Tag: writing

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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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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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Tonight I just finished the first draft of a short story. Yeah!

Okay, that’s not such a big deal, since I’ve finished the first drafts of lots of stories, but this is the first one I’ve pulled off in a while. I spent most of the first part of this year writing a novel, then I took a brief break from writing, and the two stories I tried to finish after that just didn’t work out. But this one turned out well.

Granted, it’s a total mess right now, with terrible pacing, a nonsensical conclusion, and some heavyhanded speechifying in the middle. But: it’s a first draft. And it’s done.

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A long, rambling introduction.

A few weeks ago I released phonix 0.8, the latest version of my phonological modeling language. And now that you’ve read the previous sentence, assuming you haven’t already clicked away in boredom, I hear you saying What the heck is a phonological modeling language?

Let me explain. No, let me sum up.

Languages change their sounds over time: Spanish and French have different sounds than Latin, and different sounds from each other. However, there are regular correspondences between the Latin sounds in a word and the resulting sounds in Spanish, and with a good set of rules you can generate Spanish words from Latin ones. However, to do this you need a model of the sounds in Latin and how they relate to each other, and a set of rules that describes how those sounds change over time and what the conditions are for turning one sound into another. This is what phonix does: it defines a special notation for describing a language’s sound system and the rules which apply to that system, then it allows you to apply those rules to lists of words.

All of this demonstrates that I’m a huge language nerd. I majored in Linguistics in college, and I was (as one under-motivated classmate said) "one of those people who reads linguistics books in their spare time". As a language nerd I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the languages used in my stories. And sometimes I think I’m the only one, since most fantasy and science fiction writing sucks a big one one this.

I feel a rant coming on.

Common failure modes of language in SF

Here they are, in decreasing order of fail:

  1. There are only two languages, the Modern and Old-Timey. Everyone speaks Modern, and no one can understand Old-Timey except maybe for the wizard. Guilty of this: Robert Jordan.

The problem with this model is that if the language has changed enough that the older form is incomprehensible, then unless the language community is very small the language should also have split into multiple daughter languages.

  1. There is one language for every country on the map. They are all obvious knock-offs of some familiar language in this world. Nonetheless, the protagonist never meets anyone that he can’t speak with. Guilty of this: Tad Williams.

This is a lot better than option #1, but it contains the problematic assumption that countries only contain one language. Americans, in particular, seem to fall into this assumption because we’re used to our vast, linguistically homogeneous country. But the majority of the countries in the world are home to multiple, mutually unintelligible language groups, and often dozens or hundreds of such groups. In a pre-modern setting, our protagonist should fine that the local vernacular becomes incomprehensible as soon as he’s traveled more than a few days from his house.

  1. There are multiple languages, but there is one common language that everyone speaks, so let’s just use that and keep all of the other languages out of it. Guilty of this: J.R.R. Tolkein.

This is tolerable, and it’s this approach that’s taken by Tolkein and those of his followers who bothered to care. There is often something of a handwave to this explanation—the author has posited this in order to avoid having to actually think about the languages in their setting too deeply—but at least it’s superficially plausible and has historical precedent.

  1. OMG SO MANY LANGUAGES. There are lots of languages, and they all have a distinctive phonology, syntax, and vocabulary. The historical relationships between the languages are well-documented and understood. They have their own writing systems. Really, there’s far more information about the languages of this world than anyone could reasonably hope to assimilate.

I actually don’t know any published authors in this category. Mark Rosenfeld has done amazing work in documenting his world of Almea, but alas he’s never been published. Such is the fate of many a conlanger.

So now you’re depressed. Your options are to write about language in your setting badly, or to spend years and years elaborating something that most readers don’t care about anyway.

There is one more option.

Pretend that it doesn’t exist. I read an interesting article the other day about how language is handled—or, more accurately, isn’t handled—in the Magic: the Gathering tie-in novels. (Scroll down to the "Letter of the Week" to see the discussion.) A letter asked how characters from different planes of the Multiverse can talk to each other without needing to learn a foreign language, and the author responded quite directly with "just ignore that":

The risk is over-explaining. To use a Star Trek example again, this time in a negative way—it’s like the episode where they explain why all the humanoid races on the show all basically look alike. Ugh. It’s one thing to poke fun at the show’s makeup budget and do armchair xenobiological critiques of how the aliens resemble each other so much, but it’s quite another to expect the show to provide an in-universe explanation of those budgetary or story-based limitations. Either you didn’t think it was a problem before and now this explanation throws an awkward spotlight on it, which diminishes your enjoyment of the formula, or you did think it was a problem but you had learned to live with it but now suddenly you have to live with the show’s one groan-worthy and set-in-stone explanation forever.

An explanation like "Well, everybody across the Multiverse happens to speak the same language because a long time ago blahblahblah" or "Well, all planeswalkers find that they can communicate just fine because the spark blahblahblah" may ultimately cause more problems than it fixes. It might actually reduce enjoyment to patch over one of those weird, load-bearing plot-holes that are kinda ugly but that make the fantasy genre possible.

Though it makes me want to cry a little, this guy has a really good point. No amount of world-building will cover everything. And if you don’t have the skills or the patience to make the languages, why bother? More importantly, if your story doesn’t need the linguistic detail, then maybe you should just leave it out.

Not me, though.

We all have our obsessions. I’ll be using phonix to apply the sound changes for deriving Prasi from Old Tzingrizil. And I’ll be having a great time of it, even if no-one cares.

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Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you the most awful piece of extruded fantasy product that I’ve ever had the misfortune to read in its entirety:

Man, this thing was awful

A March into Darkness by Robert Newcomb. If you’ve read this book, then you know what’s coming. It was just… I mean… words fail me. This was bad in nearly every way that it is possible for a book to be bad. I would never have read the entire thing, except that at the time I was under unusual circumstances: I was stuck in a room with nothing else to read for an entire weekend, and one of my fellow room-sitters had this book with him. It was either read this book, or stare at the wall. I chose to read the book.

In retrospect, staring at the wall may have been less painful.

Let me quickly run down the book’s faults, before we move on to the one thing that the book did well.

  1. The protagonist was a complete idiot, and a grating, indulgent whiner at that. Main character stupidity was the main driver of the plot for the first quarter of the book.
  2. The worldbuilding was a fourth-generation Xeroxed copy of a Dungeons and Dragons cliche guide. There was nothing inventive or surprising about any of it. (Well, except for the invisible flying magical manta ray army. That was kind of cool.)
  3. The dialog was awful. It was so banal and so predictable that I learned to just skim the pages of dialog looking for the longer-than-average paragraphs, because that was where the exposition nuggets were buried. Everything else was the most juvenile, cringe-inducing conversation that you’ve ever read.
  4. The characters were factory-built from plastic parts. I can’t remember a single one of them aside from their most generic specifiers: “the protagonist”, “the girl” (there’s only one of significance), “the wizard”, etc.
  5. The plot problems were all solved by a combination of coincidence and application of magical technobabble. The main antagonist is supposedly invincible because he has a kind of magical martial arts training that takes centuries to complete. A major plot point is the protag trying to find the ancient monastery where this technique is taught and begin training, so that he has at least a chance of standing up to the baddie. And then, about 100 pages before the end, they discover a magic spell they can cast that will allow them to skip straight to being a grand-master. And why did we spend all of this time reading about the %!#$&^ training?

But there was one saving grace. One thing, one thing that kept me turning pages instead of going back to the comforting tedium of wall-watching.

The plot moved like a crack money on rocket skates.

Had I been reading under normal circumstances, I probably would not have kept reading long enough for the book to get its plot hooks into me. And even after I had sunk a few hours into the book, I looked up about once a chapter and said, “Why am I still reading this dreck?” But I kept going. Not just because I had nothing else to do, but because I actually wanted to know what happened next. When I had to put the book away for an hour, I kept thinking about it. The girl was in danger! The wizard was going to discover something magical! The protagonist was angsting about something! Would the girl be saved? What did the wizard discover? Will the protag stop being such a putz? I was aware—painfully, eye-gougingly aware—of the fact that every one of these plot points was a cliche. But nonetheless, I cared. Not about the characters, and certainly not about the setting, but about what happened next.

In part, the relentless nature of the plot is what made the later betrayals so galling. When I wondered How would the protag overcome the baddie?, the answer turned out to be By using a magic spell to make the previous 200 pages of martial arts training irrelevant. This made me mad, because I was actually invested in the answer. Not very invested, mind you, but invested enough to be upset that the resolution was so stupid. In fact, it was only as I reached the end of the book that the novel’s full stupidity began to weigh on me, because I realized that the one good thing in this trainwreck was itself going to be derailed, as all of the dilemmas of the plot were resolved in the cheesiest and most obnoxious way possible. And so I resigned myself to skimming over page after page of banal, repetitive dialog and burning through hordes of doomed redshirts on my way to the climax, knowing that it, too, was bound to be a disappointment. And it was a disappointment.

But I did learn some things along the way.

First, plot matters. Many readers get their fix from character, ideas, or prose more than plot. I would normally count myself as one of those. But even a convicted setting-and-style junkie like me couldn’t help but be taken in by the sweet plot crack that Newcomb put into his book, and I kept coming back for another hit. Even after it was clear that the plot had been cut with some nasty stuff, and even after I was sure I was going to regret it. I still wanted more. After a while I started to hate myself, wishing I could kick the habit, but the book would not let me go until I had burned through to the very last page.

The second point is don’t disappoint your reader. If the conclusion of the book had actually satisfied me rather than dissolving into a mushy pile of cliche and frustration, I might have tentatively recommended it. I mean, for a certain kind of reader, the kind who doesn’t care about characterization or prose style or anything else, this could actually be a good book. The opening is kind of interesting. At first it seems like it’s going to go somewhere compelling. If there had been any follow-through, if the author had actually tried to solve his plot problems rather than just hand-wave them away, it might have been kind of okay. Not great literature, mind you, but a pulpy little fantasy romp. Instead it was a disaster.

It turns out that Newcomb’s publishing contract was cancelled after the sequel to this book. I can’t imagine why.