Category Archives: writing

Fiction as Inspiration: “It’s like getting a crush on a book.”

Posted on by

I ‘m sometimes asked in interviews, “What book {that you didn’t write but loved or admired] do you wish you had written?”

I always answer: None.

When I fall in love with a novel that I haven’t written, one of the reasons I fall in love with it is exactly that I couldn’t have written it. If I could have, I guess I would have. Instead, I’m so thrilled and even grateful to read a story I wouldn’t have told, and therefore could never have encountered if there hadn’t been another writer there to write it with that person’s unique vision and sensibility.

There’s a flip side to that question.

I know a number of writers who got serious about writing after they read a story or book they considered so poorly done that they said to themselves, “I can do better than this.”

I don’t specifically recall having one of those moments, either.

But if you take those two questions, mash them together, something does emerge about fiction as inspiration.

Every good novel I read is an inspiration, and I’ve read a lot of good novels in my time (or at least novels that worked for me, regardless of whether other readers might have thought them good).

Sometimes I read a novel that is both good and which also just hits all my sweet spots. It may or may not be better than other books I’ve read, but it gets up under my ribs and straight into my heart.

I just finished reading an unpublished (and not under contract) novel that involved me so deeply with a subject matter and approach that I don’t see often but which really hit home for me, that the pleasure and thrill of reading story overtook me, made my heart race, made me stay up way too late. Made me smile with the pure joy of falling so hard.

It’s like getting a crush on a book.

When that happens, I get excited all over again about writing. I remember how wonderful it is to be on the reading end of a story that captures me that strongly. Remembering that makes me able to dive back in with renewed excitement and vigor to my own writing. Reading a novel that takes me in that manner makes me want to write, not as competition, but as celebration.

It can happen! It’s there! It’s awesome!

That’s inspiration.

The One True Method

Posted on by

As NaNoWriMo trundles on, with greater and lesser success for the many involved, and as other writers simply write, because that’s what they do, I reflect on the statement I would most like to repeat to aspiring writers. And to myself, because it never gets obsolete and yet I do need to remind myself periodically that it is true and bears repeating (although most of you already know).

There is no One True Method or one Best Method or Preferred Method.

There is just the method that works best for you.

And furthermore, the method that works best for you on Project A may not be the method that works best for you on Project B, because different projects may demand different methods.

Talking about process and method is valuable because it helps me/you/us think about how and why I/you/we write. It creates a sense of community, and shared difficulty and triumph. It helps unveil tricks and methods and processes that may work for you, or may help resolve your own realization that you do (or do not) have a process that is working well for you.

Writing is a constant pattern of learning and re-nogotiating with creativity, of challenge, retreat, doubt, and those times when the flow runs unimpeded.

The secret is not in learning what works for others. It’s in learning what works for you.

Outtake Monday: from Cold Magic

Posted on by

As an occasional series, I’m going to post outtakes from my novels. These will be paragraphs and snippets that did not make it into the final volume. I will try not to include major spoilers.

Here are some reasons I cut scenes and paragraphs:

1) The world building needed to be trimmed to allow the narrative to focus on character and plot

2) I changed my mind about the direction the scene was taking

3) It is excess verbiage not germane to the forward push of the narrative (see also #1 above)

4) A change elsewhere in the text made the exchange, scene, or description obsolete

5) I just didn’t want it there any more

 

This outtake is from Cold Magic.

Andevai and Cat are bickering by the campfire of the djelimuso Lucia Kante, in the spirit world. I cut this exchange because I decided it wasn’t necessary to move the plot forward, although I like what it reveals about Andevai’s knowledge of the spirit world.

 

    “I could sit right here until winter solstice, and the mansa could not reach me.”

He laughed sharply.  “Could you?  So let me ask you.  How will you know when enough days and weeks have passed that you may safely cross back over?  And while you linger here, how will you eat and drink?”

Those difficulties had not, in fact, occurred to me.  “There’s water in the well.”

“Will you go hunting, and with what instruments?  Eat the carrion these cats pull down, and hope they do not forget themselves and eat you, while they are hungry and blooded?  Will you gather fruits and roots, and hope those you try are not poisonous, as such things are in the spirit world?  That which is beautiful may be deadly, and that which is ugly may be your friend.  How can you tell the difference?  Born and bred in the city as you so obviously are, do you even know how to find food except at the market?  If so, at what markets may you shop?  With what payment will you purchase that which you need to live?  You know nothing about the spirit world.”

“You have made your point.”

Writing Character: Details

Posted on by

Each character will have an individual way of reacting to and observing the world.  These are the details you as the writer can use to reveal both your world and your character.

The details any character will notice depend on that character’s personality, interests, needs, relationship with other characters, and their cultural landscape, the way they look at the world.

If Cat is hungry (and she’s always hungry), she will notice food, describe food, and be interested in the presence or absence of food.  If Mai is shopping, she will notice silk, its quality and weave and its color and the quality of its dye.  Anji will always be aware of where people are standing in relation to him and his people, and whether those others present a threat.

Another character may not notice those very same things even if they are at the first character’s side, or they may register them in the most cursory sense.

Another character might be more of a listener, attuned to sounds.  Another might only really notice people and their reactions rather than noticing space and setting.  Another might not notice much of anything, being more involved in their own thoughts.  A character who lives within a culture will notice different things about what’s going on around them than a traveler new to the culture.

When you as the writer start thinking about filtering details through the characters’ point of view, it becomes easier to decide which details are necessary to the story and which you don’t need.

Cold Fire Word Cloud & NaNoWriMo Day 1 (2011)

Posted on by

For the first day of NaNoWriMo I offer up the Cold Fire Word Cloud. Click through to see the Cold Fire Wordle

Today included some discussion of the problem of too much research and/or worldbuilding bogging down stories. It’s received wisdom, and I think reasonably true, that YA calls for less world building on the page. My one concern about that is that by stripping out too much world building in an sffh YA setting, one unintended result is that the setting smooths more and more into a default generic American or Euro/Am.

Wordage:

1250 on Cold Steel (for the first day after a week off as I get back into the flow, that’s decent; I’m aiming for 2K/day).

850 on my new secondary project, which I’m doing in part to write something I have no expectations of, so I can get more relaxed into writing for the pure pleasure of working on a story for the delight of the process. This does NOT mean I don’t enjoy writing Cold Steel. It’s just that writing the first draft of Cold Steel has a lot more built in pressure because of expectations raised by the first two books.

NaNoWriMo. Plus signed copies of Spiritwalker books

Posted on by

I’m going to participate on a parallel track in NaNoWriMo (more on that later) and also try to post something about writing every day in this blog, answering questions I haven’t gotten to yet, discussing world building, or just a short snippet of something I’ve been thinking about regarding the art and craft of writing.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here, now, or later, or on Twitter or Facebook or via email.

 

FYI: While at World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, I signed copies of both Cold Magic and Cold Fire as well as rare copies of a printed pamphlet version of Bonus Chapter 31.5 (there aren’t many of these). So if you want, contact Mysterious Galaxy Books, Borderlands Books, or Larry Smith Bookseller.

Empty Space: Some thoughts on openings in novels

Posted on by

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.  A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
(Peter Brook)

Everything you need to know about openings is present in this quote by theater director Peter Brook.  The essence of storytelling lives in this moment:  one (metaphorically or perhaps literally) walks, another watches.  This happens every time we open a book and start reading.

The director and actor make choices just as the writer does.  How does the man walk?  Is he triumphant?  Frightened?  Weary?  In love?  How is in-love-ness conveyed?  Why?  And why have you made that choice and not another one?

Openings are part of the overall plot arc, the overall narrative.  The opening carries within it the ending, it can foreshadow, reflect, parallel, hint at, paint the mood of, contrast with, or lay the groundwork for the ending.

I’m not a believer in the One True Path.  I am not going to tell you there are hard and fast rules that govern openings.  If you can make it work, then it’s working, whether it is the rule or the exception.  But I do have thoughts on the issue of openings in fiction.

Here are three things I consider when I am searching for the right place to begin. Continue reading →

Trying to Write Non-Colonial Alternate-History in a Fantasy Context

Posted on by

The Spiritwalker Trilogy (starting with COLD MAGIC) is my attempt to write “an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy adventure with airships, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendents of troodons.”

There’s a quite interesting discussion of colonialism and post colonialism (specifically with regard to fantasy and science fiction and her own work) in N.K. Jemisin’s post Considering Colonialism. In the comments, Jemisin mentions that she thinks Spiritwalker might be a non-colonial narrative.

I suspect it is difficult if not impossible to write non-colonial narratives in our colonial and post-colonial world when writing from the perspective of a culture that has done its share of colonizing. However, I believe the point is to examine other ways the world could be (and is, outside a certain narrow range of vision) and open a window onto them.

Here is the map for COLD FIRE, Spiritwalker #2  (click to embiggen)

Map drawn by Jeffrey Ward from an original by me (assisted by A’ndrea Messer).