Being married is having someone that you can talk to about your poop, and they’ll still have sex with you.
Being married with children is having someone you can talk to about your child’s poop, and they’ll still have sex with you.
Blog
Ye gods, have I actually not posted anything since July 4?
Anyway, just like the rest of the internet, I have to link to today’s XKCD:
I find this especially touching, because I studied linguistics at the university. Linguistics FTW!
America is the greatest country in the world
Vylar Kaftan found out that May 22 is the least common birthday in the US, which coincidentally is our son Ciprian’s birthday. He wins!
He also has a dimple, which he got from his mother. I love dimples, but am without them. His ordinary 6-week-old cuteness, multiplied by the cuteness of his dimple, makes him some kind of gurgling atomic bomb of adorability.
(Random cultural fact: in the US dimples are generally regarded as attractive. In Romania they are regarded as neutral. I wonder why?)
Opening Lines, Paragraphs, and Chapters
So I’m gearing up (slowly) to start on my next novel, and in preparation I’m thinking about openings. The opening of my laslt unpublished novel was probably the weakest part, and it’s something that I always struggle with. While pondering the ways in which my next WIP will begin, I decided to have a look at the openings of several of my favorite novels, to make a study of what they do, and what I can learn from them.
The parameters are simple: I’m looking at the first chapter of first books (if the book is part of a series), and the first sentences and first paragraphs of that chapter. It has to be a book I’ve already read, so that I can compare the opening with what I know of the rest of the book, and it has to be a book that I liked. I’ll also be sticking to genre works, and though I will use books by some famous authors, I’ll try to stick to earlier works. (The idea being that a BNA has more leeway to experiment with different kinds of openings, while I don’t.) I’m also open to suggestions if my readers (both of them) care to make them.
First up: Devices and Desires by KJ Parker. I’ll print the opening paragraph, with the opening line in bold:
“The quickest way to a man’s heart,” said the instructor, “is proverbially through his stomach. But if you want to get into his brain, I recommend the eye-socket.”
Thoughts: The first sentence is nothing special. If this were a short story, I might even recommend changing it. In a novel, you have a little more leeway–maybe as much as a page–before a reader or editor will reject you, so this is evidently okay. (Or so I’ve heard.) The second sentence that finished the paragraph is where the meat is: it illustrates the black humor that will permeate the novel, sets the tone, and establishes the theme of warfare. We already know that this will be a book about violence–specifically, as we’ll see in the next paragraph, fencing. There may be a double meaning in the instructor’s words as well: it turns out that our protag is in love, as a pretty young duchess has gotten into his brain and heart through his eye, and the results will be no less devastating than a simple rapier into the brain. Finally, this line is repeated almost verbatim at the opening of the next two books in the trilogy, providing important thematic continuity.
The second paragraph of this novel is so excellent that I feel compelled to share it, as well:
Like a whip cracking, he uncurled his languid slouch into the taut, straight lines of the lunge. His forearm launched from the elbow like an arrow as his front leg plunged forward, and the point of the long, slim sword darted, neat as a component in a machine, through the exact center of the finger-ring that dangled from a cord tied to the beam.
Now that is some really fine action writing. Take a look at those verbs: cracking, launched, plunged, darted. Notice also the phrase “neat as a component in a machine”–echoing another of the trilogy’s themes, that of mechanism and machinery.
Notice that we haven’t gotten any names yet. The protag is first mentioned in paragraph three.
The rest of the chapter:
The protag, young Duke Valens (though he isn’t actually Duke until the end of the chapter), is at a fencing lesson. This lasts for three pages, by the end of which we have a pretty clear understaning of Valens’ character. He is resentful of his father and doesn’t like being a Duke, but he is also fiercely determined, talented, and smart. Parker shows us all of this through Valens’ internal dialogue, without once resorting to overt characterization.
On page four we realize that Valens is in love. The girl he wants isn’t named at first–she’s just “she”, which is perfectly appropriate given the close 3rd POV that Parker uses. Valens is trucked off to a state dinner, where we see the representatives of a neighboring, industrialized country, and where Valens actually gets to talk to his crush. We’re introduced to the political situation and learn a little about the duchess’s character, and then…
In the second half of the chapter something strange happens. We skip a few years, find out second-hand that the duchess has been married to someone else, kill off the old Duke, and make Valens the new Duke. And then chapter two begins in a different country, roughly ten years later.
So everything in chapter one turns out to be backstory, introducing us to the pieces that will be in play when the main plot arc begins in the second chapter. This works because it’s not told as backstory: all of the description is vivid and immediate, and plenty of things happen. There is no shortage of action and character in the first chapter, and our attention is never allowed to wander.
Done!
Ha! The dark fantasy/horror/vampire/zombie/voodoo novella is FINISHED. With the first draft. It 27K words, and was some of the most fun I’ve had writing in a long time. Now, admire my wordle:
I find that wordle kind of upsetting. The name of my protag hugely overweighs everything else, and “said” is so prominent. Too much dialogue? Oh, well. It’s a first draft: much grooming to do yet.
Annals of Encouraging Rejections, Part 2
In this case, you made it all the way through round two and into the winnowing phase. There were some rough spots, one person thought, but two others thought it was quirky and interesting enough to publish. It lost out in the winnowing phase. That’s pretty far — about 5% of all stories make it there.
Woohoo! Maybe next time.
The Martian ponders the white-haired man on the sidewalk. He is baking in the Florida sun, waiting outside the craft shop while his wife gathers materials to make another ceramic doll. His lime-green polo shirt and white slacks match her own.
His children are grown, his youth is gone, twenty thousand days and night of marriage have flown past. His days of power, of protecting and providing, have slipped away. He waits quietly in the sun, a little drowsy. There is no reason on earth for him to be there but one.
From Frederica Mathewes-Green.
If nothing else, I will be taking “Twenty Thousand Days of Marriage” as the title of a story.
“If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God that you have found.” – Thomas Merton
See, now this is a great kernel of an idea for a story.
How I Work
Meme time! As suggested by csinman, here’s a brief rundown of the way that I write.
I usually start with something so small that it can’t even be called an idea. Sometimes it’s a title. (My most recent short story, The Typographer’s Dream began that way.) Sometimes it’s an image (“an old woman weeping over a river”), or a theme (“something about forgiveness”), or a more typical what-if (“what if someone stole your ability to sleep?”). These kernels by themselves are never enough for a story. I have a file where I sometimes write down my kernels, but honestly I rarely use it. Usually the kernels just sit in my head and wait to germinate.
Kernels germinate either by combining with each other, or by latching on to some snippet of plot, something I read in the news, another story I read, etc. Here I’m helped by the fact that I have a Giant Fantasy World which is vast in imagined geography and history, and which almost any kernel can find a place in. (For example, my unpublished novel An Inheritance of Stars and my recent short story The Last Free Bear are both set in the Giant Fantasy World, despite the fact that they’re very different stories with no visible connections between them.)
Once the kernel has sprouted a plot, I’m ready to think about starting to prepare to consider what I’m going to anticipate writing. This takes a long time. Even after the plot has sprouted, I’m not ready to start cultivating a story in earnest. I have to let the plot stretch and unfurl and grow some more detail. I need to know at least 75% of what happens before I sit down to write; the last 25% can come in as I’m writing. If I have less than that, the story tends wither as I get stuck not knowing what to do. (This was the fate of the last novel I started, now trunked.)
Once all of that’s in place, it’s time to sit down and write. I write my stories in plain text. Yes, the kind you can read with Notepad. Once I wrote in WordPerfect, but then I lost my WordPerfect install CD, moved to a different computer, and found I couldn’t open any of my stories. Never Again. Text is universal and eternal. However, it’s not exactly “plain” text: I actually write everything as LaTeX, with the help of the sffms LaTeX package. LaTeX and sffms are both open-source, which means that even if they did go away someday, I’m free to use and modify the versions that I have squirreled away all over my hard drives. Oh, and my text editor is Vim. I use a makefile to generate txt, rtf, html, and pdf versions from the LaTeX source, and I have Vim set up to do all that with just two keystrokes.
(This is by far the nerdiest writing setup I’ve ever heard of, but I like it.)
I usually write on the bus to and from work. My goal is 1000 words a day, but I’m happy as long as I get more than 500. I would like to write more, but my time on the bus is the only writing time I can count on getting, and that’s less than two hours per day. I figure that at 500-1000 words per day, in 6 months I can finish a novel. (That hasn’t worked out in practice, so far, but we’ll see how things go in the future.)
Once a first draft is done, I wait a little while then make a first editing pass. This is just looking for mechanical errors or really egregious writing sins. After that, I put it up on OWW and/or send it to my flesh-and-blood readers. Then I start working on something else. A few weeks (for a short story) or a few months (for a novel) later, I’ll take all the comments I got and do a really thorough edit. This is when I’ll make serious changes like removing characters, changing the order of scenes, or reworking the plot. After this, I may send it out to one or two people that I know and trust for final comments. I brush up any last issues they see—then it’s off to the cruel world.
J.S. Bangs 