Over a year to write a chapter

I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE AND THE WRITING AND I SURVIVED

I’m digging out some of my unfinished blog posts – to either finish or delete – and I find this one which is entirely appropriate, because I’m basically at the same place, but in LIMBO, not NETHERWORLD, and the Chapter is 41, not 26.

And, of course, the date is Mon., May 29 – 2023 – and Memorial Day.

Must add: I ended up quite pleased with Chapter 26!

**********

March 19, 2018 at 1:52 PM
I have been mentally putting off getting started on Chapter 26 for plenty of good reasons having to do with time, selling the house, giving stuff away, health (the Valsartan [heart drug I couldn’t tolerate] loss of ten days crippled me), worry…
And one bad reason: I’m scared of it.

Friday August 16, 2019 at 2:33 PM
Finished. Cut out a bunch of words. Left it cleaner.
Andrew is back to thinking only about himself as he heads back toward his rooms. Considered professional, and personal by implication. His way – fast easy travel at the drop of a hat implied – is contrasted with what he knows about her ability to travel. It is quite clear for the reader.

I have a bunch of time: this is the end of the chapter.
How can I best use the state of being more or less awake.
Unfortunately, I’m also hungry.

But Chapter 26 is over – down to She’ll be fine ’til I get back.
Which is my foreshadowing.

Saved time by not running scenes through AC as I finished them because, in all honesty, I didn’t think my brain capable of the fine decisions AND I was worried about the chapter as a whole still being in my ‘voice’ and the characters’ voices and my style…

Then the editing went stupendously well – I’m getting better at correcting a couple faults I have as a writer, from the very beginning – and it took less than a day to get the whole chapter – around 11,500 words, not untypical for me – edited, polished, and proofread.

**********

Be wary of accepting help from bots/algorithms/autocorrect

The rest of the original 2018 post is toast, because I accepted WordPress’ offer to turn the original Classic format into the current Blocks format – and it took all the statistics I quoted, from AutoCrit, and me writing Chapter 26 – and turned them into some kind of weird ‘Your Statistics’ in the block format because it recognized some patterns (such as the word ‘statistics’) and MISREAD them, and now won’t let me go back to the previous version.

Sigh.

I will have to delete all of them from here to the bottom.

Basically, the statistics from AutoCrit (which they no longer provide) said I had analyzed over 4 MILLION words up to that point in my use of AC: “On average, each scene went through Autocrit (online editing software) and my process about ten times after I finished writing it. I constantly edit and rewrite as I go, so this isn’t unusual for me either.”

So why bother quoting statistics from 2018?

Because, due to 1) publishing NETHERWORLD (which took until September 2022), and then 2) the aftereffects of two major problems, surgery and a big tax/paperwork project, I haven’t finished a Chapter in the new book, LIMBO, yet.

I HAVE written the first scene (which will not be shared for a while because I don’t have the whole of Book 3 organized the way I need to, and the scene MAY be missing a few key pieces), so I can’t move on yet.

And it was over a YEAR since writing the last scene in NETHERWORLD (March 2022?) and getting to the first scene in LIMBO, and I would rather not dwell on that year!

But the PATTERN – much time may go by between writing one scene and the next – is not unfamiliar for me, so it doesn’t alarm me, and I just get to work as soon as I have a usable brain and the ability to put that time to my preferred use, writing fiction.

To be clear: I’m not HAPPY about this way of writing, but it happens, doesn’t freak me out TOO much, and I’m like a police dog which has acquired a scent: I go right back to following it.

My style of writing, my ‘process’, copes fine with the breaks

Because I do everything in writing, using the many Journals and Scrivener files to keep track of minutiae (if I do anything remotely new or different, I start and date a new file in the appropriate Scrivener folder), EVERYTHING is there when I need to reload my brain.

I don’t even try to remember what I need (will, spontaneously, sometimes, but I don’t RELY on it), but I KNOW I wrote it down somewhere.

It wouldn’t work if I were writing many or shorter books; but for my complex novel trilogy about Andrew, Kary, and Bianca – characters who love and work in the movie/writer universe – this kind of compulsive tracking of details has come in handy time and again, rescuing me from having to remember any more than vague concepts, and leading me to where I can reload the pieces I currently need with relative efficiency.

I thought the organization of LIMBO was more complete

But now that I’m finally going through the spreadsheets I created in Excel and the reports from Dramatica, I find that I did NOT really finish it.

Not surprising: when I spent those three weeks at LaSalle as chaperone for our teenage homeschooling chemistry interns in 2007 (?), I was still working on PURGATORY!

Back then, I did the fully-fleshed encoded storyform for Book 1, and did a great deal with the enrobing of Book 2, somewhat less for Book 3.

When, years later, I had finished and published PURGATORY (Oct. – Dec. 2015), and plunged into writing NETHERWORLD, I found myself at the same stage I’m at now for LIMBO, where I hadn’t done as much work on NETHERWORLD as I thought I had, and it was NOT ready to ‘just write’. It took several months to get it to that state.

Well, it turns out that LIMBO is pretty skimpily encoded. I can’t write it from this state – because I don’t have each individual scene and its requirements planned.

So, after another year+ of not writing, I have to go back to planning and organizing, which means RE-READING most of the notes I wrote myself in 2016 as I put Book 2 through its paces. And finding that they help – a lot – except that the final details of the end of the whole trilogy are sketched in much less than I thought they were, so I’m having to repeat the whole process, AND the third book is actually a leveling up of a bunch of concepts, rather than a duplication of the same concepts from the previous two books.

Complicated enough yet?

All this means is that I have work to do.

With all my written notes, I can figure out what the work is, and have a scaffolding for escalating the parts of the structure that will need it.

I THINK I’ve learned enough now that this part of the process won’t take me months this time. It is OBVIOUS where I’m going with it, and I know what it needs to produce, the list of scenes with every important detail assigned to the appropriate one of them.

The auxiliary files – spreadsheets and calendar – will take a bit of time, but I know how much it helps to have them, and have models from Books 1 & 2.

YESTERDAY the pre-learning tantrum occurred

If you haven’t heard the concept, it comes from Dr. Karen Pryor’s Don’t shoot the dog, and expresses the frustration at a key point in the learning process:

The old ways don’t work, and the new ways don’t make sense. Yet.

My brain HURT, physically, as I struggled to make sense of how to apply my process for the third time, BUT to a more complicated book.

But YESTERDAY I had a brain for a while, a stubborn one, and I didn’t quit, didn’t put it off, didn’t flee at the pain, but broke it down into the tiniest of steps.

And voilà! We broke through.

I figured out what the heck I was doing (and for a bonus, WHY it was giving me such a hard time), and calmly took the first tiny step – in this case, assigning the major plot steps to the list of chapters and scenes. Starting from those fragmentary bits from 2007, I started putting up the scaffolding and bolting it into place.

So that today, when I ran into the first wall, I recognized it and started the process of getting over it. WITHOUT freaking out.

I think I’m okay now. The tantrum was painful, but it is already receding, another one conquered by method and patience.

There are plenty of missing bits, so I have plenty of WORK to do, but I also have the memory that twice before, when the blueprint was finished I could move on to the construction phase, and I am actually EAGER to tackle the project.

Then go back and revise 41.1 (LIMBO’s first chapter’s first scene if you count from the beginning of PURGATORY, 1.1 if you start numbering in LIMBO) IF necessary, and then confidently grab the next one and write IT, over and over until the words are out.

Even though there are always MORE walls.

Maybe this time it will be done in fewer years.

Is this elaborate process worth it to me?

Yes, because, with my damaged brain, I can’t write anything with any level of complexity otherwise.

And also yes, because, once the rigging is finished and I start raising sails, we fly over the water (okay, I’m slow at that, too), and I have hopes of finishing a book.

And this one IS the biggie, the third one which tests/proves the rule, the solution/end/completion to the trilogy – and I can’t wait to read it.

**********

To celebrate, here is the very beginning of LIMBO over at prideschildren.com, the tiny prologue/Prothalamion which is the continuation of the New Yorker article that is the frame around the trilogy, purportedly written by someone interested in ‘telling’ The Great American Love Story, years after and with all the missing pieces.

And readers of the whole will enjoy knowing a LOT more than that journalist – and knowing which pieces in that article are truth.

**********

Delighted to learn I’m using Nietzche’s writing rules

FUN TO DISCOVER: I’VE BEEN USING FAMOUS RULES

I confess to having been ignorant that the philosopher had codified his rules for writing, tickled pink to realize that I’ve picked up my versions of many of them in the course of developing my own writing.

Especially since I hadn’t read them until yesterday, courtesy of LampMagician‘s post. (Pop over there to see the whole list – I’m not stealing his thunder!)

Which I reached courtesy of Jack Eason’s blog, Have we had help?

The last four rules:

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.

9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.

10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

Enticing the senses, #8

One of the rules I have for myself is: People read me for my unique take on life, but if I’m not subtle, they will leave – because no one likes being preached to.

Which means whatever meaning I may want to imbue, it has to come from the sum of the writing, not some narrator’s pronouncements.

AND the subtlety must be even MORE entertaining than in a novel with only entertainment as its goal.

In a shorter form: if the story was there, in your head, YOU decide if you believe my story of choices and consequences – because you shouldn’t take my WORD for it, but you can believe the lives of the characters who are discovering exactly what THEIR choices mean. For them. Whom you are channeling as you read through the story.

What do I believe is important?

Lots of things. Love, children, fidelity. Integrity is a biggie – say what you mean, mean what you say. That work is important to satisfaction with life. Kindness to those who need a leg up.

That talents should be developed – and will be a source of satisfaction. That as much as possible people should be self-reliant. That there are plenty of hidden obstacles in life. Respect. That prejudice of all kinds does unbelievable amounts of damage – to the hated AND the haters.

That life is uncertain. That I have been incredibly privileged. That I’m not ENTITLED to special consideration because of WHO I am by birth, just lucky to enjoy it. And that I’ve also come up against some of the biggest imponderables: chronic illness.

And nuances of all that.

Readers get the best writing I can produce, #9

I’m not in this for speed. Not for ‘good enough’. To me, language, rhythm, pacing, emphasis, ‘feel’ are all critical. If I aspire to writing ‘literary fiction,’ the language has to walk that narrow line close to poetry WITHOUT being the most important part.

For the readers I want, the language is a PRE-requisite. It is assumed. If it isn’t there, the reader will notice – and leave.

That means both using and NOT overusing or abusing the words I know, walking the path between the overly-familiar and the correctly-nuanced versions of a concept, picking the synonym with the song in it, being precise and accurate but not pedantic. Impossible task – except that I’m expected to master it for ‘people like me’ who have similar outlooks, education (self and formal), and knowing it chooses readers with a wide background in books, because those are the readers who share that vocabulary by right, not force.

I think I have an advantage by NOT having had teachers of writing. But I have to be very careful not to be difficult and pedantic without reason.

Sharing the honors, #10

I read somewhere that a writer should depend on the readers supplying, from the reader’s own experience and reading, about half the story.

Maybe that’s the problem with a too-rigid education in ‘English’: the young reader doesn’t yet have the mental database required, but is going to be constructing it FROM the reading absorbed, required by schooling plus read for pleasure. So the beginning stages will be awkward, and if there is too much of an emphasis on analysis and required reading, boring. And when the curriculum ONLY has room for the analysis and deconstruction, it becomes a chore.

I’m sure soccer is important, but so is reading for the many experiences the reader can’t have personally, a habit which has to begin young, because there is so much to sample.

And finally, my favorite: #7, STYLE

It took me a long time to become ME as a writer. To SOUND like myself, while still BEING different characters.

To feel my way through different forms of expressing thoughts, dialogue, and action so that they are self-consistent – and because of that, transparent to the reader.

When you’re reading Dickens, you know you’re reading Dickens – because it sounds like Dickens. If you’re reading The Dying of the Light (also called After the Festival) by George R.R. Martin, you know you’re reading him and that the promises of the story will be fulfilled.

A writer can’t COPY style

Agatha Christie sounds like Agatha Christie. Sue Grafton sounds like Sue Grafton. There are thousands, maybe millions, of tiny choices an established writer makes intuitively, instinctively, with every word they write. Which may be the source of my irritation with writers doing pastiches of Jane Austen’s or Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters, stories, and styles.

Even though a wave can be reconstructed to a particular degree of accuracy from a relatively small sum of its component waves, it will never have the resonance of having every POSSIBLE component, because that number may be infinite.

With imitations, it is impossible not to introduce dissonances. The differences may be minute, and almost indistinguishable by those who accept the stylistic changes as the PRICE of getting more stories set in a universe whose creator is no longer with us, but there is a real tendency for the modern artist to want to establish ownership, to choose their own stories, situations, and characteristics, and so to deviate from the model (artists have souls and it chafes to be imitative). So the anachronisms creep in, and the incongruities with the original, until we have neither an ‘undiscovered new story’ nor one which truly satisfies the connoisseur. Good ENOUGH, and maybe the originals felt STUFFY to modern sensibilities, but… not the same. The vast majority of humanity doesn’t care, so it’s a quite reasonable strategy, and ‘Sherlock Holmes, girl detective’ brings identification quickly without the bother of familiarity with the Conan Doyle original beyond ‘detective.’ And those original stories didn’t make much sense, anyway. What was it with the bed nailed to the floor and the snake, anyway?

And those who can quickly imitate, copy, and tweak a style with recognizable connections hit the writing road running, and fill their coffers more quickly.

The cost: missing the chance to create an original.

I don’t think the imitations/modernizations will have the ‘legs’ for legacy – as something is missing – but most of that work isn’t intended for posterity anyway. It’s fine with the population at large who find preoccupation with nuance boringly misplaced, and are enjoying the results just fine, thank-you-very-much.

**********

And so I am grateful to Lamp Magician and Jack Easton for bringing these rules with the big name writer’s imprimatur to my attention – for poking at.

This is my take of a few of the rules – feel free to expound on your take in the comments.

**********

Learn to teach yourself to edit yourself

SELF-EDITING IS A LEARNED SKILL

We’ll assume for the sake of principle that there are people who want to edit others, and people who want to be edited by others, and that they WILL FIND EACH OTHER, make commercial or other arrangements, and live happily ever after.

This post is not for them.

Good luck to those who use editors – but MAKE SURE you learn how to do every single thing they point out is ‘wrong,’ so you wean yourself off external advice as early as possible.

———-

NO ONE is born knowing how to edit OR self-edit

It’s regular CLICKBAIT, and I’ll get in trouble with the Writing Police for pointing it out: if you’re going to be a writer, especially one who writes fiction, an editor is inimical to your process of discovering YOUR writing VOICE.

Someone else can’t sound like you. They can only drag your words closer to some idealized medium value that everyone thinks is ‘best.’

Editing and self-editing are LEARNED SKILLS. Writing is much harder, but if you’ve read this far, it’s because you, for your own writing ONLY, think that using someone else, at great expense and time commitment, to clean up your own work because it doesn’t yet meet YOUR standards seems somehow economically and morally wrong.

Don’t argue with me – and this may apply only to me: don’t pay anyone to trample around in your word garden.

When I see manuscripts Editors have marked-up in red, my stomach does very unpleasant things.

Self-editing is a learned skill. If you learn to edit yourself, you will only need to learn to edit ONE person – editing for fun or profit requires that you be flexible enough to, and interested enough to change someone else’s words, into “better” words; I have no objection to that – for those who want it and can afford it and don’t mind what it does to their words.

———-

LEARN to do all the individual editing tasks yourself

Become a mature writer. DO the WORK of learning. You’re a professional now; this is your job.

You’ll thank me in the long run. Editors have to learn – they are not born.

Never trust software – always use it with extreme caution, and only for counting things (my pet peeve – Business English). Software, even that which claims to be ‘trained’ on fiction, is a regression to the mean. Think about it: who is their target audience? The small percentage of people who write fiction – or the masses of office workers who produce ‘content’ daily in huge amounts?

LEARN to plot. Lay your story out in steps from beginning to end. With or without detail.

LEARN to spell, and to recognize when you’re iffy about a word – meaning or spelling – and go look it up.

Be aware of the first time you write any kind of scene – and go read a couple of books with advice about that kind of scene, and then find your own path.

Read books which teach YOU. If you’re a pantser, don’t read books about plotting and outlining. If you’re an extreme plotter (like me), don’t follow pantsers for advice. LEARN to tell the difference, and figure out where you are on the spectrum between the two. It is the biggest contribution I can make to happiness in the newbie writing world.

It will all save you time, money, and angst in the long run.

If you’re me, of course.

Also, never let anything out until at least one trusted pair of eyes and a brain have read it carefully for you.

———-

LEARN to sound like your models, the writers you admire

Your own sense of right and wrong and written should have been previously developed in fine detail from extensive READING, the books YOU like to read, for PLEASURE.

For writers like me, who want to write complex novels, it helps to read a lot of them, especially the classics.

And you can get the robot software on your devices to read things out loud to you, including your own writing: close your eyes and listen to the cadences, the awkward phrasings, the confusing bits – and the good stuff.

I don’t know if audiobooks would help – they are professional performances, and don’t show the mistakes in getting there. But a robot voice on my Mac, getting something absurdly wrong, has been quite helpful (after I stop laughing).

———-

GO DO your own thing

Only you can write your books. Only you can make them sound like you. Only you can care enough to put in the effort.

———-

POST SCRIPT:

Don’t bother trying to use this post of mine to tell people (and me) we need editors. Instead, kindly go write your own posts about why you think everyone always needs an editor, and supply your rates.

———-

Who and what a writer is matters

WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG, YOU TRY OUT FEELINGS

And the books which become favorites, the ones you remember, are the ones that make you feel good somehow.

Because that’s what you get objectively and subjectively when you read/buy a writer’s book: their particular take on a life, love, and the universal.

It isn’t accidental that some books become classics: they appeal to something in the reader that makes the reader buy the book as an adult, and read it to their children, because it’s an easy way to say that: this is what I want you to grow up loving – and feeling – because it was important to me, and I want you to have it.

As you go through life, and get battered, you choose

But you have to read widely first, so you find out what you need.

Is it The Velveteen Rabbit?

Is is Pooh, original or Disney (or both)?

Is it mysteries or gory serial killer thrillers? Do you like fantasies and are you satisfied when someone else – the protagonist – is The One? Or do you prefer stories in which, due to the writer’s skill, YOU are the center, the quester, the One.

There’s a whole MATRIX of other relevant bits

• Historical time
• Gender
• Location on this planet or an alternate universe
• Ending
• Language
• Complexity of ideas
• Style and tone and vocabulary
• Originality

But the most important one is always: how does it make you FEEL?

Because that’s what you’re looking for in the next story, the next favorite, the next book.

And that’s what will determine a basic satisfaction with what you read, and what you look for when you take a chance on something new.

I’m a sucker for well-written books

And I get annoyed when that leads me astray: well-written – but with a basic nastiness to the ending; well-written – but with an underlying misogyny or racism; well-written – but with characters you’d never want to meet in real life.

I still remember one book which was recommended by a literary blog I no longer recall and which the reviewer said it was a shame more people hadn’t read, since it was so well-written. I bought it! I read it! I was indeed very well written. And the recommendation made me miss the early red flags, because the story, about a murdered young girl, and how it affected her family and friends, turned into a story which blamed the victim for her own murder – because of the way she ‘responded’ to the sick adults who perverted her innocence. And the final conclusion to the story was that it wasn’t important to identify and stigmatize the killer!

I deleted the book from my Amazon account, something I rarely do, but haven’t been able to scrub how it made me feel from my mind.

Because first the writer described how wonderful she was and how everyone loved her – and then destroyed her by saying she deserved what happened to her! As if anyone, especially a child, a teen, deserved to be murdered.

It makes me wonder WHY someone would write such a book. And realize there’s a whole subculture of writers who do – and readers who love those books.

When I write I make conscious choices

I leave the characters those turnoffs that the big trucks use on a mountain road when their brakes fail – but I can’t make the characters use them.

I adopt the slow burn: things happen with enough time to think about why, to consider consequences, to justify actions. There are plenty of stories – and real life events – where something pivots on a tiny accidental point. They don’t interest me because there is nothing a character can do to avert the coming disaster – they will cope with the change, and the coping will show who they are, but it’s a cop-out, and, under dire circumstances, even good people make mistakes. And have to live with the consequences of a split second.

Not much in the way of subtlety with the turn-your-life-on-a-twisted-dime stories, especially if the reader can see it coming at the previous mile marker. Plus, those books don’t reward re-reading, and that’s a waste: depending on a trick ending is a fool-me-once.

I WANT to write something re-readable.

I want it to take several readings to see many of the connections.

I want most readers to have to go back and read the previous volume before the new one – or to have internalized what came before so they wouldn’t have to (I’ve had both kinds of readers comment about this).

I offer the usual bargain:

I do the work – you tell me how it made you feel.

Then tell me how it worked for you.

Try it out on the prequel 1500 word short story Too Late.

Then remember there’s plenty more where that came from.

**********

Setting fiction in worlds with calendars and clocks

GOING TO ABSURD LENGTHS TO MAKE TIMES AND DATES WORK

There are two parts to verisimilitude: characters and plots.

When you graft a fictional character onto a world in a historical context – changing the name of the president, for example (still missing President Bartlett of the West Wing, not so much the Presidents Underwood of House of Cards), is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because FICTION.

But there is a significant difference between an alternate history – one which answers what if? questions about what would happen if something changed due to that fictional occurrence (President Lincoln survived the Civil War) – and one which aims to change only a few features of an event, without completely changing the chronology of what happens after.

Because, within wide parameters, most people aren’t important enough to change history, and writing things a little different to end a personal story in a particular way is a perfectly valid fictional technique: you don’t imagine the 1950s differently, but your sleuth solves cases in them.

My fictional world is the real world

I want you to think, when you finish reading my WIP, that you’ve read something that really happened.

But because I chose Hollywood (and Bollywood added to it in the second volume of the trilogy), I need a worldwide stage for some parts, which has resulted in characters at times in very different time zones being aware of or communicating with each other.

Or traveling from one place to another and back.

Or of something they do affecting a different character somewhere else.

Stories aim to give you the flavor of reality

Stories – even very long dense epic stories – give you only a tiny part of what ‘happened.’

Try to document your day. In just one 24-hour day, you perform thousands of actions, make hundreds of decisions. Even listing them in a recording as you go through the day would take forever.

So the writer in a novel has to give you enough of the right kind of scenes so that you think you’ve lived with the characters – but are actually seeing a tiny fraction of what real people would do in that time.

The RIGHT tiny fraction. To give an illusion of time passing and being present.

The writer has to know a lot more than the reader

Or readers will notice the gaps. Call them plot holes, inconsistencies, anachronisms. Or my favorite: refrigerator moments. Because you’re at the refrigerator at 3am and suddenly it occurs to you that there was no logical reason for something that happened in the plot, but you were swept away by the action, and didn’t notice. It may have been Lawrence Block who mentioned no reason for the Estonians to be eating chocolate chip cookies (my memory is very vague on the topic).

Well, I don’t want any of those.

I don’t want readers to say, “Wait a minute – that couldn’t happen!” Because it would pop the ‘suspension of disbelief bubble, and damage the flow.

So I go to a lot of trouble to make sure something might have happened that way.

MOST readers will never notice the hole, or if they do, care.

Funny thing: in my mind, that doesn’t absolve me of the requirement to make sure there aren’t any I can see.

In practical terms in NETHERWORLD

It means that when I do my complicated alternation between characters, and something has to happen on a close timeline, I spend effort making sure that timeline is actually possible.

If two characters alternating are on different continents (a recent example), and there is a plane flight from one of those continents to a place on a third one, I use a lot of convenient time/date software (what time is it in Berlin when it’s 3am in Shanghai?) in coordination with other software which tells me how long the flight will be for a particular aircraft.

Sometimes I’ve had to reset the time for a particular sequential scene.

Other times I’ve had to start a scene earlier or later, build in a gap, or have it end at a different time.

The interesting thing to me has been that when I get that involved in the details of ‘could it work’, I find myself feeling more like a detective than the plotter of a novel.

I’m discovering what happened rather than creating it.

It has been eerie how real the timelines are – and how I’m able to fit the changes in without it rippling through the rest of the scenes.

Some scenes are anchored in REAL TIME

I’ve chosen to insert a character into an actual historical event, so I have to make sure a barrage of physical actions happen around that exact event.

I don’t want a reader to remember something – that year that award ceremony happened on a Monday, not the usual Sunday – and me have gotten it wrong.

It’s enough fiction that I’m putting my characters into that ceremony.

I want the reader to have the spine-chilling thought, “Hey. Wait. Am I remembering it wrong?” because my fictional part fits so well into the past reality.

And it’s not that many years ago.

Next time I may pick something without these real-world anchors!

Or in a fictional universe.

I never realized how much work it might be until I was up to my neck in alligators in the swamp.

**********

As a reader, what do you do when the glitches are so obvious you can’t ignore them?

As a writer, am I crazy to worry about these tiny details?

**********

When the WIP forces change on your writing style

I’VE BEEN STRUGGLING WITH A NEW CONUNDRUM

I didn’t expect to, not this late in the middle book of a trilogy.

I capture these thoughts when they happen, hoping to have something to refer to when it happens again.

The constraint here is both the calendar – the end is near, and the content until the last scene is what it has to be – and a sense of pace.

In the real world, things have their own importance, and can’t be hurried – or slowed. Their pace is what their pace is.

In fiction, however, technically every bit is under the immediate and complete control of the writer – nothing happens without her say so – and completely not. Why? Because the pace you work hard to develop as you go seems to have a built-in speed you didn’t put there.

I’m not used to this

All pantsers are familiar with this.

Whereas I, an extreme plotter, like to think I’m in control of everything.

The story takes over.

And you bumble around in the dark until you learn.

Oh, and try doing this with WRITER brain fog!

You can’t write chaos smoothly

But it can’t be completely chaotic stream-of-consciousness either, not for very long on the page: the Reader won’t stand for it.

So it’s a mixture, and, from deep third multiple pov, you have to credibly present a chaotic situation for a character you’ve already developed (starting that way in Chapter 1 or with a new character is a different ballgame), and who is usually much less confused.

So you will get a little indulgence from your audience, but don’t want to presume on that – or they’ll start skimming, and you’ve lost them.

Balance.

So, another skill attempted in the craft.

I wonder what the beta reader will say.

**********

If you’re a reader, do you notice this kind of thing? And how much patience do you have for a change in how you see characters, especially when they’re under stress?

If you’re a writer, has this one bitten your ankles?

**********

Is your book optimistic or pessimistic?

Or over-engineered?

WHAT IS YOUR DEFAULT POSITION AS A WRITER?

Why do we read?

To learn about the world and to learn about our potentialities as humans.

Really.

To read a book is to live part of another life.

Optimist or pessimist is a question I ask books.

Is your book ultimately depressing or uplifting?

Even horrible books can raise spirits, especially by the end of the book. The Diary of Anne Frank does that.

It’s a value judgment.

Doing some research, I spent time reading the Top Reviews for Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls (2016).

Top reviewers are the ones who get the most comments or upvotes; the first four pages had negative after negative review (it wasn’t until page 4 that I found two short positive reviews, from readers), many of those from reviewers you would love to get to read your book: Top 500, Top 1000, Vine Voice…

And those reviewers were appalled at the violence against women that was graphically depicted, over and over. ‘Gratuitous’ was used as a descriptor.

Many commented that the writing was good or adequate or competent (workmanlike would have been my assessment, from reading the Look Inside sample provided), but that the choice of subject matter left them sick to their stomach.

A depressing book – depressing author?

Ms. Slaughter is a NYT bestseller.

Apparently, previous books she wrote were not nearly as negative as this one; many of these reviewers commented they would not read another of her books.

Some commented they wished they could scrub their minds of the images, for which they could find no socially redeeming reasons.

Me, I wondered why they continued reading, even if they skimmed.

The optimistic book – optimistic authors?

SF can be pessimistic (dystopias) or optimistic.

Romance is usually optimistic, and those fans who like to read Romance want their ‘happily ever after’ (HEA) ending, and can be very unhappy with writers who don’t provide one. There is a subset of books which end, not with an HEA, but with a ‘happy for now’ (HFN). These books are still hopeful, but possibly more realistic – and also possibly open to sequels.

Thrillers and mysteries can be all over the map – but do deal with the grittier side of life, and more often are pessimistic or neutral, but possibly with an optimistic undertone, say, to a continuing detective’s life.

A special category is the detective who finds happiness

My favorite, obviously, is the definitely HEA ending of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, ending with Busman’s Honeymoon, where Peter and Harriet marry, finally, and solve one last real mystery which sets the tone for their married life. Sayers wrote only two short stories about the pair after that, even though her series was popular and is still popular now.

During all the novels, there was still an optimistic cast to the series: there was a right and wrong, people had principles, and there were consequences – but mysteries were solved and things set ‘right’ where possible. Sayers went on to write theology, so her stories were optimistic because she believed in the possibility.

Jane Eyre is optimistic. Silas Marner is optimistic.

Huckleberry Finn is optimistic. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein) is optimistic.

You write what you like

And I don’t like ultimately pessimistic books.

Almost every genre can be written either way; even serial killer Dexter is optimistic.

I just want to know that, at the end of the book, things are, or have the potential of being, better.

That covers a lot of territory, but the thing in a book that makes me pick another book by an author is that there was hope at the end.

So if you read what I write, you will be reassured that, whether you like exactly how I have arranged things to happen, there will be an upbeat end.

**********

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

And does it show in what you read and/or write?

**********

Finagling past reality for fictional purposes

Will the real bridge AND CITY be insulted?

REALISTIC FICTION STARTS HERE

What it’s like to insert a fictional character into a historical event for the purpose of telling a story.

The basic question is unanswered: how to take over a historical event and change it.

Such as how to write a thriller with someone else as President!

So, it’s fiction, identified exactly as so in the beginning of the books, and mine to do with as I will.

I doubt someone has to get permission from the White House to change the President – or we wouldn’t have President Bartlett and The West Wing.

So I’m worried about nothing.

Except…

The general rule to changing a name has to be avoiding harm

If you are going to say something negative, it might bring a lawsuit if the named person or organization feels it affects their reputation in some way. And even if a court decides they are wrong, and you get an amazing amount of viral publicity out of this (google the Streisand Effect if you don’t remember it), it is going to take a lot of your time, effort, and money to fight such a suit – and there is no guarantee you will win.

Organizations can have in-house lawyers who eat problems like this for lunch. They will bury you easily – nothing personal – and have no mercy.

Please read books on writing and copyright, and know the legal definitions of Libel (Letter – ie, written – mnemonics mine, probably not original) and Slander (Spoken) and ask yourself, as a start, whether YOU would feel libeled or slandered if you were the subject.

If even you are uneasy, it may be easier to change the name that might get offended.

And you might have to change that to something that is significantly different in enough ways that no reasonable person would be offended (unpredictable).

Where’s this coming from?

For the purpose of NETHERWORLD, I sort of have to insult a famous movie or two, and some actors – in a minor way.

The insult consists in taking away an earned award – and awarding it to someone else, another movie.

The problem stems from everyone’s ‘knowledge’ of how Hollywood works, and what the major awards are from which organizations.

In the same way that President Bartlett is less interesting if he is Superintendent Bartlett of an unnamed or fictitious school district, an actor getting a life-changing nomination for, say, an Academy Award is more interesting than if I make up an organization called FCBM and award my character their Best Actor award.

Along with ‘The White House’ you get an amazing amount of the reader’s foreknowledge of how things work there – which saves a lot of words and explanations.

Along with ‘an Oscar’ you get the same kind of response – red carpet, photographers, exotic borrowed clothing for beautiful women… And the whole suspense thing dragged out as long as possible, followed by one winner and a lot of gracious losers who were honored to be nominated. It’s in your head already, and a writer just needs to mention a few points to trigger a full-blown award ceremony in your mind.

Why do I even bother worrying about this kind of stuff?

Well, first because I’m a worrier.

Second, because I want that identification and value from the awards. I agree with the organizations and the individuals that they are worth a great deal in a career.

Third, because the last thing I need in my state of energy and illness and retirement is some organization getting its panties in a twist because I, well, lied.

Fourth, because I hope to be famous and well-read (not synonymous) some day, I want to do it right, and not leave a mess for my heirs.

Fifth, because, as a writer, it’s my job.

**********

Have you had to face this choice? If so, how did you handle it? Have there been repercussions?

As a reader, have you ever wondered if the author has stepped over the line? Care to share?

**********

Loving scenes where the villain wins

HOW TO FEEL RIGHT ABOUT LETTING THE VILLAIN WIN

Some lights are seen better in contrast with dark.

NOT necessarily permanently – I don’t write downers or tragedies – but so you have done a good job when writing something that, in the long run, enhances the story.

A hero is a hero ONLY in comparison to the obstacle overcome.

The DIFFERENCE between the hero’s HIGH and the villain’s LOW is the STAKES of your story.

The answer to every objection is: Does it make the story better?

Even in a long book, you have only so much space to use the whole palette of emotions that go with your story. You don’t get to waffle about – you have to use what you have, and make it squeal.

This means that you have to be confident enough to do what the STORY needs, even when it hurts – or at least feels odd – when you get to the place where you have to write that the wrong character is winning.

For a while, you tell yourself.

Not permanently.

So the ‘winning’ characters have something to overcome that is worth writing about.

But plotting it to happen and writing the scene are different

I knew what I was going into when I chose to start writing this novel trilogy. It is in many ways a fairytale for grownups, something that is highly improbable in the real world.

But I figured out a way to make it come out the way I wanted.

I found a way to make the ending POSSIBLE.

And, as you might expect, it required some finagling to make it interesting and not trivial.

It required making ‘highly improbable’ ALMOST ‘impossible.’

And then doing the writing to make it happen.

Believably.

To me. Who am picky about plausibility.

Because the characters need to change

Some of them do.

And change of direction requires the application of force.

Nobody changes unless they have to.

And these characters had no reason to go looking for change, except that I wanted them to.

The bigger the change, the bigger the applied force needs to be

The applied force is the stakes, and I needed to make the stakes big enough to make a couple of very stubborn characters change, so it’s really their fault.

But then I got to the actual writing

And I found I had to make the reasons for change credible because the characters had turned into people I cared about.

So the actual writing of the lowest scenes not just in the middle novel, but in the whole trilogy, was hard.

Even though I knew it was coming and exactly what was going to happen.

I had to admit that there was no way around the difficulties I plotted in in the first place. Duh!

So I went ahead and wrote the first of these scenes, and it was as hard as I imagined it would be, and harder because I write linearly, and couldn’t postpone doing it now.

I am proud to say I survived

The story survived.

Some version of the characters survived.

The villain got to win.

At least for the time being, but mostly because it is necessary.

If you aren’t writing stakes you care about, I can’t see the point of putting in the kind of work this is taking. Because it is very hard to let the villain get away with things, even temporarily, because it is necessary to create that leverage for change.

And I had to give it the very best writing I could create – and make every tiny step in the win justified – because otherwise the villain is a straw villain, easy to overturn.

I hope it works for my readers after it works for me.

Or you guys are really going to hate me.

**********

How do you feel about this kind of story – as a reader?

If you’re a writer, have you ever had to do the same?

I’ve earned some kind of reward.

**********

When to dump a scene completely

With ice cream, you don’t have to ask where it went!

WHEN IT ISN’T AN INTENSE IMMEDIATE NECESSARY EXPERIENCE

It’s a high bar, wanting only scenes in a novel that are strong enough to leave a reader breathless.

Quietly or dramatically, a scene has to have a reason for being in the story, and that reason has to answer the question: Why is this scene PIVOTAL?

Yes. Every single time.

Scenes accomplish many things at once

The structure and skeleton of a scene offer a place to hang many hats: character development, plot, theme(s), setting, language, the ability to hold a reader’s attention, emotions… I could go on for a long time, or merely post some of my checklists for things which must be considered.

A scene has to be packed with meaning, symbolism, omens, backstory, forewarning, consequences, and costs.

It has to move the story from where it was to where it has to be, a stepping-stone across a great river.

Preferably subtly.

But the scene itself has to have a primary reason to be in the book, and it isn’t as a catch basin for a whole bunch of important little things the author thinks the reader needs to know.

I dropped a scene

I’ve done a lot of things between the complete rough draft and what will be the final complete draft that included rearranging material, moving things to a slightly better scene for them, altering the timelines enough to change the order, switching point of view to a different character, tweaking the goal.

I’ve considered, for each scene, how best to tell its part of the story.

I’ve combine a couple of shorter ones, split some long ones.

I’d have to go back over extensive lists, but I don’t think I’ve completely dumped one before.

It feels weird – but I’m happy I made the decision to ‘kill a darling.’

I was having trouble writing 34.5.

Since I have trouble writing every scene, this wasn’t anything new or startling. I have many ways of writing myself out of these problems, some suitable when it’s the writer who has a previously-unknown problem (the Journal gets a lot of these long explorations of why) and others which work to get around my physical limitations.

I have those checklists to allow me to explore MANY features of a scene in small enough chunks that I can focus on one thing at a time – by the time I’ve gone through all of those, I have the gathered material for that scene all in one place. Then I have systems to organize it. Then it gels. Then I write it.

I was even in a good mood and had had enough sleep.

The material wasn’t compelling as a whole.

There were specific bits that need to be in the book. There were some really nice bits. And there were all those answered questions and placeholder text bits, including some really decent dialogue.

Then I realized that writing this particular scene bored me

And that I wouldn’t be looking forward to rereading that scene when I reread the book, and would probably skip it.

Telling myself the Reader needed the information, presented in a nicely dramatized way, with bells, didn’t work.

And then I really, really looked at the nascent scene, and I admitted to myself that there were 2-3 necessary pieces, which is why I thought I should group them in this scene in the first place, but that it wasn’t enough to do a good job of surrounding them with a scene and let the reader absorb them painlessly.

It won’t surprise you that it was a villain scene – and I’ve given her plenty of room to express her opinions, follow her thoughts, listen to her justifications.

So I made the decision to cut a scene

And immediately knew it was the right decision.

I found a home for those necessary bits in the following scenes and an epigraph which wrote itself. There isn’t anything wrong with them.

And the chapter suddenly got livelier.

I dug into the next scene, and found it compelling, and found a way to make it heartbreaking.

We’re back on track.

This scene should be a doozy. As they should all be, if I had my ‘druthers.

I can always go back and put it in; somehow I don’t think it will be necessary. I’ll leave it up to my beta reader to notice.

**********

I don’t think this is because I write one finished scene at a time; I’ll find out.

Does any of this ring a bell?

**********

When to restart a scene from scratch

Yup, blank.

SOMETIMES YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

I gather a lot of pre-written material when I start a scene.

I also have a lot of lists of prompts I fill out which remind me to think of various aspects of a scene, from the internal twist to the various beats to the emotions I wish to invoke in Readers, so I’ve created a lot of new material now that I’m about to write this scene.

And I have one bugaboo, what I call the Old Text (OT), the original polished-but-primitive draft that I wrote when I had the three books in the trilogy plotted out, and wanted to see that I could make it logically from the first line to the last.

The Old Text can be missing, a few paragraphs, a scene in the wrong point of view (pov), or even, in the worst case, a

PERFECT FINISHED COMPLETE SCENE IN THE CORRECT CHARACTER’S POINT OF VIEW.

Except it’s not right.

And every attempt to take what you have and rework it, rearrange it, change it, edit it, tweak it

doesn’t work.

It’s still wrong.

Worse, it’s throwing you off and keeping you from getting into the character’s pov so you can fix things.

For those times you have a secret weapon:

You can choose not to keep ANY of what you wrote before.

Or only a couple of tiny new pieces you just wrote that you know are in the right pov.

Or an image or two, reworded of course.

Or the time/day/date.

Or even the idea of the scene.

But you don’t have to because there is no Scene Police Division

down at writing headquarters.

No one who can make you, encourage you, or even try to persuade you.

Just because you wrote it gives it no rights.

Just because it was finished, complete, polished, and has impeccable grammar and spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, and you worked for days on it way back when you wrote that particular version, it has no integrity or separate solidity: it is just as friable as your grocery list.

With me, it means I am really stuck.

All the journaling in the world can’t fix something that needs to be plowed under and redesigned from the bottom up.

I just redid a scene like this – from a blank page. After getting fairly close to…something.

I had so much new stuff to put into the scene, and such a solid Old Text version, I thought it might be one of the few things that survived from that draft.

Nuh uh.

Maybe if I had published the scene as a story fifteen or twenty years ago when I wrote this particular little gem, and spent days or weeks getting it to be the best I could do back then. It might have been a book I removed from my backlist after getting much better with the newer books.

I’m glad I didn’t publish that older draft.

Even I had the sense to realize it needed a lot of work.

The new version is so much better.

But I hadn’t realized that the OT had so much power.

I didn’t want to start from scratch. I didn’t want to dump everything.

I wasn’t sure I could write something better, or come up with an entirely different version of the original idea.

That’s just the FEAR talking. Trying to protect me from wasted effort (old and new).

So I labeled the old contents ‘draft version’, and left it where I could get to it easily if I needed to swipe something from it.

And I started a blank file with the words: ‘just putting this here so the page isn’t blank’

And I started all over again, paying special attention to how that character operated, felt, saw, listened and wrote it again from the top.

Then I deleted ‘just putting this here so the page isn’t blank’, proceeded with my other steps to get a scene into final usable state, and didn’t insist it contain any of that old but good stuff, and …

It’s finished. It came out far better. I wrote the new version in a day or two, edited and polished it, and it doesn’t look at all like the OT.

I still can’t imagine any amount of tweaking that would have turned the previous grammatically-correct-but-completely-wrong and progress-blocking scene into what I signed off on today.

It hurt. A lot. All that nice clean text!

But sometimes you have no choice but to start from scratch.

**********

Stubborn opinionated determined author at work

You can’t guarantee the results

Isn’t ‘effort’ the same thing as ‘work?

After I wrote the above, I realized that I think of them separately (personal choice), with effort being the whole mental atmosphere surrounding what writers do – from paying attention to things other people never notice, including information on publicity, covers, and selling – and work being actually sitting down and turning that attitude into things such as a finished ad or a description that rocks or any number of other ‘deliverables.’

‘WORK‘, of course, includes the writing itself, the finished words on the page of a pdf you are about to upload to Amazon or others.

And know it’s the best version of the story you are able to provide that mysterious elusive creature, the Reader.

After that, Amazon takes over and supplies copies of the WORK to those who pay for it.

For many of us, Amazon is currently publisher and distributor, for a hefty portion of the rewards (30% for ebooks, more for print books). I am currently okay with that. Because that equation is far worse on the traditional publishing side, and many of the benefits to using them (editing, covers, advertising, promotion, reasonable advances, royalties) are on the path of the Dodo bird.

Writing successful fiction requires two additional things:

Finding your potential readers, and

Getting them to try your writing.

If you haven’t truly written a good book that readers would buy if they only knew about you, YOU’RE WASTING YOUR TIME when you promote and advertise and stand on your head to do PR. You may fool some of the people some of the time, but that is rarely a recipe for commercial success.

Indeed, after reading some authors’ latest ‘work’, I know I will never read another from them.

But the whole discoverability part of writing is hard, tricky, and requires the one thing I don’t have: energy and the capacity for endless self-promotion.

If you have written ‘a good book’ for a segment of the population

the satisfied readers should be clamoring for more.

If you have more (backlist), they have a lot to discover and enjoy.

If not, well, keep working. And some readers will never get that pleasure from you again, but it won’t be your fault, if you’ just keep truckin’.’

And hope for some luck, or ‘Here a miracle occurs,’ or going viral, or catching someone’s eye…

Some of us will simply have to hope for an afterlife, and wait to ask Margaret Mitchell what happened to Scarlett. Assuming she still cares – the afterlife runs on different rules, I believe.

And now I’m going off to nap, followed by keeping my nose to my particular grindstone.

I do so want to finish. It’s coming nicely. And every time the idea that life might be easier if I spent it entertaining myself instead of torturing myself with imaginary people, I have managed to fight that attitude off.

**********

What are the things in your life that you will never give up on?

**********

The value I’m offering MY Readers

You’ll never get it back

A blogger’s question made me think:

HOW MUCH TIME do my potential readers spend looking for SOMETHING, ANYTHING interesting to read before finding a few possibles,

and

HOW MUCH MORE TIME do they spend starting and then giving up on books that pass their initial selection process – BEFORE they find one they like and actually enjoy reading to the end?

Readers may have preferences, but the good ones, the educated literate WHALE readers – the ones who read a lot of books, hard books, complex books, and often buy them in hardcover (which I will produce when I have 1) a lot of time, or 2) Amazon lets me into their beta hardcover program), and then RECOMMEND them to their friends – are often happy to just read ‘a good book.’

Because their appetites are not satisfied – no matter how many books are on their To Be Read piles.

They are not looking for ‘more of the same vampire books.’ Or ‘the latest James Patterson book.’ Or another ‘clean Romance.’

They are let down by what they read (have you seen how many NEGATIVE reviews there are on books such as The Goldfinch? They won’t all be people who can’t handle the complexity and bought it primarily as a coffeetable book!).

They want what writers are counseled to produce: a good book

So it got me to thinking about my writing, and what I am trying to produce, a good story, a book that is worth the time invested in reading it, a book which will make the same Reader want the next in the trilogy.

It’s easier for me to vet my potential Readers than for me to try to please everyone (an impossibility).

So I’m going to try to QUANTIFY the ineffable

There’s an example: If you are potentially MY Reader, either you already know what ‘ineffable’ means, or you will figure it out from context and a dictionary – because you like words and enjoy pinning down ones you’ve seen before but don’t remember exactly what they mean. And either way, it will give you PLEASURE just sitting there on your page.

If ‘ineffable’ appearing in your reading material is annoying because you think the writer’s being elitist or you’re done with SAT words, your are NOT my potential Reader.

Because ineffable came to my mind as what I wanted to say (and I did a quick check to make sure I didn’t have it mixed up with something else – fatal to the point I’m trying to make). Something unquantifiable because it is big and complex: how to help Readers know the value of my work – to them, the only people they are really interested in satisfying.

Everything else is miscommunication.

And I’m going to quantify it in a very me way

I’m going to make a list of books which have influenced Pride’s Children by being favorites of mine still years after I’ve read most of them, and why.

I’ve done this on Goodreads when carefully looking for potential reviewers, using the Compare books feature, especially if they’ve reviewed and I can see if our reasons for loving a book are compatible.

All you have to do to find out if you are potentially a Reader of my fiction is to see if several of these hit you in similar ways.

For the actual writing part – because we can love the same books without me being able to produce a coherent sentence in a similar style – I will make my standard recommendation: go to Amazon, to the print version – because my formatting is part of how I want to write. The ebook is available and I love it, too, but ebooks have reflowable text on purpose so you can change fonts and sizes to suit you; great for reading, not so great for seeing if you like everything about the author.

1. Read – but don’t get hung up on – the description; these are always being tweaked to occupy the very limited real estate on the book’s page. It is an indicator, not the definitive reason for choosing or not choosing a book.
2. Read some of the reviews. I’d choose several of the top reviews (most of the longer 5* ones from older men) and maybe a couple of the few negative ones (you’ll know what I mean if my writing will appeal to you). Go for the long ones – but not the ones which summarize and ruin the plot: you’re looking for reviewers like you.
3. Read a few pages of the Look Inside! – by the end of the third scene you will have met all the point of view characters, by the end of the first chapter or two you will have picked up the as-needed style of alternating them, and by the end of the sample, if not much sooner, you will know if – in your opinion – I can write.
4. Ten or twenty minutes spent will tell you all you need to know. And you should spend that on a potential book; Pride’s Children PURGATORY will take you a good while to read.

That’s it: checkout my list of influencers and read a bit of the actual writing, and then, if you’re one of us, buy in your favorite format and get to reading.

I can guarantee it’s a good story; after all, it has occupied all my usable writing time for the past twenty-one years, I’m almost finished with volume 2 (which ends well but still leaves you wanting more), and volume 3 is completely plotted and exists in rough draft form (so you know I know exactly where we’re going).

What kind of a good story?

Well, here is a partial list of the themes woven in there somewhere:

• Family matters
• Love is based on trust
• Children matter – and must be protected
• Beliefs are important
• Beliefs lead to action
• Right beliefs lead to right action
• Dignity matters
• Good will prevail
• Life throws stuff at you – how you handle it is who you are
• You can’t stay married to someone who doesn’t want you
• Some people are objectively better than others
• Integrity matters
• Evil exists – and can’t be excused
• Love transcends age
• We have a capacity for intense love: of a character. Of an actor. Of a story.
• Disability themes: how common it is, the intrinsic value of the person who is disabled, and the empathy I want developed in readers and the world.

And the overall theme: How you live your life PROVES what you believe. And believe in.

Now for those influencer books:

(you will want to have read – and liked or have been affected by – at least several):

• Dune (plus Dune Messiah and Children of Dune)
• Jane Eyre
• Wuthering Heights
• On the Beach, Trustee from the Toolroom
• The Thorn Birds
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Roccannon’s World, Planet of Exile
• Leviathan’s Deep
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Great Expectations
• Frankenstein
• Strong Poison, Have his Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman’s Honeymoon, Talboys
• Rebecca
• Exodus
• Lucifer’s Hammer
• A Tale of Two Cities
• Dr. Zhivago
• The Exorcist
• The Dying of the Light (also named After the Festival), A Song for Lya
• Ender’s Game
• Huckleberry Finn
• The Foundation trilogy
• The Crystal Cave, The Last Enchantment
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes
• Brave New World
• The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
• Black Beauty
• Silas Marner
• Snow Falling on Cedars, Our Lady of the Forest
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• The Three Musketeers
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• GWTW
• Way Station
• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• The Name of the Rose

A good serving of these plus a familiarity with Shakespeare and the Bible.

That’s basically it

Spend a bit of time vetting your reading material – you will be spending hours of your life you will never get back – and then settle in to a nice long encounter.

You may also pray for good health for the writer; in this case, she needs to be semi-functional to be able to write at all.

IF you are persuaded, leave a comment saying why – feedback is crucial to writers, especially if you want more work from them.

**********

The necessary odd story pivot scene

WHEN YOU DIDN’T REALIZE HOW IMPORTANT A SCENE WAS

I write these posts when I get an epiphany (and interestingly enough, it is set right before the real Feast of the Epiphany, January 6th, 2006).

I did what I always do, and gathered enormous amount of material related to the scene in progress – and went through my usual process of trying to turn the most important parts of what the Reader needs to know at this point into a coherent scene.

Almost always when I get to this point in my writing process (and I’ve written much about that), the scene almost self-organizes, includes some of the bits of dialogue I’ve developed during the process, and gives me trouble until I get it written.

Then I clean it up, check against my lists, run it through AutoCrit, and am usually happy to move to the next one.

And occasionally I get massively stuck

Which drives me crazy, and then drives me to picking apart what I’ve done, writing in my Fear Journal, and generally making a mess of everything.

Until suddenly the subconscious hits me upside the head with a ten foot Pole (to thoroughly mix metaphors), and I somehow figure out what’s wrong.

And then add it to another list: THINGS I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN.

Or at least expected!

Which are embarrassingly obvious after that point.

Sigh.

Endings and beginnings are fraught

This scene is essentially the last one in this section of the plot. I knew I needed it, structurally, and threw it in, moved some content around, and left it as a stub in my very detailed Scene list in the Dramatica file.

But I did NOT have a rough draft (the very rough draft of everything I have has been proof of my ability to create a story from nothing, and still serves as an anachronistic paper map to the path) for this scene.

Because, in many ways, I was still learning plotting when I finished the first plot (for Dramatica initiates, had my storyform down to 1) and wrote the rough draft to flesh out the ideas. Only Sandy, my long-suffering writing partner at the turn of the century, has seen the rough draft – and I hope she’s forgotten.

The storyform was then revised permanently in the great Reorganization of 2007.

So, I had somehow known SOMETHING WAS NECESSARY HERE,

thrown it into the mix, and moved on to more important things, such as writing PURGATORY.

And of course that’s what landmines are for: to make you sit up and pay attention.

To put this all into something more understandable: my usual process led me to gather enough material for this important transition pivot, but I hadn’t realized it was an important scene.

I thought it was a simple ‘cleanup and move on’ scene.

And of course it did no such thing as self-assemble.

The important ones on whatever scale never do.

Because they’re something new, and you haven’t done it quite that way before, and your subconscious doesn’t know HOW.

So, no template. So, no assembly possible.

And then, in the wondering and thinking and journaling that goes about when I get stuck in these little quagmires, I suddenly realized that we had reached the top of one mountain, the view was spectacular in all directions (see image), and it was going to matter, a lot, exactly how we got down.

For specifics, and so you might recognize it later, we move from the Czech Republic to Ireland. Over the course of a couple bits in several scenes.

And it is a major turning point in not only this chapter, but this book, and the whole trilogy, because the bottom has been hit, and the Reader doesn’t yet know how the characters are going to climb out, because climb out they must.

Apologizing for the contradictory images and the many cliches, I go now to write this scene, somehow, because I have to.

And that’s not bad.

**********

As a question, do you remember your turning points, and how wobbly they felt?

**********

Oppression and misrepresentation rampant in fantasy fiction?

The following is a reblog from Janna Noelle, a writer I’ve been following for a long time. She writes fantasy and is very careful and systematic about it (I’m still waiting to read the debut novel when it’s published), and always has interesting things to say):

“I’ve been thinking about how magic is often represented in fantasy.

I’ve written previously about how many SFF stories (poorly) represent post-racial societies. My issue with magic is a close cousin to that topic.

Magic is frequently connected to oppression within the story world. Often it’s illegal, with practitioners doing so in secret while on the run and/or in hiding from the armed forces of a state-sanctioned death squad seeking to exterminate them.

It’s an obvious attempt by fantasy writers to draw a thematic comparison to the real-world oppression of marginalized people.

It doesn’t work…”

Please go to her blog to read WHY it doesn’t work – Janna is very coherent.

I don’t read much fantasy, and don’t write it, but it hit me immediately that she’s nailed it.

She has all kinds of other great posts, too.