Like This One...
WoW Lessons Pt. 2
Maturation as a Writer

Hope you've had as much fun as I have, and that you'll stick around for the next year. Should be an interesting one. No more college, hopefully work in publishing, the completion and subsequent revision of my novel, and more are all on the horizon.

See you there.

Why We Do This

"So just how far down d'you wanna go? Or we could talk it out over a cuppa joe, and you could look deep into my eyes like I was a supermodel"-The Refreshments, Banditos

Alright, a brief sidetrack this week away from point of view, because I watched the Banff film festival last night, and in-between thrills it made me remember why it is that I write, and more specifically why I write what I write.

Quite simply, it boils down to this: Art moves people.

Last night I saw it in the form of documentary film--I saw people doing incredible things, like backflipping off of cables into thousand foot vertical caves and climbing hundreds of meters off the ground without ropes. I also got to hear them explaining why it is they do what they do, and it moved me.

The feeling you get when you experience someone else doing something incredible, the shiver that runs down your spine, the way you can empathize with them, is an inextricable and extremely important part of what makes us human. And whether you get that feeling from reading about an elf's desperate last stand or a drug addict's against-the-odds recovery doesn't matter to me.

What matters is that you feel it, and that's why I write.

Point of View pt. 1 (the basics)

"Thanks for the memories, even if they weren't so great."--Fall Out Boy, Thnks fr th Mmrs

Today I've been inspired by some of the revising I've been doing to talk about point of view. One of the most basic tools of the author is point of view (who is telling your story--literally, the point of view it's from). You have a few basic options that anyone who's ever taken a creative writing class is familiar with: first person (I), third person limited (He), or if you're crazy, second person (You). Each of these has advantages and disadvantages.

In first person, the narration comes entirely from the point of view of one character. This method means that every sentence, every word, develops character. From the tone and voice of the narrative you learn how the narrating character speaks and tells stories. From its content you learn what they find important to relate. Hopefully at some point you learn why they want to tell the story they're telling. The list goes on. At no point can you escape from the character's head, so every little detail gives a subtle touch-up to their character.

Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to pull off and takes a lot of practice. To make a character sound convincing in the first person while telling an interesting story at the same time is not an easy task, and not every story can be told from first person anyway. In the first person, every fact is suspect, and sometimes you don't want that.

When that's the case, you'll most likely want a third person limited point of view. The third person limited point of view is told in the third person, with the narrator having access to the thoughts of one character. For instance, "Her eye was twitching. He could see she was nervous." is a third person limited point of view passage. We have access to "his" thoughts (in the second sentence), but not hers. In the first sentence, we have an objective fact. He does not think her eye is twitching--it is. (Compare this to "Her eye was twitching in nervousness"--a third person p.o.v. sentence from "her" point of view).

Third person limited point of view is a very useful point of view to work from, and most novels are written in successive third person limited p.o.v. chapters (especially in sci-fi/fantasy). The difficulty in this p.o.v. lies chiefly around navigating which thoughts belong to which characters and keeping a consistent point of view throughout a section. How easy would it be to write "He looked like her dead uncle. He could see she was nervous. She felt uncomfortable."--whose point of view is this? It's unclear. Either of them could have access to the knowledge that he looked like her dead uncle. The second sentence could either be a report of him observing her or of her observing him. The third could either be her reporting her emotions or him analyzing his observation in the second sentence.

Second person point of view is told in the second person, but implies a narrative character anyway. "You open the door and step through. You're free." is a second person point of view passage. It involves the reader directly in the story, and since the reader knows that they didn't actually have anything to do with it, it tends to lead itself to "What if?" scenarios. What's interesting about it is the development of the invisible narrator. Who is it that is claiming I walk through this door? Why do they think that there is freedom on the other side? Why are they commanding me, anyway?

Obviously, there's some fertile ground to work with there, but second-person point of view is rare and off-putting to readers. I've never encountered it outside of literary fiction, and even there it's unusual.

Those are the basics, as I see them. Point of view is infinitely complicated, and there are professors who make their living studying and writing huge, convoluted papers on it and writers who make their living stretching its boundaries, but for a start, this will do. In my next post I'll cover some more advanced techniques to consider when using it--the ones I've been playing with that prompted this post in the first place.

Workshopping a Novel

"We ran like vampires from a thousand burning suns, but even then we should have stayed." -Rise Against, Audience of One

I've gotten a lot of advice on workshopping a novel before, mostly as I submitted portions of my novel for workshops. They usually ran like this, "It's difficult," "It's not always a good idea," etc. etc. etc.

The rationale runs like this: first, your workshop group won't read the entire novel. Thus they won't be able to comment on whether or not the things you're setting up in the beginning work in the end. You will always be able to say, "Oh, I'll explain that in chapter 23," and there's not much they can say in return. Second, you may become discouraged by the feedback you get from your workshop and give up on the project entirely.

After my experience in workshop today, I can say that neither of those fears are very well founded. In workshopping my own novel, I ran into the first problem. There are questions being asked by some of my workshopmates that will be resolved later, and some things that are striking them as odd are meant to strike them as odd, because they're setting up later revelations.

As of now, I don't have a ton of useful feedback on those issues. But they will be workshopping more of the novel, and as they do, I'll begin to see whether these things are working or not. By coming to the workshop of each new chunk with a list of the questions they had that should have been resolved in that chunk, I should be able to tick off what is and isn't working---it just won't all happen in one workshop.

I also got a lot of useful information out of just today's workshop, about what was working in my beginning (Most of the things I had focused on---booyah) and some of the things that weren't (surprising things, like some comments that my antagonists weren't pure evil enough for people).

Either way, I think that as long as I continue to move forward in the novel and don't worry about implementing any changes they've suggested until I can work out whether or not they're warranted, the experience should only be positive.

As far as the second fear goes, I have to admit I was worried about that going into today--not for myself, but for another writer, whose work I had barely been able to get through, and had had trouble not tearing apart.

That writer's work had a lot of fans in the workshop. Whether these people read completely different than me, are interested in different things, or are simply willing to let the author get away with more than I am (my main problems were grammatical), I don't know, but it certainly wasn't the awkward, quiet, "Umm...maybe try this?" affair it would have been if there were fourteen of me critiquing it.

So don't be afraid to workshop your longer work---just remember to move forward, and only come back to the feedback on your beginning once you've finished your end.

Shifting the Narrative

"Who needs sleep?"- Barenaked Ladies, Who Needs Sleep?

Apparently, writing a novel is exhausting. Someone should have reminded me. Upside: Four chapters of my novel cranked through in the past two weeks. Two of them get workshopped on Wednesday, which should be an interesting and blogworthy experience. Downside: Zero blog posts cranked out in the past two weeks. A thousand apologies, honored reader, for my slackness.

That said, in honor of Heroes, which I hope to catch up on shortly, before the new season leaves me completely and utterly left behind, I'm going to talk today about something I call shifting the narrative.

Shifting the narrative is, in short, taking characters and settings both you and your readers are already familiar with and changing the type of story that they're participating in. Serialized stories often do this, because it's a good way to keep a series going without it getting too stale. Heroes has a pretty good handle on it.

In Season One, Heroes was, fittingly, a hero fantasy. It was a story about people discovering they could do things they were unaware of, coming to terms with that, and then using those abilities to save the world. Season Two was a travesty, except for Hiro's story (a coming of age, face-your-illusions narrative), so I'm going to ignore it and pretend it never happened. Season Three was a family drama, in which sons were forced to choose between their parents (neither of whom was a particularly lovable character, which was one of the season's better points). Season Four we'll see about it, but it sure looks like the family drama story has been abandoned.

What Heroes has done particularly well is flowed from one narrative into the next, without it becoming too obvious that that's what it's doing. When Peter comes back from the future to kill his brother at the beginning of Season Three, you have no idea that it's setting off a family narrative (though in retrospect, it seems like that should be obvious). It doesn't begin with the father versus mother dilemma, it works its way into it in an interesting way.

It's an interesting technique to keep in mind, and for writers who dream of writing novels in series, it's an important one to remember. There are ten million different types of stories out there, and if you try to stick with just one you'll get boring fast. Figuring out how to change between them, how to position your characters so that as one narrative ends they're already at the beginning of a different one, is the great trick in writing sequels.

I'm baaack!

"I wish I may, I wish I might..."- Breaking Benjamin, Wish I May

Well, I survived Ecuador! One could even say I did better than that. I climbed both Cayambe and Cotopaxi, and let me tell you, it's a pretty amazing experience to see a mountain jutting up above the clouds as your plane is leaving a country and think "I stood there, right there, less than a week ago."

More importantly, I got the experience I was looking for. I spent eleven hours climbing a glacier more than three miles in the air. I know what it feels like to be exhausted beyond belief, with a pack that feels heavier every second, and keep your feet moving anyway. I slept in a mud hut and played with villagers who have lived their entire lives within a few hours of one place. I saw a mountain range so beautiful it outdoes even the Rockies. I ate fried guinea pig, ants out of a cracked open tree branch...the list goes on.

And now I find myself embarking upon the biggest revision to my novel I have attempted. I apologize for posting a few days later than my predicted January 19th, but getting the schedule of my last semester in college figured out has been more difficult than expected.

Luckily, all this excitement means I have a lot to write about, from the difficulties of focusing during group travel to the uses of exotic beauty in fantasy to knowing your audience to yet more of the shortcomings of creative writing programs.

Stay tuned. It's going to be a fun few months.