Category: writing

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One of the longest-lasting and most rewarding friendships of my life began in the sixth grade. I had just transfered to a new school, and being a shy, unathletic kid, I naturally gravitated to the other shy, unathletic kids, which in this case included Brett: a tall, skinny boy with glasses, allergies, and a gloriously nerdy set of interests. We played chess and read books together at recess. He got me to read Tolkien. And he got me into language.

In sixth grade Brett had already studied Latin and Old English, and his enthusiasm for arcane and obscure linguistic trivia infected me. I started studying Hebrew, we both dabbled in Tolkien’s languages, and we both tried to make our own languages. His languages were initially much better than mine, as he had a big head start on linguistics, and having two foreign languages already under his belt was a tremendous advantage for his initial language-construction forays. He taught me the International Phonetic Alphabet and the basics of phonology and historical linguistics. I don’t exaggerate much to say that my friendship with Brett changed my life: the interest in linguistics that he sparked never died out; Linguistics became my major in college, which led indirectly into my current day job; and my linguistic training was part of what motivated and prepared me to go to Romania where I met my wife.

He’s still better than me at linguistics, too, since he is in the last stages of finishing his PhD. in Linguistics, while I have a lowly B.A.

However, I do have one thing over him: I kept up the hobby of language creation (conlanging, as we call it), while he seemed to abandon it in high school. I’ve continued to develop languages for my fictional settings and my private amusement, and just the other day I completed an application for an actual paid conlanging gig. At this point I have at one well-documented language, Yivrian, and a whole slew of sketches, planned languages, and notes.

I’ve also put a lot of work lately into Praseo, the language used in my current WIP. And with the confluence of conlang-y things going on in my life right now, this seems like a good time to write about that aspect of my writing process, talking about how I use and create languages for my fictional settings, with pointers to how you can do the same if you’re interested.

Next week: a naming language.

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The advice to hurt your characters is given so often to writers that I thought it was a cliche by now. In fact, I would have told you that things had swung too far the other way, with some writers relishing in inflicting every known form of pain and suffering on their poor protagonists.

But maybe everyone didn’t get the memo? A friend of mine recently asked me to read her manuscript, and while there was a lot that was good about it, it had one glaring flaw. Everything was too easy for the protagonist. There was a conflict, sort of, but it was all worked out with a nice heart-to-heart and some convenient self-awareness. No one got hurt, no one was mean or selfish, and absolutely no one antagonized. Despite the protag’s many endearing qualities, it was very hard to really root for her, because she never had a real obstacle to overcome.

I remember, some years ago, reading another manuscript with many of the same flaws. In both cases, I think that the authors were mislead by their choice of genre to think that they could write a story without struggle and without pain. One was an Edwardian romance, and the other a light contemporary comedy — both of these being genres that generally eschew the dark and gritty. But the lack of angst and torture does not mean that you get to ignore basic requirements for plot and conflict. Rather, the struggles and the difficulties that the protag faces have to be that much more significant to the character, and the struggles that the protag goes through have to be that much more difficult in order to make their goals seem worthwhile.

Wes Anderson is the master of this. In most of his movies, the characters are moved by solely personal goals, and little is at stake other than their individual aspirations. The tone is light and funny, even when pirates take over your boat, and the angst is comic rather than dark. But this doesn’t mean that Anderson is easy on his characters. On the contrary, he throws every kind of obstacle that you can imagine in their way, and often they don’t actually get what they want, even at the end of the story.

This is how you should make a light contemporary comedy. Not by toning down the conflicts, but by turning them up, making them more meaningful and more over-the-top, and having your protagonist treat them as deadly serious regardless of how absurd they are.

(As for me, I don’t have this problem. If anything, I err on the side of dark-and-gritty. Which has problems of its own…)

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Natasha Oliver recently tagged me. Now I must participate in a meme. Now, I sort of hate memes, but this one seems kind of fun, so here goes nothing.

  1. Go to page 77 of your current MS.
  2. Go to line 7.
  3. Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences, and post them as they’re written.

Fortunately, I’ve been working on the second draft of The Wedding of Earth and Sky lately, so I have page 77 already edited nicely.

Bhaalit chuckled. “The hard part will be building them. Everything after that is just standing and pulling.”

They began early the next day. Keshlik sent Bhaalit and half of the warriors with axes to to fell the lodgepole pines that grew a few miles upstream. The men were warriors, not loggers, so it took excruciatingly long for the first log to appear in the stream, bobbing to where Juyut and a half-dozen other young warriors plunged into the water and wrestled it to shore.

You may be asking yourself, Who are these log-chopping warriors? Where are they going? What are they building? How am I supposed to pronounce their names?

Unfortunately, I can’t answer these questions for you right now. Let me finish revising the book first.

(One hint on the pronunciation: Bhaalit is [ˈbʰaːlɪt]. Good luck with that.)

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So… here’s something embarrassing. Due to certain calendaristic confusions, I had the date of Easter wrong. Most people here in the U.S. celebrate the Protestant/Catholic Easter, which of course was last Sunday. My wife and I do celebrate that date with our friends and family, but we make our primary religious observation of the feast on the Orthodox date, which falls a week later. However, I didn’t realize until late last week that Orthodox and Catholic Easter don’t fall on the same date this year—I misread my calendar, and was confused by the fact that Lent began on the same week under both calendars.

So now it’s Holy Week (again), but I already used that excuse for not blogging once. However, rather than try to beg off (again), I will simply make a brief announcement:

My story The Typographer’s Folly was just accepted for the Bibliotheca Fantastica anthology from Dagan Books. The release date for the anthology hasn’t been announced yet, but expect further news as the publication approaches.

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If you are not a linguist, a conlanger, or some other form of dedicated linguistic dilettante, you’ve probably never heard of ergativity. (If you are a conlanger, you may be sick of hearing about it, since it’s a perennial subject on the CONLANG list.) Ergativity is one of the weirdest linguistic phenomena that I know of, and because I’m that kind of nerd I’m going to share it with you.

Let’s take a simple transitive sentence:

  1. The duck(A) bit him(P).

If you remember your grammar at all, you know that the duck is the subject of #1, while the object is him. In English, we have the bare remnants of a case system for our pronouns, which requires us to use the form He for the subject and him for the object. You’ll notice that I’ve marked these A and P, which stand for Agent and Patient. My reason for using these terms will become clear below.

Now let’s add an intransitive sentence:

  1. He(S) fell.

Here the "subject" is he. I’ve marked He as S for Subject here.

In English, as in most languages spoken in Europe, the Agent of a transitive verb and the Subject of an intransitive verb take the same form. In fact, we are usually just call them both "subjects" and forget about it. In more formal terminology, the combined A and S case is the nominative, while the P case is the accusative.

But this is not necessarily the case in all languages. There are languages in which the Subject and Patient take the same form, and the Agent gets left out. This is called ergativity.

If English were an ergative language, we might express the sentences like this:

  1. The duck(A) bit him(P).
  2. Him(S) fell.

Note that our A, P, and S labels haven’t changed. But now the S and the P forms are the same, while the A form is different. In such a language, we refer to the combined S and P form as the absolutive case, and the A form as the ergative case.

If, by chance, you know a language with a more robust case system than English, it may help to think about how this would work in those languages. Take your Russian, German, or Latin and recast it with the subjects of all of the intransitive verbs in the accusative case. This is how an ergative language works. The only difference is that in a nominative/accusative language we think of the nominative form as the base form and the accusative form as the marked form, while in an ergative/absolutive language the absolutive form is unmarked while the ergative form is marked.

There’s more to it than that, and as usual Wikipedia has a decent overview, though I prefer the one with Cthulhu. Some ergative languages you may have heard of include Basque, Hindi, Georgian, and Tibetan.

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Pages and pages have been written on the topic of pantsers and planners. If you’ve been a writer for any amount of time, you’ve probably encountered the terms at some time, and chances are that you have strong feelings about which way is best, or at least which way is yours.

Me, I’m a planner. At first I thought it was a pantser, because I wrote my first novel without any kind of plan at all, and it turned out fine. (Relatively speaking.) But this turned out to be an anomaly: I was able to write my first book without any written plan because I had been planning it in my head for ten years. Once I moved on to fresh stories, I found that I needed a plan, or else I got lost and the story died.

However, nearly all discussions of pants vs. plan that I’ve read focus on plot and structure. Character, insofar as it’s mentioned at all, is either assumed to be part of the plan (by the planners) or to flow from that same wellspring of mystical inspiration that gives you the rest of the book (the pants). Here is where my technique is different from both the average pantser and the average planner: I plan my plots, but I let my characters take care of themselves. I know who the characters are, of course, but I don’t really know much about their personalities, histories, vices, or virtues before I write the story.

When I say this, a great many writers will recoil in horror. The problem, they say, is that then my characters will be lifeless, mindless plot-puppets going about and doing things because I, the author, have decreed it, and not because it flows naturally from the characters’ motivations. I had this fear myself when I first started this habit. But I discovered that my fears had no basis. The characters I created this way did not read like plot-puppets, but were as fully-fleshed as any other character I ever wrote.

The reason for this is simple: character is established by action. What this means is that it’s possible to learn about a character, even one that you’re writing, by observing what he does, in much the same way that you learn about the character of those around you by observing their actions. If your protagonist saves a kitten in chapter one, and punches his wife in chapter two, that tells you something about who he is. It isn’t actually necessary to have an elaborate understanding of his innermost thoughts in order to write his character; merely knowing what he does can be your starting place. In that way, your plot outline can suffice as a character outline. Your characters are the sort of people who will act in the way that your plot specifies.

If you do this badly, you can still wind up with bad characters. But generally these problems will already be visible in your plot outline. If the plot is implausible and unmotivated, then your characters will be implausible and unmotivated as well. But if your plot is taut and consistent, then in general the characters you discover while writing will hum.

The only downside to this is that I know my characters much better by the end of the story than the beginning, and I sometimes have to revamp the character’s thoughts and interior monologues from the first part of the story when I rewrite. But as writing problems go, this barely qualifies as a nuisance.

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Chuck Wendig has this to say:

You learn early on how to write. But for most authors it takes a long time to learn how they in particular write. Certain processes, styles, genres, character types, POVs, tenses, whatever — they will come more naturally to you than they do to others. And some won’t come naturally at all. Maybe you’ll figure this out right out of the gate. But for most, it just takes time — time filled with actual writing — to tease it out.

(Warning: the rest of the post at link, as well as nearly everything ever written by ol’ Wendig, is NSFW.)

So, Chuck is exactly right here. And this is one of the hard things for newbie writers to grok — or at least, it was hard for me to accept. There were lots of books written by Famous and Successful writers, people who have sold way, way more books and stories than I probably ever will, and they tell you the way to do it. And who are you to disagree?

(Actually, pretty much every writing book I’ve ever read says that you may do it differently. But eager young writers looking for the keys to the kingdom tend to overlook those.)

And in that vein, I’d like to tell a story about how I broke through five years of writers’ block.

I got two pieces of advice as a young writer. The first was not to just write one thing. Don’t just have The Novel that you work on for years and years and years, as that leads to stagnation and spinning your wheels on something that just isn’t gonna work. The second was to recognize that you have a million words of garbage to write before you write something worthwhile, so you should just accept the fact that your first n stories/novels are going to suck.

Unfortunately, these interacted in a really bad way in my head. My problem was that I had The Novel that I wanted to write. It had been occupying headspace in my thoughts for over a decade, and I loved it. But I knew I should write other things as well, and I knew that if I just plunged into The Novel without any experience it would probably suck. So I tried to write other things: short stories, flash fiction, and one or two novellas. None of them were bad, but none were very good. And then, after a while, my well of ideas (other than The Novel) dried up. I was blocked. I didn’t write anything at all for about five years.

Over this time I continued to think about The Novel, but I knew I still wasn’t good enough to write it properly. And I still felt the itch to write something, but I didn’t have the ideas and the motivation to work on anything else. Until, one day, I literally woke up and thought to myself, “Screw this. I’m just gonna write the novel.”

I wrote four chapters (about 50 pages) before I went to bed that day.

I finished the novel in 2-3 months. And guess what? It wasn’t very good. It wasn’t terrible, either, but all of the problems that the writing books said I would have showed up, especially bad pacing and flabby prose. I spent probably another year polishing it, and then a long time trying to submit it and get editors or agents interested. But they all turned it down, for very good reasons, and the book was eventually trunked.

But in the meantime something interesting happened: once I had actually written the big novel that had occupied my mind for so many years, I found I had lots of other stories to write. My writers’ block was destroyed by the simple act of writing the story that I wanted to write, and not worrying about doing it “right.”

That was several years ago. I will eventually return to that first novel and do it in the way that it deserves, but in the meantime I have lots of other things to write.

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Our language only gives us one way to greet each other ("How are you?") and only one way to answer ("Fine"). It’s a lie. But somehow the transparency of the lie makes it easier to bear. We greet each other in the way that people do, and then we slip into silence or share silent embraces, and niceties slip away.

None of us are fine.

The relationship between cousins is interesting. Growing up, my cousins were people that I saw every few months, during holidays and vacations, for a few intense days of card games, fishing, fighting, and laughing. As we’ve become adults, several of us moved further away, and every few months turned into every few years, when we’d gather again for Christmas or a wedding, packing into the house of our mild and patient matriarch to recreate the explosive camaraderie of our youth. But my relationship with my cousins suffers from the great blessing and the great curse of all family relationships: the bond is unchosen and indelible, so in the end it doesn’t really matter how long it’s been since you’ve seen each other. You’re still family.

We’re all bigger now, and many of us bring girlfriends, spouses and children to the reunion. My grandmother is a great-grandmother several times over, and when we get together our children coalesce into a raucous mob that stirs my memories of what the get-togethers with cousins were like when I was little. Of course, our children are actually further removed than cousins, and we spend several conversations failing to remember the details of the nomenclature. Are Luke and Sophia second cousins, or first cousins once removed? Is Tasha Sebastian’s aunt or great-aunt?

It’s the little ones that keep us sane. When we gather for the wake, we take over one of the church’s nurseries and allow our kids to run wild in the play room, taking turns watching over them. They don’t understand what’s going on—for them, this is just a few days’ vacation, extra time spent playing with the cousins. Getting out of the wake and into the childcare room, to see the children shrieking and giggling, is quite a relief.

It is late on a Friday night when I got the call from my mom saying that my uncle had died. My initial reaction is no reaction at all. I immediately turn my attention back towards whatever I had been doing beforehand, and over the next few days I don’t spare much thought for the funeral, other than making the necessary arrangements to attend. There are some cracks here and there, but mostly I’m holding it together.

Then I see him in the casket. He looks really good. Not overly made-up or plastic. He looks like he’s resting. Only his hands give him away, as they seem to have shriveled and taken on a black undertone.

But I go to pieces.

I burst out crying nearly as soon as I go in to see him, and it’s a while before I can even think anything coherent. The family shares embraces, and we wet each others shoulders with tears. There are words, but they don’t matter. There’s nothing we can say that defeats the reality of the resting man in the front with shriveled black hands.

Laughter and weeping alternate like the steps of a dance.

It’s been so long since we were all together—we have to laugh and tell ridiculous jokes and insult each other and laugh at the insults. This is what we do. To do any different would cede too much to death.

The night after the funeral, we all gather in the hotel, all of the cousins and spouses and aunts and uncles, the siblings and children of the deceased, and we have fun. We eat pizza and tuna salad and cookies, and we tell stories. About Uncle Brian growing up. About fishing trips and diarrhea. Things his kids got away with. Things his kids didn’t get away with. No one cries tonight. It’s a good night.

I’ve written nearly a thousand words now, and hardly said a thing about my uncle himself. This doesn’t seem right. But it’s is partly deliberate: most of you who read this didn’t know Brian, and no eulogy I could write would communicate even a speck of who we was. But everyone knows grief and loss (or will come to know it sooner than they think), so I hope that talking about our grief will somehow connect with others who have grieved, or will grieve.

But please don’t think that we grieved in the abstract. At the funeral, we didn’t cry because someone died. We cried for Uncle Brian. And we still miss him.

The funeral lasts nearly three hours, but I don’t mind. My uncle had six children, and all of them speak. I wouldn’t trade those hours for anything.

Afterwards we make a brief procession to the graveyard, where the casket is laid out over the grave. All of the immediate and extended family have taken yellow roses, and one at a time we come and lay them atop the casket and say a final goodbye. My aunt lays her head on the top of the casket and weeps for a minute before leaving her rose. All of the children come by, ending with the youngest, a beautiful ten-year-old girl. She touches her cheek lightly to the casket lid as if giving her father a final kiss.

I’m normally rather cynical about the conventional Christian comforts that people trot out at times like this. But at the funeral my cynicism is shattered. I do not care for philosophical dithering and theological complexities. I do not care whether my atheist, pagan, and other friends think I sound stupid. I care that my uncle is with Jesus.

Bless the Lord, oh my soul

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So it’s that time of year again, when we look back on what we’ve accomplished in shame and embarrassment, then set ourselves unrealistic and unachievable goals for the next year! I’m perhaps a little late, but, hey, I have a once-a-week posting schedule and I’m sticking to it.

Here’s the highlights of 2011 in my writerly life:

  • In January, my story The Last Free Bear was published at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
  • Also in January, Last Words was published at Eschatology Journal.
  • In November, The Judge’s Right Hand was published at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
  • Aside from the sales mentioned above, I submitted seven other stories a total of 31 times to various markets.
  • I completed the first draft of my third novel, The Wedding of Earth and Sky.
  • I completed the first drafts of two other short stories.
  • I wrote 55 blog posts. In December 2011 I had four times as many visitors as in January 2011!
  • I moved across the country, bought a house, and changed jobs. (This was not, strictly speaking, a writing accomplishment, but it has to count for something.)

All in all, not a terrible year. So what am I hoping to do in 2012?

  • Complete more short stories. I’m sort of embarrassed that I only finished two last year. For 2012, I’d like to get at least six first drafts put away.
  • Completely revise The Wedding of Earth and Sky.
  • Decide whether to self-publish this or any subsequent novel.
  • Keep up with my once-a-week blogging schedule.
  • Get all of my short stories published and optioned into movies starring Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson. The plot will be changed beyond all recognition and it will only get 68% at Rotten Tomatoes, but hey, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson.

Happy New Year, everyone!