Punting is what I didn't get to do in Cambridge today because it was way too freakin' cold. But it basically consists of standing in the back of a small boat ("punt") and poling it up and down canals. Definitely a cool thing, and a wonderful experience to have in the repertoire when writing.
Neat thing is, until the friend I was visiting suggested we try it, it had never occurred to me that it might be applicable to my writing. So even though I never got to try it, I still learned that a.) I should give it a try and b.) Maybe some of my boats should be punted instead of rowed.
Long story short, it's just another example of how fate often presents you with opportunities for growth as a writer, if you only manage to notice them.
In other news, I leave on my european adventure tomorrow, which means blog posts should grow more intermittent, but also more interesting. The next time I write it will probably be from an internet cafe in Rome, with visions of gladiators and ancient ruins dancing in my head. Stay tuned for that one.
Saturday, 22 March 2008
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Using Common Fantasy Elements
This is something I've struggled with lately---namely whether or not it's wise to use common fantasy elements (I'm thinking especially of elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, and whatnot) in one's writing.
When I first began writing fantasy, the thought of doing it without at least a few of these races seemed impossible. I didn't have what it took to create a full world of my own from scratch, so I borrowed from archetypes I was familiar with and worked with them.
As my writing matures, however, I find that my own dwarves and elves (the common elements I chose to work with) are very different from the archetypes I started out with. This of course is a good thing, and had been a goal of mine even when I first set out to use those archetypes in the first place.
But I've now hit a point where they are sufficiently differentiated that I could simply rename the races and forego the archetypes entirely, and I'm not sure whether it's wise to do that. To be certain, there are upsides to it---a lot of people seem to be sick of dwarves and elves, particularly (and importantly) editors and agents, who I'm sure have seen the same old dwarves and elves eight thousand times and understandably get a little queasy when they see those words in a manuscript.
However, I'm not sure that giving up those associations is something I want to do. Certainly you can, and a lot of very successful fantasy writers have. Robert Jordan certainly didn't need elves and dwarves---he had enough new races of his own. But even in looking at his work I can see there are failures to his method as well. While the Aiel wound up being an incredibly cool race, the Trollocs (for me at any rate) fell flat on their faces. And the non-elf, non-dwarf knockoffs of the originals I see in imported Chinese and Korean MMORPGs just make me roll my eyes and decide to play a human instead.
Additionally, other writers have done very well with the archetypes they started out with. The elves of Dragonlance are nothing like Tolkien's elves, and the dwarves of Terry Brooks are a far cry from the stereotypical dwarf. Most readers of fantasy like elves and dwarves, at least up to a point, because it's sort of what we all began with--they're just comfortable, a part of our shared literary past. Giving readers a range of different kinds of their favorite archetypes to identify with can be a good thing to do as well.
So I'm wondering what other people think. Do elves and dwarves have a place in new fantasy anymore?
When I first began writing fantasy, the thought of doing it without at least a few of these races seemed impossible. I didn't have what it took to create a full world of my own from scratch, so I borrowed from archetypes I was familiar with and worked with them.
As my writing matures, however, I find that my own dwarves and elves (the common elements I chose to work with) are very different from the archetypes I started out with. This of course is a good thing, and had been a goal of mine even when I first set out to use those archetypes in the first place.
But I've now hit a point where they are sufficiently differentiated that I could simply rename the races and forego the archetypes entirely, and I'm not sure whether it's wise to do that. To be certain, there are upsides to it---a lot of people seem to be sick of dwarves and elves, particularly (and importantly) editors and agents, who I'm sure have seen the same old dwarves and elves eight thousand times and understandably get a little queasy when they see those words in a manuscript.
However, I'm not sure that giving up those associations is something I want to do. Certainly you can, and a lot of very successful fantasy writers have. Robert Jordan certainly didn't need elves and dwarves---he had enough new races of his own. But even in looking at his work I can see there are failures to his method as well. While the Aiel wound up being an incredibly cool race, the Trollocs (for me at any rate) fell flat on their faces. And the non-elf, non-dwarf knockoffs of the originals I see in imported Chinese and Korean MMORPGs just make me roll my eyes and decide to play a human instead.
Additionally, other writers have done very well with the archetypes they started out with. The elves of Dragonlance are nothing like Tolkien's elves, and the dwarves of Terry Brooks are a far cry from the stereotypical dwarf. Most readers of fantasy like elves and dwarves, at least up to a point, because it's sort of what we all began with--they're just comfortable, a part of our shared literary past. Giving readers a range of different kinds of their favorite archetypes to identify with can be a good thing to do as well.
So I'm wondering what other people think. Do elves and dwarves have a place in new fantasy anymore?
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
Query Letters
Okay, I know it's technically Wednesday morning, but seeing as I haven't gone to sleep yet it still counts as Tuesday's blog post---deal? Now, on to the subject at hand:
Query letters. I have struggled with these bastages for coming on five years now. They have been the ever-loving bane of my existence, but I am getting better and better at writing them. I learned a lot of good lessons about what to include at the Pikes Peak Writer's Conference last spring (and I must take this opportunity to plug Writer's Conferences. If you can't afford one, find a way to...even if it means crashing on the floor of a high school friend's empty dorm room to avoid the hotel bill and not going out on the weekends for three months to save the cash. It's totally, completely, unequivocably worth it) and mine is constantly improving.
I thought my query letter was good enough after the PPWC last year. After all, my in-person pitch had gotten the attention of Kristin Nelson, who was my dream agent until she rejected my sample pages (she has now been honorably relegated to incredible-agent-whom-I-wish-had-been-interested), and I figured I was good to go.
Unfortunately, when I sent out my letter to a few more agents that summer, not a single one asked for sample pages. So I thought, hmm...what's missing? The description of my story remained unchanged from the in-person pitch to the written one, so it couldn't have been that. Then I encountered the final paragraph of my query letter. It read, and I quote:
"I am a college student pursuing a Creative Writing degree at Hamilton College in upstate New York, but I grew up in Colorado and plan to return there after I graduate. This is my first novel, and I very much appreciate your time in considering it."
Not bad, or so I had thought. Fairly professional, short, a slight introduction to who I am as a person, and not making much of my lack of credentials. But after my spate of rejections I realized that it was a glaring weak point. There are things that make me very well qualified to write what I write. So I changed that paragraph to include them. Unfortunately I don't have any saved drafts of that version of the query letter template, but it read something like this.
"I am a college student pursuing a Creative Writing degree at Hamilton College in upstate New York. I plan to become a professional writer and have put a lot of thought into how to do so. I grew up reading fantasy books, but as I got older my interests grew to include anime and RPG videogames as well. These interests have combined to make my writing something unique--a fantasy novel that combines traits of anime and RPG storytelling.This is my first novel, and I very much appreciate your time in considering it."
Better, I thought, but not nearly good enough. Yes, those are the reasons why my writing is unique, but there's nothing solid there. Telling an agent "I have these hobbies and they contribute to my writing, and trust me when I say that I take my writing seriously" is pretty weak. It was, to use a term familiar to those of us who have taken a creative writing course, telling and not showing.
For a moment, I sat and stared at my sad little paragraph wondering how on earth I was going to convince an agent that I really am a competent writer with an understanding of the industry and plans to write professionally, as well as a unique voice because of the way I blend my influences.
Then I had my great, breakthrough brainstorm. I decided to write the paragraph I WANTED to send, not the one based off of my credentials so far. It read something like this:
"I am a graduate of Hamilton College with a degree in Creative Writing. I have worked as an intern at a major publishing house. In my senior year at college I wrote my thesis on storytelling similarities and differences in Anime, RPG videogames, and fantasy literature. My experience studying Anime and RPGs has made my novel something unique: a fantasy novel that combines Anime and RPG storytelling techniques to drawn in readers used to seeing those types of stories."
I felt I was onto something. Only a sketch of what it needed to be, really, but a much stronger paragraph, and one that has acted since then as a blueprint for my professional development. As I have completed some of my objectives and discovered new ones, the paragraph has grown. At press time, it reads like this:
"I am a twenty-one year old college student pursuing a creative writing degree who has been preparing for a career as a novelist since the age of fifteen. I have a blog about writing that gets about two hundred visitors a month (http://wakaiwriter.blogspot.com). For the past nine months I have worked on maintaining a World of Warcraft community site and am looking forward to creating a website of my own to provide a place for a community of fans to grow once my book is under contract. In Spring 2008 I worked as an intern at the Editorial Department of (name removed, sorry ;-p) in London. In Summer 2008 as the culmination of a research project I wrote a thesis-length paper on narrative techniques in The Dragonlance Chronicles, Gundam Wing, and Final Fantasy VII. My experience studying Anime and RPGs in addition to literature has allowed me to incorporate elements of all three into my writing, all of which should make it more attractive to my target audience, the teen to thirty fantasy crowd."
My kickboxing instructor has a noise he makes when he's demonstrating a technique and it lands particularly devastatingly. It sounds something like "OOoom." I feel like making that noise when I look at this paragraph. It is, by all accounts, pretty close to what people are looking for, and by the time I send it out, it (and probably more) will all be true.
Most of this was my idea---certainly the thought of turning my list of what I was into a list of what I wanted to be was, and it's one I'm particularly proud of---but I also have to doff my cap to the experience and help I got this year while writing my resume and cover letters for internship applications. In many ways a query letter (especially that about-the-author paragraph) is like a job application, and thinking of it as such certainly can't hurt.
So that's part of the development of my own query letter. Hopefully it will be the development of a successful query letter, but it is no matter what a record of the improvement of a query letter, and I hope that it will be helpful to others who are looking to improve their own.
Query letters. I have struggled with these bastages for coming on five years now. They have been the ever-loving bane of my existence, but I am getting better and better at writing them. I learned a lot of good lessons about what to include at the Pikes Peak Writer's Conference last spring (and I must take this opportunity to plug Writer's Conferences. If you can't afford one, find a way to...even if it means crashing on the floor of a high school friend's empty dorm room to avoid the hotel bill and not going out on the weekends for three months to save the cash. It's totally, completely, unequivocably worth it) and mine is constantly improving.
I thought my query letter was good enough after the PPWC last year. After all, my in-person pitch had gotten the attention of Kristin Nelson, who was my dream agent until she rejected my sample pages (she has now been honorably relegated to incredible-agent-whom-I-wish-had-been-interested), and I figured I was good to go.
Unfortunately, when I sent out my letter to a few more agents that summer, not a single one asked for sample pages. So I thought, hmm...what's missing? The description of my story remained unchanged from the in-person pitch to the written one, so it couldn't have been that. Then I encountered the final paragraph of my query letter. It read, and I quote:
"I am a college student pursuing a Creative Writing degree at Hamilton College in upstate New York, but I grew up in Colorado and plan to return there after I graduate. This is my first novel, and I very much appreciate your time in considering it."
Not bad, or so I had thought. Fairly professional, short, a slight introduction to who I am as a person, and not making much of my lack of credentials. But after my spate of rejections I realized that it was a glaring weak point. There are things that make me very well qualified to write what I write. So I changed that paragraph to include them. Unfortunately I don't have any saved drafts of that version of the query letter template, but it read something like this.
"I am a college student pursuing a Creative Writing degree at Hamilton College in upstate New York. I plan to become a professional writer and have put a lot of thought into how to do so. I grew up reading fantasy books, but as I got older my interests grew to include anime and RPG videogames as well. These interests have combined to make my writing something unique--a fantasy novel that combines traits of anime and RPG storytelling.This is my first novel, and I very much appreciate your time in considering it."
Better, I thought, but not nearly good enough. Yes, those are the reasons why my writing is unique, but there's nothing solid there. Telling an agent "I have these hobbies and they contribute to my writing, and trust me when I say that I take my writing seriously" is pretty weak. It was, to use a term familiar to those of us who have taken a creative writing course, telling and not showing.
For a moment, I sat and stared at my sad little paragraph wondering how on earth I was going to convince an agent that I really am a competent writer with an understanding of the industry and plans to write professionally, as well as a unique voice because of the way I blend my influences.
Then I had my great, breakthrough brainstorm. I decided to write the paragraph I WANTED to send, not the one based off of my credentials so far. It read something like this:
"I am a graduate of Hamilton College with a degree in Creative Writing. I have worked as an intern at a major publishing house. In my senior year at college I wrote my thesis on storytelling similarities and differences in Anime, RPG videogames, and fantasy literature. My experience studying Anime and RPGs has made my novel something unique: a fantasy novel that combines Anime and RPG storytelling techniques to drawn in readers used to seeing those types of stories."
I felt I was onto something. Only a sketch of what it needed to be, really, but a much stronger paragraph, and one that has acted since then as a blueprint for my professional development. As I have completed some of my objectives and discovered new ones, the paragraph has grown. At press time, it reads like this:
"I am a twenty-one year old college student pursuing a creative writing degree who has been preparing for a career as a novelist since the age of fifteen. I have a blog about writing that gets about two hundred visitors a month (http://wakaiwriter.blogspot.com). For the past nine months I have worked on maintaining a World of Warcraft community site and am looking forward to creating a website of my own to provide a place for a community of fans to grow once my book is under contract. In Spring 2008 I worked as an intern at the Editorial Department of (name removed, sorry ;-p) in London. In Summer 2008 as the culmination of a research project I wrote a thesis-length paper on narrative techniques in The Dragonlance Chronicles, Gundam Wing, and Final Fantasy VII. My experience studying Anime and RPGs in addition to literature has allowed me to incorporate elements of all three into my writing, all of which should make it more attractive to my target audience, the teen to thirty fantasy crowd."
My kickboxing instructor has a noise he makes when he's demonstrating a technique and it lands particularly devastatingly. It sounds something like "OOoom." I feel like making that noise when I look at this paragraph. It is, by all accounts, pretty close to what people are looking for, and by the time I send it out, it (and probably more) will all be true.
Most of this was my idea---certainly the thought of turning my list of what I was into a list of what I wanted to be was, and it's one I'm particularly proud of---but I also have to doff my cap to the experience and help I got this year while writing my resume and cover letters for internship applications. In many ways a query letter (especially that about-the-author paragraph) is like a job application, and thinking of it as such certainly can't hurt.
So that's part of the development of my own query letter. Hopefully it will be the development of a successful query letter, but it is no matter what a record of the improvement of a query letter, and I hope that it will be helpful to others who are looking to improve their own.
Monday, 17 March 2008
Not All Trips Are Created Equal
Just got back from spending the weekend in Ireland (for St. Paddy's day, woot!), which is why I didn't post this weekend---again. And the exciting news I have to report is:
I didn't learn much about writing. At all.
Don't get me wrong, I had a great time. Cork is an incredible city, the locals are friendly and the company was good, but it didn't compare to my time in Cumbria, or even my afternoon at Windsor Castle, in helping me with my writing.
I'm not sure why I expected it to--perhaps that my European travels so far had been so helpful, or because Ireland has the reputation of being so magical, but other than developing a taste for stout (which in the long run will probably work its way into my writing somewhere or another), I didn't get much material.
Sort of a sobering omen as I gear up for my big three week extravaganza that begins on Sunday. However, just for fun, I'm going to write up odds for getting inspired in the various places I'm going to visit. It should be interesting to compare with the results in a month.
Rome--- 1:7 I mean c'mon, given a couple of scenes in my book, if I don't get anything out of the ruins of a civilization that had its heyday two thousand years ago I'm screwed.
Paris--- 1:2 Thinking mostly of Notre Dame and the catacombs below it here, but there's plenty in the city as well.
Frankfurt--- 3:1 A bit of a wildcard, but I can't think of anything there that seems particularly pertinent, plus I'll be pretty tired after Paris and Rome.
Garmisch (Germany)--- 1:2 Again, a bit of a wildcard, but it's in the mountains, and I seem to find those singularly inspiring.
Prague--- 1:2 Once again not entirely sure what I'll find, but I've heard great things, and I have high hopes for a new architectural style to work with.
Berlin--- 7:1 Not much time here, I've heard it's a very modern city, and I'm meeting a college friend here. Doesn't seem good.
Stockholm--- 1:5 One word for you---fjords. I've heard a lot about them, and now I'm going to see them, and the north coast of my world needs better description. You do the math.
One more thing occurred to me as I wrote this. I'm now much more likely to get inspired in all of the places with good odds because I have something in mind to look for as I go there. That may have been my failure with Ireland in the first place---I just didn't think through what I was likely to find there.
I didn't learn much about writing. At all.
Don't get me wrong, I had a great time. Cork is an incredible city, the locals are friendly and the company was good, but it didn't compare to my time in Cumbria, or even my afternoon at Windsor Castle, in helping me with my writing.
I'm not sure why I expected it to--perhaps that my European travels so far had been so helpful, or because Ireland has the reputation of being so magical, but other than developing a taste for stout (which in the long run will probably work its way into my writing somewhere or another), I didn't get much material.
Sort of a sobering omen as I gear up for my big three week extravaganza that begins on Sunday. However, just for fun, I'm going to write up odds for getting inspired in the various places I'm going to visit. It should be interesting to compare with the results in a month.
Rome--- 1:7 I mean c'mon, given a couple of scenes in my book, if I don't get anything out of the ruins of a civilization that had its heyday two thousand years ago I'm screwed.
Paris--- 1:2 Thinking mostly of Notre Dame and the catacombs below it here, but there's plenty in the city as well.
Frankfurt--- 3:1 A bit of a wildcard, but I can't think of anything there that seems particularly pertinent, plus I'll be pretty tired after Paris and Rome.
Garmisch (Germany)--- 1:2 Again, a bit of a wildcard, but it's in the mountains, and I seem to find those singularly inspiring.
Prague--- 1:2 Once again not entirely sure what I'll find, but I've heard great things, and I have high hopes for a new architectural style to work with.
Berlin--- 7:1 Not much time here, I've heard it's a very modern city, and I'm meeting a college friend here. Doesn't seem good.
Stockholm--- 1:5 One word for you---fjords. I've heard a lot about them, and now I'm going to see them, and the north coast of my world needs better description. You do the math.
One more thing occurred to me as I wrote this. I'm now much more likely to get inspired in all of the places with good odds because I have something in mind to look for as I go there. That may have been my failure with Ireland in the first place---I just didn't think through what I was likely to find there.
Thursday, 13 March 2008
Internal vs. External Conflict in Fantasy
Ok, here we go--the last of my sort of "Theory of Fantasy" posts, at least for now. Apologies again if it gets a bit academic. Required reading is my previous post on Fantasy Worlds, but to sum that one up: fantasy worlds are generally representative of the hearts of minds of normal people. Either trust me on that one or go read my post to find out why ;-p.
Most of that post was concerned with explaining how external conflict in fantasy is representative of internal conflict in the hearts and minds of normal, everyday, live-in-the-real-world people. I ended it by saying that in the best fantasy, the characters are undergoing this same internal conflict.
To take a rather canonical and widely-known example: in The Return of the King Frodo struggles (and eventually, in one of Tolkien's best moments, fails) to overcome evil in himself (his desire to keep the ring) even as Middle-earth at large struggles to overcome evil in the form of Sauron's armies.
And that larger struggle, of course, is representative of the struggle between what we see as good and evil ourselves, as normal live-in-the-real-world human beings. So we have an internal conflict (in Frodo) that mirrors an external conflict (in Middle-earth) that mirrors an internal conflict (in ourselves).
That sort of double set of mirrors is, I think, what really makes fantasy hum. It's what makes it difficult to put down, and what makes it stick in your mind long after you finally do. The first mirror (the internal conflict in a character that mirrors the external conflict in his/her world) gets you looking for mirrors, and also lends the character's internal struggle much greater urgency---since often the outcome of the external struggle depends on the outcome of the internal.
Once you see the first mirror, you see the second. You have a, "Wait a second, if there's this link between internal and external struggles for this character that I love and identify with, maybe there's one for me, too?" You start to look for ways that the book mirrors your own life, and it's there that fantasy really serves its most useful purposes.
My experience with this, as a budding author, is that I initially did it unconsciously. In creating a story that I thought was cool and exciting, and characters that I thought were interesting, I wound up putting my characters in exactly this type of mirror-of-a-mirror-of-a-mirror situation. But recognizing that that's what I'm doing has given me a much greater degree of control over when, where, and how it happens, and as a consequence made my writing much better.
So to others doing the same thing---look for it in your work. You don't have to be conscious that you're doing this in order to do it, but once you are you can do it much better.
Most of that post was concerned with explaining how external conflict in fantasy is representative of internal conflict in the hearts and minds of normal, everyday, live-in-the-real-world people. I ended it by saying that in the best fantasy, the characters are undergoing this same internal conflict.
To take a rather canonical and widely-known example: in The Return of the King Frodo struggles (and eventually, in one of Tolkien's best moments, fails) to overcome evil in himself (his desire to keep the ring) even as Middle-earth at large struggles to overcome evil in the form of Sauron's armies.
And that larger struggle, of course, is representative of the struggle between what we see as good and evil ourselves, as normal live-in-the-real-world human beings. So we have an internal conflict (in Frodo) that mirrors an external conflict (in Middle-earth) that mirrors an internal conflict (in ourselves).
That sort of double set of mirrors is, I think, what really makes fantasy hum. It's what makes it difficult to put down, and what makes it stick in your mind long after you finally do. The first mirror (the internal conflict in a character that mirrors the external conflict in his/her world) gets you looking for mirrors, and also lends the character's internal struggle much greater urgency---since often the outcome of the external struggle depends on the outcome of the internal.
Once you see the first mirror, you see the second. You have a, "Wait a second, if there's this link between internal and external struggles for this character that I love and identify with, maybe there's one for me, too?" You start to look for ways that the book mirrors your own life, and it's there that fantasy really serves its most useful purposes.
My experience with this, as a budding author, is that I initially did it unconsciously. In creating a story that I thought was cool and exciting, and characters that I thought were interesting, I wound up putting my characters in exactly this type of mirror-of-a-mirror-of-a-mirror situation. But recognizing that that's what I'm doing has given me a much greater degree of control over when, where, and how it happens, and as a consequence made my writing much better.
So to others doing the same thing---look for it in your work. You don't have to be conscious that you're doing this in order to do it, but once you are you can do it much better.
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