Storage Locker?

"I'm not after fame and fortune, I'm after you." - Rise Against, From Heads Unworthy

I use this blog for a lot of things---advice, venting, taking the time to develop my own thoughts and commit them to fake paper---but more than anything else I I think I use it as a storage locker. A lot of the wisdom (and regardless of how it may serve you, for me that's exactly what it is: the lessons I have learned through experience) tucked away in various posts down the sidebar are things I have forgotten by the time I go back to read them, and I am always very, very glad that they're there.

Every so often, I find something created by someone else that's so wonderful that I think it needs to go in the locker even though I had nothing to do with it. It's a bit like clipping articles from a magazine and tucking them in a drawer to find years later.

This, a blog post by Tobias Buckell about dreams, rockets, and loving what you write for its own sake, and not for the good you think it will do the world or the satisfaction you think it will bring you or the financial independence you hope it might grant, is one of those things.

I hope you read it. I know that I'll be back to, though I have no idea when.

THE PASSIVE VOICE!

"Every day I'm shufflin'..." LMFAO- Party Rock Anthem

Recently, after a two-year hiatus from the company of other writers, I swallowed my post-collegiate distrust and began attending a critique group. In many ways it has been a wonderful experience. As advertised, it turns out it is almost always useful to have more eyes on your work once you think it's ready for them, I have gotten some good advice, and the opportunity to play editor for others has been a valuable one.

That said, there are many in this critique group (and other critique groups across the internet and the planet) who are, I feel, overly disparaging of a.) the passive voice, and b.) the verb "to be" in general. So much so that I fell asleep on Friday constructing what I felt to be a spirited defense of the passive voice and the verb it uses so heavily. What little of it I remember two days later, I shall share now.

First I shall sum up conventional wisdom as it has been (ahem) explained to me:

Passive voice ("it has been explained," or more simply "The dead horse was beaten," is almost always inferior to active voice ("My professors explained it," or "My professors beat the dead horse"). It is somewhat tolerable when the entity performing the action is unknown ("A rock was thrown from the crowd") or in journalism ("Three suspects were arraigned today...") when the actor (the person doing the arraigning) is unimportant to the story.

There is some truth to this. Passive voice can make for weak, boring writing. It can be especially painful in academic writing, which is where most writers are first made to realize they're using it. But there are circumstances in which it can be not just tolerable, but preferable to active voice. We'll start with, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," and move into a hypothetical critique group battle royale:

"Bad!" cry those who despise passive voice in all situations. "Consider the following: 'A rock hurtled from the crowd,' 'Someone threw a rock from the crowd,' 'A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head." Look at the detail! The action! The zing! The absence of the word 'was!'"

Let's start with the first example. "Hurtle" is a Big Word. It's unusual. It's eye-catching. It bears tension. "But wait!" cry my haters of passive voice, "Aren't those all good things? I want my writing to be all of that!" To which I reply that if something hurtles or erupts or volcanoes forth in every sentence in your paragraph/chapter/novel I as reader will very quickly lose any sense of what sort of motion is important and what is not, and probably throw something across the room.

"Someone threw a rock from the crowd," is slightly tougher to defend. It is very similar in most respects (meaning, length, tone, emphasis) to, "A rock was thrown from the crowd." A poet will notice that the sentences scan very differently (meaning that the accents on the words occur in a different pattern). Someone else might note that this affects the rhythm of the sentence as well as the sentences around it. I maintain that that in and of itself is reason to keep the passive version, especially given that little of importance is changed by making it active in this particular way.

And finally, "A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head." This is my prime example of what can go wrong when a writer seeks to eliminate passive voice. It's a good sentence. There's detail. It's interesting. We can go in just about any direction from there. But consider the different sentences placed in the context of the following paragraph:

Tony shivered. The President looked pale and shaken on his balcony. Tony's ankle was swelling up and he knew he wouldn't be able to run far if things got ugly. A rock was thrown from the crowd. He needed a way out.

Versus:

Tony shivered. The President looked pale and shaken on his balcony. Tony's ankle was swelling up and he knew he wouldn't be able to run far if things got ugly. A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head. Tony needed a way out.

In the active example we wind up having to redefine the subject of the paragraph again in its last sentence ("he" would be ambiguous). This paragraph is about Tony. It's not about the rock, or the crowd, or the President. There are things going on around Tony that are making him nervous. That's what's important. The only reason this paragraph exists at all is to let the reader know that. When we make "A rock was thrown from the crowd," active in this way our paragraph loses its focus.

"But wait!" cry my haters, "You could..." and I don't care any more. I could spend a lot of time fiddling with this paragraph and changing it in all kinds of ways, but the only way to make the sentence, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," active is to make the rock an actor in the sentence. That's how you get rid of passive voice. It's the fix. And when you make the rock an actor you introduce three actors (yes, "looked" is a weak verb, but it still counts, and I picked a weak verb in that sentence for the same reasons I picked passive voice later) into a five-sentence paragraph that's meant to be about only one of them, and that's just too many.

It's here that many writers wind up damaging their own writing in an attempt to purge it of passive voice. Yes, passive voice is weak. Sometimes weakness is desirable. Not every sentence gets to be captain of the ship.

The other instance I wanted to talk about is when you're working deep inside a character's head (which, SPOILER, I contend you always are. Hemingway's nameless, formless narrators are as much characters in his novels as his actual characters are). People experience the world in words. Four different people watching the exact same footage of a rock being thrown from a crowd could turn out the four different sentences we go over above. It is imperative that a character who, seeing that footage, would say, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," be allowed to relate it to the reader that way through the narration, even if he or she isn't talking or thinking it directly. If we're in Tony's head, we ought to see the rock the way Tony does, and no matter how much the writers in some critique group might hate passive voice, I'd much rather experience the rock through Tony's words than theirs.

Vacation

"Vacation all I ever wanted..." The Go-Gos, Vacation

I had an interesting moment the other day. I'm in Austria, visiting a friend of mine who has been teaching English here for the past two years, and as we were sitting around in his apartment (which we often do, being as it is cold and rainy here and mein deutsch ist nicht so gut) I realized I couldn't remember the last time I had gone more than about two days in a row without writing.

This realization occurred at the same time I was really, really struggling to move forward on Book Three of Soulwoven, and discovering that Book Two was going to require a lot more revision than I had hoped.

I wondered if the two were related.

So I have taken some time off. Damn near two weeks of it, actually. And I feel good. Very good. Some of the knots that seemed so undisentanglable seem looser. The difficulties of structure and plotting in Book Two that were daunting me no longer seem so daunting. I'm excited to get back to it. The other day I was in the midst of reading a chapter of Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind and had the sudden urge to put it down and go back to work on Soulwoven instead.

This is a good thing. I return to the United States on May 4. Shortly thereafter, I shall declare my vacation over and go back to work.

But I'm glad I took one. Really, I am.

Subtitles

"Hang on to me and I'll hang onto you..." -Carbon Leaf, Deep Blue Sea

No, not the kind you're thinking of. They kind that come after a colon in a book title, preferably to help delineate the chunks a longer-than-one-book story has been broken into. Like Dragonlance: Dragons of Spring Dawning. Or Somethingvaguelyhauntingandprofound: A novel. Depending on your genre preferences.

Anyway, awhile ago (months, really. I should have posted this long before. Mea culpa.) I came up with working subtitles for the four parts of Soulwoven. I'll share them in a moment, but the interesting thing that came out of the subtitles is that they are helping me immensely in focusing the books. The more I tell of Soulwoven the more it tries to do what epic fantasy inevitably does---sprawl out and out and out, and the more picky I have to be about choosing which stories to tell and which to leave untold. The subtitles remind me of the themes I'm working with. They help me decide which episodes should begin and end the book-length chunks of the story I'm writing. This is not a development I predicted. I simply decided one day that if I wanted to maintain any sort of control over the titling of what would eventually be four or more books, I ought to make a real attempt to title them. The focus was just a happy side effect.

I share this in the hope that somewhere out there someone will read it and think "Aha! That's what I need!"

It may not be true. Or it may. But either way it's worth noodling.

And oh yes, the (working) subtitles are:
Soulwoven: Exodus
Soulwoven: Exile
Soulwoven: Redemption
Soulwoven: Brotherhood

I like 'em. Someday it will prove interesting to see if a marketing department does too. :-)

The One-Sentence Pitch

"Shiny happy people holding hands..." -R.E.M., Shiny Happy People

I have a great breakthrough to report: I have finally, finally, finally nailed the one-sentence pitch for my story down. And I have some news to share regarding how I did it.

For years, the one-sentence pitch has been one of the things I struggled with most when describing Soulwoven. What is it really about? Like, really, really about? At its broadest, its most basic, in one sentence? For a long time I fiddled around trying to sum up the first book and wound up with very broad, very bland descriptions: "A group of characters has to save the world from necromancers trying to release a dragon."

And I looked at the sentence and thought, well, yes, that happens. But it's not really what the book is about, is it?

So after a writer's conference and my time working in publishing and my experience writing reader's reports I decided to try focusing on one character, and I wound up with this: "A 2o year-old swordsman fights to save the world even as he discovers that the power he has to do so comes from that which is destroying it in the first place."

Better! Serviceable, even. But that's a thick, meaty sentence. It's a little convoluted, hard to understand. You have to read it twice. If I were telling it to you out loud you might say, "Wait, what?"

Then I decided to treat all four books of the story as what they are: one story. I zoomed way out, and asked myself not what the first book of the story was about but what the whole story was about, and I came up with this: "The choices of three brothers shape the destiny of a world torn between loving and hating itself."

Mmm. Yummy. Vague but interesting. The kind of thing that sticks out as you read through the zillions of one-sentence synopses on Publisher's Marketplace every day.

And it came from zooming out. Way out. As far out as I could get. Because I was out that far, there's so much more packed into every part of the sentence: "What choices? Who are the brothers? What destiny? What world? Loving and hating itself? Explain!"

And questions lead to page-turn, and page-turn is what the craft of writing is all about.

Reading Out Loud

"Ah-hoo! Werewolves of London," Warren Zevon- Werewolves of London

J.R.R. Tolkien read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy out loud to C.S. Lewis before it was published. I don't have a C.S. Lewis to read to, but one of the biggest revelations of my last year has been the utterly inimitable experience of reading my novel out loud to people, and what that means for my writing.

Put shortly: you really have to stand behind what you write when you read it to someone's face. The little voice in your head (which I've heard called the Inner Editor elsewhere on the blogosphere, and which, for the record, I am a fan of) that tells you when something is wrong gets a lot louder when your precious self-esteem is at stake. It's easy to tell yourself "Oh, that's okay, I'll come back and fix it later," when you're reading to yourself, even out loud. It's a lot harder to say that to a friend or a significant other. There have been a couple of chapters which I have had to stop reading and just say, "Okay, I thought this was ready for you, but it's not. Sorry. Can we try again tomorrow?" And that's a good thing.

You also get an amazing chance to gauge which parts of your story are interesting and which are boring. If you're reading to a room of people, you feel the atmosphere change. When it's good, they're on the edge of their seats, their eyes are wide, they're leaning forward, they get upset if you pause to fix a typo, and it feels great. When it's bad, they're looking around the room, checking their watches, yawning, fidgeting, and it doesn't really hurt so much as tell you, "Okay, this spot right here. This paragraph, this sentence, this word, is where I lost them," which is incredible. If you're only reading to an audience of one it's even easier (especially if that one is someone who'll snuggle up close to you while you read).

So once you're ready to edit your story, find people to read out loud to, no matter who they are. It's an invaluable tool that I think writers often skip nowadays in favor of the workshop approach, and that's a sad thing.

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.

Maturation as a Writer

"Help me believe it's not the real me..."-Three Days Grace, Animal

Had an interesting moment as I spent all day yesterday in airports and on planes trying to get home for Christmas. I've never minded these days as much as a lot of other folks do, because I find there's plenty of downtime to get thinking and planning done for my writing, even if I rarely have success trying to write (those coach seats are just too small for my laptop).

So after my flight from Cleveland to Denver got off the ground last night, I settled back in my seat, turned on my Zen (MP3 player) and started thinking about some unresolved issues still plaguing my novel, as well as reviewing the direction I plan to take it when I begin rewriting it.

About an hour or so into this process I had an interesting realization: I was thinking in terms of theme, character development, and point of view. This was a surprise to me because for most my writing life, when I've set back to think about my books I've spent most of the time imagining plot elements, climactic scenes, epic battles, and the like.

I can't say for sure what this change implies for me as a writer, but I'd like to think it's that I've matured. I understand how books and stories are constructed in a much better way now than I have in the past, and I'm glad to see my thought processes reflecting that. It's not to say that I didn't dream up any epic scenes (I was rewriting the confrontation between my protagonist and antagonist in my head somewhere over Iowa and man, is it going to be ten thousand times better...) but I spent as much or more time planning how to set them up, how to make them climactic in many ways--the culmination of multiple stories that have been building since chapter one and the beginning of new ones that will lead into the next book--rather than just exciting, or the necessary endgame of the "What's going to happen?" question that the book begins with.

In short, my work over the past year has paid off, and I can now suggest it to others. Go study narrative (on your own terms, not in classes) and work in publishing! You won't regret it. :-)

Limitations of Fantasy

"We were fated to pretend..."-MGMT, Time to Pretend

Alright, so I post often about all the great things that fantasy stories are uniquely suited to do. As a writer of fantasy, I feel like it's my duty to defend my genre, especially since I've seen it slammed over and over again by more literary-minded folks.

But it's worth taking the time to recognize the limitations of the genre as well, and as I was reading The Golden Compass last week, I came across one: fantasy narratives are forced to spend a great deal of time describing the worlds they take place in.

I've been over some of the ways this particular facet of fantasy can be useful. It's great for telling stories that revolve around discovery and growth, because the most natural way of describing a world is for one or more characters to learn about it as the narrative progresses. But it has limitations as well--one of which is that there are really only so many ways to squeeze in world-building details.

Inevitably, you're going to wind up using some of the same tricks that other authors have before you. And if your reader has read enough fantasy, they'll start to recognize some of them. That's never a good thing, even if most readers will forgive you (I mean, if they've read enough to recognize the tricks, they must love the genre) and may be one reason why some people I speak to think of fantasy as full of cliches. Read the wrong three novels in a row and you may get the same trick three times in a row--an unfortunate coincidence that might turn you off of fantasy for life.

So! In recognition of this deadly danger, I intend to compile a list of different ways of revealing world-building information, as well as different twists that can be put on it. Help from the peanut gallery is encouraged.