Anica Lewis

RavenCon and Advanced Fiction Final

Sun, 04 May 2008 06:49:52 GMT

Late again! I'll try to do better. It's still within the right week, though, and since I only ever claimed to try for once-a-week entries, that's about good enough.

This past weekend, I went with a group of friends to RavenCon. This is a science fiction and fantasy convention with a literary focus, and at least two of the friends who came with me also write fiction (including fantasy). I'd been to the con twice before, and it was great. This year was also a good time, though the panels were perhaps down a little in terms of literature. (The con was ambitious this year in other ways, such as the masquerade.) My three con-going occurrences of most note writing-wise are as follows.

1. I got a fun writing idea. This happens to me all the time at conventions and conferences. Maybe it's just being saturated in a writerly environment, making me think of things in terms of how I could write them; oh, wait, no, I do that constantly. Maybe it's hearing other people toss ideas around. Who knows. Anyway, the very first panel I attended upon my arrival Friday evening was called "Writing the Perfect Blurb." (I could tell from the description, and it was confirmed in the panel, that the name should have been something like "Writing the Perfect Cover Letter.") The panelists were several authors and an editor of a sci-fi/fantasy magazine. At one point, an author panelist was trying to point out good versus bad ways to approach an editor.
"So, let's say you want Ed" - the editor panelist's name was indeed Ed - "to read your story on . . . oh . . . cross-dressing dragons."
"Ha," I thought. "How would you have cross-dressing dragons? I don't see -"
"DING," said my brain. I took notes. Now, I have actually written this story (more on that after we leave RavenCon).

2. I learned things about podcasting. This could be important because of my hope to podcast Dragons Over London this summer. A number of RavenCon's guests had podcasts, and there were several panels on the subject. I went to one on podcasting for promotion. One panelist was an author who had podcasted a book, and there were three other people who just had podcasts (though they sounded interesting; two were comedy, and one was about technology and the future). Anyway, they talked mostly about their content (largely interviews), and I took notes, but then asked the author some questions afterward. She recommended that I go to the hour-long workshop on podcasting later; I said I could make it to the first half, probably, but the second half coincided with a panel on literary worldbuilding. She was nice, and said that if I came she'd try to tailor it to me.
I did go to the workshop. The author, who was the moderator, asked a question or two that were helpful to me, but the workshop was largely on technical stuff. This could have been fascinating to me, I think, if put in a way that was not utterly terrifying. The panelists had brought something like twelve microphones between them, massive amounts of wire, microphone stands, interfaces, laptops, cases, headphones, and more. The table looked like someone's attempt to hotwire an alien radio station. Also, most of the other people at the panel seemed to already know a lot about podcasting. As best I could tell, they were there in order to say things like,
"Oh, the Luna. That's a nice one. I got one of those on eBay for sixty bucks. I got really lucky."
It didn't help that I had to leave halfway through. However, when I reached the worldbuilding panel and told Becky briefly about what had happened, she assured me that podcasting is not scary and alien, but doable.

3. I almost learned things about worldbuilding. I say "almost" because, while the panelists gave lots of good, true, important advice, I'd heard practically all of it before. I've been to panels on worldbuilding - in fact, I'm pretty sure I went to one at RavenCon last year. Anyway, a few basic points for those who wonder what kind of things the panel covered:

Do:
- be internally consistent.
- think through all the implications of anything you change. (This ties into the previous Do.) If your magic system allows people to easily speak with the dead, realize that you will have trouble writing a murder mystery.
- make the rules clear quickly, at least to the extent to which your point of view character would know them. If your POV character is a psychic but can only read the minds of redheaded men, make this clear in some way, or people will wonder why the character isn't reading the mind of that woman who holds the vital information. Likewise, if your character can read minds and you don't let readers know, they'll feel baffled and left behind when he starts peeking into someone's thoughts. Possibly the worst is to have a POV character who clearly has some powers (i.e. we know she's a mage), but does not explain how powerful they are or what they do. You could probably get away with one or the other, as long as you give an idea of both (i.e. she controls fire, but is only a novice and much less skilled than older and more practiced mages).

Don't:
- assume all of your people are nice, nonagressive, and upstanding (unless there's a reason they would be). If your world has people who use magic and people who don't, and mages don't rule the world, there had better be a reason why not.
- make your entire world - or even its countries - a monoculture. Even people who speak the same language often have different cultures. Within any group of reasonable size (a country, a town, possibly even a large family) will be conflict: any time when people have different priorities, they will have conflict. With different philosophies, alliances, politics, etc., potential for such conflict increases.
- make your aliens like humans without a reason. If they evolved on a planet just like Earth, maybe.
- make things too regular. This is rather like the monoculture issue; if your vision for Country A is that it is extremely capitalist, that doesn't mean that every single person there favors the capitalist system. Not to say that you need to have a token communist or anything, but don't make your characters carbon copies. This goes for natural things as well. You have to be careful not to throw people off, but most rules do have exceptions.

As someone who writes a lot of fantasy (and has put loads of work into worldbuilding), my favorite advice ever on writing magic came from a book called The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy. (I highly recommend this book and its follow-up, The Fantasy Writer's Companion. Funnily enough, I got both at RavenCon.) It has a lot of great advice, but I found the part on magic systems particularly helpful, as magic is a huge part of any world which uses it. Not only does it set parameters for the possible, it can change the tone of the world. The Complete Guide suggests considering three things when designing your magic system and analyzing how it will affect the rest of your world: power, price, and availability to the general population. The book talks about these factors in terms of ratings from 1 to 10. It's actually pretty easy to translate a system into numbers. For example, magic in the Harry Potter universe is probably an 8 or 9 in power (can do almost anything possible within the world), a 2 or 3 in price (many spells cost nothing in materials and virtually no time or effort; most spell components of even difficult spells seem to be easily obtained within the world), and a 1 or 2 in availability (most people cannot use magic, at least not under ordinary circumstances, and cannot be taught).

Interestingly, you can design a world for any combination of ratings; it's just going to be a world more or less shaped by its magic. For example, if someone told me to design a world where magic had a 1 in power, a 1 in price, and a 10 in availability, I might set up a system wherein all the people can, by snapping their fingers, change the colors of their eyes. Common, easy, and fairly useless magic. If you were to, say, change the price to 10, you would have a world where no one was likely to use magic at all (say, it takes a lifetime of study and the replacement of your hand with a fist-sized diamond to change the color of your eyes). On the other hand, you could have a world with a 10 in power, a 10 in availability, and a 1 in price. Now everyone has magic that can do anything. Your world might be chaotic, but could certainly be written. A 5 in each might represent a world in which all women (or the firstborn of every family, or all people of a fairly common race) can use magic, which is powerful enough to do most things modern technology can, but for which the more powerful effects require years of training and hours of set-up time. If you want a fun worldbuilding prompt, take a ten-sided die (or random number generator set from 1 to 10), roll three times, and set up magic systems to go with the numbers you get.

My major fantasy world uses a magic system which is probably a 9 power, 4 or 5 price, 3 or 4 availability. If you write fantasy and care to comment on a magic system you've developed, feel free!

This brings me, sort of, to the story I wrote on cross-dressing dragons. I enjoyed it very much. I find that, no matter how I work at the short stories I write for class, most of my favorite short stories are ones for which the idea just came to me. This is the first such that I turned in for Advanced Fiction. (Most ideas I get are for longer pieces.) I edited it and turned it in as the final story for my Advanced Fiction class.

I feel it worth noting that my Advanced Fiction class had a barbecue at the end of the semester, during which two of my classmates made and played a drinking game based on English-major terms. They called it "Allegory." Since we mostly knew each other in the context of writing, such terms kept coming up. Someone would use words like "narrative flow" or "point-of-view violation." "Allegory!" they would shout, and take a drink of beer. Becky and I, who don't really drink, were highly amused. Eventually, both players ended up in the host's neighbors' wading pool. (I think the neighbors were lending it to our host, as it was in his house's yard, but he said it belonged to them.)

Just thought I'd mention it as this blaze of nerdy, writerly glory seemed an appropriate end for an excellent creative writing class. As a hopeful creative writing professor-to-be, I'd love to teach classes as well as Professor Robbins did us.

In Which I Write Things Which Are Not Fiction

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:10:13 GMT

. . . because I had to, that's why. Incidentally, this is why this week's entry is so late: it is the week before final exams here, and also the last week of classes, so I had to *cough* finish - by which I definitely do not mean "write from the beginning" - two papers this week. One was my philosophical and practical reasons for banning smoking; the other was a motivational analysis of David Bowie. If you're going to write nonfiction, specific and interesting is the way to go. :)

Anyway, we had a very good last Advanced Fiction class, and not just because the professor brought cake. We had each written a two-to-three-page piece for the class, and the professor printed them onto transparencies. He had a person pick one out of the stack at random, then had someone edit it on the overhead projector (with some class input). It was really helpful! (I just realized that I'd never given my professor's name! He is, in fact, best-selling war writer David L. Robbins, and you can check out his cred here.) Anyway, Professor Robbins is great at telling us why an edit is a good one. In one case, a fantasy piece with winged characters, a character was trying to be sneaky. The sentence read:

"[He] flapped his wings." A sentence followed indicating that he would fly in order to be quieter than walking.

I read and reread these sentences, then said, "I really want that to say 'he spread his wings,' not 'he flapped his wings,' but I don't know why."

Professor Robbins pointed out that this was contradictory onomatopoeia - "flapping" is not quiet. This seems obvious, actually, but at the time I just couldn't see why I wanted to change that verb.

Good news! Spindle is up online! It looks excellent. Also, there you can read my short story "Five Days of Health Rabbitry" (under "prose" on the left-hand sidebar).

In other good news, RavenCon is this weekend! I have attended this literarily-focused sci-fi/fantasy convention twice already, and it has been fabulous. My science fiction/fantasy club friends and I are heading to the con today, and I expect to learn great new things and have loads of fun.

THAT'S What He Meant!

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:51:33 GMT

I've finally worked out that issue from The Dogwatchers. The protagonist's motivation is secure. The rat is dead. I can proceed.

As I may have mentioned before, my Advanced Fiction professor talks a lot about active protagonists. We hear the phrase "who is driving this story?" about three times per class. It's pretty valid, really, given that we tend to edit three stories per class (after finishing the scenes at the beginning of the semester), and many of our stories need that question to be asked of them. In the past, I've had some trouble with this, but I think I've finally really got it, so I feel like sharing.

The first thing that gave me trouble is obvious: like most rules, this has exceptions. Not every great story is driven by its protagonists. When our professor first told us this, someone immediately asked about The Great Gatsby; you could tell the professor was waiting for it. Yes, passive protagonists can sometimes be done well, but in some ways, they're actually more difficult. You have to give them a reason to be present at all the important scenes (because your story will be a real letdown if you never see the good stuff, and that's assuming people can even understand it). When a protagonist drives the story, he/she is almost always present, because these things would not happen without him/her.

What stumped me for a long time is that being physically active does not an active protagonist make. You can have a character who never stops to catch her breath, but who is still not driving the story. If all she does is react to others or follow instructions, she's not being active. Your protagonist must be why the story happens. This is what threw me, as I think of many stories as centering around a conflict or problem usually caused by the villain, not the protagonist. For example, detectives do not cause the murders they investigate, yet the story could not happen without the murders. Good guys, I argued, do not start fights with the bad guys. The bad guys start fights - and thus stories - because they're the bad guys.

I finally found one question which simplified things enough for me to really get it: Whose story is this? In the case of The Great Gatsby, the story is Gatsby's, though the POV is not. Usually this is not the case. Even in stories wherein the protagonist is essentially reacting to another character or event, the story quickly becomes defined by the way in which the character acts. Think of The Hobbit: the story starts with Gandalf and the dwarves telling Bilbo to do something. Does this mean that Bilbo has no hope to be anything but reactive? Of course not. Whose story is The Hobbit? If we put aside the title and even the point of view, it's still Bilbo's story. Let's say the book was written from Gandalf's point of view, or that of one of the dwarves - pick one. Would it make the story belong to that person? No. It would be Bilbo's story with a strange - one might even say poor - choice of POV character. At best, it would be a fantastical Great Gatsby; at worst, confusing and boring. (Can you imagine all the scenes wherein Bilbo would have to explain how, while the POV dwarf was wandering in the woods/hiding in a barrel/etc., Bilbo was off doing awesome things which advanced the plot? Besides, what about things about which Bilbo doesn't immediately tell his comrades? It would just appear later: "Oh yeah, and I have this magical ring.")

This is also, in my opinion, the best reason to change POV. Of my four longer works, two have included POV changes, both written in third person close. Rabbit and Cougar alternates between Rabbit's POV and Cougar's, switching at every chapter. Although I wrote it years before this class, I noticed that the chapter length varied based on whose point of view seemed most important at the time, especially toward the end, when the two spend some time separated. Since Rabbit and Cougar travel together for most of the story, that covers the "will he be there for the important scenes?" pretty well, but I think it's best to write the POV of the person most integral to those scenes, if that viewpoint makes sense to use. The person with the highest stake tends to make an interesting POV. For Lord of the Dark Downs, I switched between seven viewpoints. Yes, it's a lot, and it worried me at times. However, the times I had the most trouble were those when I found the character I was writing was not the one most heavily invested in the situation. Happily, since I wasn't doing any sort of pattern, I would then just rewrite that section for the point of view of a character whose motivations in the scene were more interesting to me. This means that some characters' points of view appear more often than those of other characters, but I think the story benefits, and I don't think any one character has so little to say that he or she should be taken out.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share that because it helped me see some things more clearly.

My website has not gone up yet. I will note when it does. It's still pretty exciting to me! :)

You Know, That Thing I Do That Isn't Writing . . .

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:35:21 GMT

I've been reading a lot. This is notable partly because I haven't had much time to read in the recent past, and partly because I'm reading nonfiction, which I rarely do except for very specific little bits that are research for writing. At the moment, I'm researching a different kind of writing: a paper for class, accompanied by a presentation, which I am thrilled to be doing on David Bowie. Thus, I've been marinating in biography for days.

This means, sadly, that I've had little chance to write. I know what the next step needs to be in The Dogwatchers, but I'm having some plot issues that are inextricably tangled with a dead rat. Funny, the way plots work sometimes. There are two scenes I really need to add, and I so far have a plot which goes as follows:

*Plot skips merrily along* Death of rat *Plot dusts itself off and continues skipping* Action C, a consequence to action B, which is a consequence of action A, and must be completed while dead rat is still moderately fresh.

You may notice a problem in the absence of actions A and B. I am currently almost as far as action C, but just realized that I really need B in there to justify C (which I earlier thought would be all right on its own), and I need A to happen for B to happen. Thus, I need to try to insert actions A and B during the plot's initial skipping, because - convenient though it might be - I just don't think they can happen while the dead rat lies there, mouldering. It amuses me no end to have this strange limitation.

I had a short story idea the other day, too, so we'll see whether that goes anywhere. At any rate, not much to report this week, but I did put some thought into The Dogwatchers today, and hope to get back on it tonight or soon after.

Plans!

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:22:48 GMT

This past week, I got the official notice that one of my short stories will be published in the online literary journal Spindle. I submitted to the journal through my friend Michelle from the Advanced Studies in England program - hooray for writerly friends! Anyway, I expect much coolness from the journal. Check it out here. I filled out the publishing contract and sent it in. Exciting!

What's also exciting about this is that it has me in gear for work on my website, which will hopefully be up by the end of the week. I don't know whether you can tell just by reading it, but I've just upgraded this livejournal account; this will allow me (and by "me," I mean "Becky," my fantastic and web-designery roommate) to put the blog directly on my website. I won't put it on the front page, because I don't want visitors to have to scroll - certainly not this much, if at all - on the front page, but it will have a part of the site. I've owned the domain name www.anicalewis.com for about a year now. An article for writers strongly recommended buying "www.yourname.com" ahead of time, just so that someone else doesn't use it. Now, I actually have server space (a vacant lot on the Internet!).

I read a tutorial on HTML, and hope to learn more; until then, Becky will help me. I've looked up several dozen authors' websites - those of my favorite authors, and then just a lot of pages from a database of authors' websites - and found a few things in common, giving me an idea of what I want on my site, at least to start with. Obviously there are things I can't put up until I'm actually published (even, in some cases, until I have a book out), but I plan to have links on the front page to pages containing:

- this journal

- a brief bio of myself, including whatever contact information I deem necessary; I suspect my webspace will provide me with an e-mail address I can use for this

- a list of links I use for writing and which I think might be helpful for other writers

- possibly some form of message board or guestbook, though I might wait until I have reason to think people will use it

- descriptions of (and, where appropriate, links to) publications I have or am going to have (at the moment, Spindle and Reynard's Menagerie)

- possibly an overview of the fantasy world in which I write, though I am nervous about placing much of it on the great unsheltered plains of the Internet, what with the love, research, and years of work I've put into it

- eventually, maybe, my Super Exciting Possible Project, described below

Before moving on to my Super Exciting Possible Project, just a note that if I seem to be missing anything, do tell! Same goes for any general website-building tips you might have. Also, if you really like a particular author's website - beside DWJ's, Neil Gaiman's, Terry Pratchett's, Lemony Snicket's, or J.K. Rowling's, as I have looked at those already - please let me know! :)

Right - on to the Super Exciting Possible Project. During a recent phone conversation, my mom told me about a fellow who was interviewed on NPR about his success in podcasting his novel. (If you want to hear the three-minute interview, it's here - just click on "Listen Now.") The idea is that one reads one's novel aloud in installments, usually weekly, and podcasts them for free. Naturally, this is somewhat scary, as it's essentially giving away for free something for which one put in lots of work. However, I think it could be the perfect solution to a tricky little problem I've had: how to deal with my novella, Dragons Over London.

I like the story a lot, but I've pitched it to agents, and it's just not long enough to be a novel. (It's just over 57,000 words, so much too long for a short story, but not written for young enough readers to be a chapbook or any such thing.) It's one of the most dynamic and accessible of my works, and the only one I think I'd feel really comfortable reading aloud for a podcast, since it's set in the real world and has as its first-person protagonist a young, female American. It's not entirely representative of my work, not being set in my usual fantasy world, but it is fantasy, and I think it's lots of fun. I've already read some of it aloud to WordShop, where it was well-received, and I think it would work well for the weekly format that the chapters tend to end in some form of cliffhanger. Also, my aunt, who works with gifted children, gave the story to the father of one of her students, who read it aloud to her before bedtimes. The father then wrote me a nice letter about how he and his daughter (I believe she was nine years old) liked it, with some constructive criticism for the parts they liked less, and a copy of one of his books (he's a poet). Besides, much as I love the story, I did write it for NaNoWriMo - unlike my other novels, which took at least a year or two each, Dragons Over London took thirty-four days. I have less to lose on it that way - though I do love the story.

So. Obviously, I'd have a bit of editing to do, and I'd want to read the whole thing aloud to myself to see how it sounds. The main thing I wonder about there is whether to do voices. They'd be fun and interesting, that's for sure, but I'd have to not only decide on voices for all the characters but practice accents: the story contains several English and Irish characters and one from Finland. I would hate to do the accents badly, but it seems like it might be lame not to even try. The other question is whether to provide a downloadable file of each chapter as it becomes available in podcast form.

At any rate, this might go up over the summer. Anyone who has thoughts on it, feel free to chime in!

Even on a Slow Week for Writing . . .

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 02:24:06 GMT

. . . I do get some things done!

I just finished printing a short fiction and a nonfiction piece to enter into two of five writing contests for students here (the other three concern plays and poetry). My entire Advanced Fiction class has been more or less pressured to enter by our professor. It's a good thing; we really have no excuse not to! We've all got the work lying around anyway! Still, it means stiff competition. WordShop, too, has notified members of the contest. My freshman year, I won the fiction contest (the Tiberius Graccus Jones award then; that name is now on the nonfiction contest). So it - well, I don't want to say "it can be done," both because that's obvious inasmuch as someone has to win, and because the "it" in question is really a different contest now in terms of entries and probably also judges - but it could theoretically be done by a person who was, to some greater or lesser extent, me. Even if it's someone else in my class (at least one other of whom won one of these awards before), that would be quite cool.

Besides that, I really didn't get a lot of writing done this week. I did a bit of editing and also some worldbuilding, and I made two unsatisfying attempts to restart my last story from the point of view of a more-active character. I love the character; I think I'm just choosing the wrong jumping-off point for the story. Anyway, I have another sort of rough story idea I'd like to work on, so I may give the first one a rest for awhile. If nothing else, working on that story has allowed me to build the kingdom in which it takes place to a greater level of detail. I now know how their rulers and other members of the royal family write their official signatures. :P For what it's worth.

Our Advanced Fiction class this week encountered more inactive protagonists, though thankfully not mine this time. Funnily enough, the same person who took so long to realize and accept that my last story was fantasy was the most adamant that one of this week's stories did not contain a supernatural element that it claimed, in plain language, that a character had.

"It never occurred to me that he could really have telekinesis," she said. "I just assumed from the beginning that it was a metaphor."

"You resist fantasy!" I told her.

"You know, I do!" she said.

To be fair, in this case, she was right. Still, one wonders how to show some people that a story actually is fantasy . . .

But anyway, regarding the inactive protagonists: it's an easier trap to fall into than I once thought. Our professor has prescribed antagonists to motivate our protagonists, many of whom could be said to struggle against their worlds, to the extent that they really struggle at all. He hasn't required that we write antagonists into our next works, but I'd like to try. We'll see how that goes!

Follow-Up

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:05:36 GMT

Unsurprisingly, I got hit for having a passive protagonist and for some plot problems that I just didn't have time to fix before sending the story out. What did surprise me was that some people had trouble realizing it was fantasy. Last semester, of the four short stories I wrote for the class (mostly the same classmates), two of them prominently featured lycanthropes; I love fantasy and talk about it often; I have misinterpreted other people's stories as fantasy often enough that it's become a running joke in the class. However, of my story's fourteen pages, one person didn't get that it was fantasy until page six, and another person until page eight. Now, if you will, consider the following:

Page One:
- mention of the Royal Mage Academy

Page Two:
- dead body levitated by magic, done by a person explicitly called the Royal Mage

Page Four:
- mages run around changing the colors of things

Page Five:
- mage changes the color of POV character's clothing, with magic special effects at center stage

Page Six:
- prince arrives on magical flying horse (at this point, Person Two speculated that it COULD be fantasy, while Person One went, and I quote, "AHHH! What? I bought the healer/mage academy thing, but nowhere else did you indicate that this world was otherwise extraordinary!")

Page Eight:
- prince's backstory includes enchanting doors and mirrors - at the use of the verb "enchanting," Person Two conceded that the setting could be fantasy.

Funny? I thought so.

Storytime!

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:33:40 GMT

This week, I volunteered to write one of the short stories for our Advanced Fiction class. It felt rather daring, as I had no idea at the time (last Tuesday) what I would write about, but since we all have to write them anyway, it seemed just as well to go ahead and do it during a less-busy week. So, after spending several days actively trying to think of something, I finally got an idea on Saturday and started writing the story in the evening (due Sunday at 8:00 pm). I spent over six hours on Sunday - most of my awake time - finishing it, and had no time to edit; it was two minutes late before I could even run spell check, and the professor isn't big on lateness. (Not that many professors are.)

So anyway, after working for most of my Sunday on this story and then sending it out, I sort of flopped back and thought, "What have I done?" Not with horror, as it might sound, but actual curiosity. My roommate, also a writer, understood: sometimes, after coming up for air from a long session of writing, you realize that you know very little about your story. Is it good? That's the main thing, actually. If, for example, I tried yesterday to remember whether I had done a specific thing - did I resolve that plot issue? - it wasn't hard. But had I done it well? Ye gods, had I done any of it well? I was highly tempted to hang around anxiously as my roommate read the story, and I did ask her later what she thought. I still mean to reread it before class.

The story was pretty fun. (It has no title at the moment, thus my referring to it as "the story.") It's set in my fantasy world; unlike my longer works, which are almost all set in that one world, my short stories are often either modern-day fantasy, set in alternate, less-developed fantasy worlds, or even not fantasy at all. I like having the room a longer work gives me to unfold the complex world I've spent so much time building. Don't get me wrong - I do my best to avoid info dumps, and I think I'm pretty good about it. It's just that I do think the world makes more sense as you see more of it, and you see more of it when there's more story. Still, I enjoyed this one, and think it mostly worked fairly well.

Also atypical for me, the story begins with a body. Obviously, given that, the late character is hardly beloved of the readers; he doesn't even get a name for awhile. However, his death is important to the story; most of it is about how his household reacts (and the kingdom, as this is in fact a king). Although the story doesn't include the king's actual death, it's unusual for me to treat death much at all, and it made an interesting writing experience.

My prediction is that I will catch it in class today for having a passive protagonist: our professor is not a fan of such at all. I don't think my point of view character is all that passive, but he's not all that active, either. Besides that, I didn't have enough time to edit, so there are a few things that come up early and are not all that well-resolved. There are also a few things I wondered about, namely, terms referring to the fantasy world without being explained (in this story, for example, a slang word for "mage," and a day of the Querran week). I'm not going to explain a term my POV character would accept without question (and that no one else would need to have explained), because that would be difficult to do well, at best. My roommate said, and this is what I would hope for above all else, that she finds these bits to hint at a larger and more complex - and thus more real and interesting - world. I think the best fantasy writers can do this. Even people whose writing is set in the real world can do this, just creating the feeling that their characters, cities, etc. go on outside the specific story they're telling. There can be a fine line, of course; sometimes you just confuse people.

So that's my take at the moment, but we'll see; Advanced Fiction class starts in half an hour!

As Long As No One Runs Off to Brighton . . .

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:37:12 GMT

I've finished the first two chapters of The Dogwatchers and started the third, and I'm getting a very Jane Austen feel from it. Partly, this is because it begins with a young girl who must go and live with a family of richer people who aren't very nice to her. (I'd also like to note that I did write most of it before beginning to read Jane Eyre for the first time, which I just did.) I like the feel of the story so far - a bit downcast at the moment, but in that sort of cozy way, if that makes sense. Very The Secret Garden / A Little Princess and, though by complete coincidence, very Jane Eyre.

The mean people with whom our heroine is staying have been a fun challenge for me. I've been lucky enough in life to not know a lot of really mean people (let alone bad people - I've rarely written actual villains, though I have plans for more in the future), and even fewer with whom I've had to spend long periods of time. Envisioning even their behavior, let alone their motivations, can be tough; I keep wondering whether they are mean enough. Some authors I like - for example, my favorite author, Diana Wynne Jones - have had extended experience with thoughtless, irresponsible, even downright villainous people in their lives, and I certainly do not envy them. Part of the reason I became a psychology major was to write better characters; I'm currently in a class called "Motivation and Emotion," and am keenly interested in its uses in writing fiction. So we'll see. I feel pretty good about it so far.

I've had to pause on that, because my spring break ended; on the other hand, being back at school means I will soon be writing short stories for Advanced Fiction again! It also means meetings of Wordshop, the writers' group of William & Mary. We met tonight, though I didn't submit anything for this meeting; most of my short stories (and chapters of longer works) are too long. It's a good group. We have hour-long meetings every other week (with informal meetings the other weeks to talk about books and so on), for which people send in writing. Two to five people read their work aloud, and we talk about it, attempt constructive criticism, etc. We've had everything from poetry to fanfiction, and I had the group look at the first eight or so (short) chapters of Dragons Over London, my novella.

"Reynard's Menagerie" has not yet sent me the contract for the story they're publishing, but Michelle has finished her paperwork with them (sent the contract back in), so I know that such does actually happen. How exciting!

. . . And a New Beginning!

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:21:58 GMT

Immediately after ending Lord of the Dark Downs, I began work on The Dogwatchers. So far, I'm quite pleased; I've just started the second chapter, and things are going well (well, not for the characters, but things are going as planned by me, so well for one of us, anyway). I did run into one thing, though, that has given me trouble in the past, so I thought I'd muse a bit on narration.

My professor of Advanced Fiction has instilled in me great value of active pace and staying close to the characters, and has encouraged us to cut narration from our work. He compares the POV character to a marionette, saying that the reader steps into this character, but that during narration, the marionette hangs limp, doing nothing. This makes sense, but at the same time, narration can be a useful tool, and I have seen it done well. After the amount of narration-bashing we see in class, though - and each creative writing class tends to have a lot of impact on me, as I feel like I haven't had many of them - I find difficulty using it. I feel almost guilty. Normally, this isn't a problem, as it's easy to avoid, and work does often improve when it's more active, but the beginning of this second chapter has presented me with an issue which gave me problems even before narration became a quasi-taboo: passage of time.

I remember in my first novel that I followed the POV character for at least two full days, maybe three, before finally doing a sort of "over the next few weeks" transition. This is precisely what I'm dealing with now; in Chapter One, a character comes to live in a new place, and the events of Chapter Two deal mostly with what happens about two weeks later, but I really want to convey a feel of what's been happening in the meantime, particularly so that the reader understands why the character dislikes her new home. I can think of several levels of narration with which this could be accomplished:

Lots: Begins with something like "over the next two weeks," but goes into a page or two of detail on what sort of thing happened. Uses "would" phrases, as in "she would go to work in the mornings," and comes across as a bit annoyingly inactive, but conveys daily goings-on fairly well, and seems almost to fit into the style of the story so far. This is how I've currently started the chapter.

None: Jump right into the action two weeks later and just show what is going on now in the character's life, living conditions, and so on. This has the advantage of showing, not telling, but the disadvantage of making it harder to convey things which have been happening right along or happen sometimes during the two weeks but not on the day I jump into. It also seems, with the slower pacing of the story, almost relentless, as if perhaps some narration is called for.

Compromise: Jump in, but include some notes which are narrationish to note whether something has been happening right along or is new. ("This was no surprise, as it had been going on all week.") These may be more acceptable from, say, my professor's point of view (not that he's going to read this necessarily), as they can spring from character a little more, and I would probably prefer this approach to the harsher "none."

So we'll see. I plan to look at how a few of my favorite authors got this effect - skipping ahead in time has always been tough for me.

A small note on the bright side, and also related to time: I've established the setup of weeks in my fantasy world! I'm constantly worldbuilding, which means a lot of research, so I learn things like the history of the week. (In ancient Rome, they had an eight-day week, and they just used letters for the names of days! Creative, right? But then, this is from the guys who brought you "September," "October," and "December," which actually were the seventh, eighth, and tenth months on their calendar at the time.) I also learned that glass marbles were officially invented in Germany in the 1800s, though both marbles (found in ancient Egypt) and glass (just really freaking old) are, well, really freaking old. So I suppose my character likely has clay marbles . . . good to know.

A Most Productive Weekend!

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:05:40 GMT

This weekend saw two exciting and highly related accomplishments in my writing life: I killed off a character and finished my fourth novel. (Technically, the third was a novella, at around 53,000 words, but this one, at about 79,000 words, is a novel.)

I've never been one for the killing off of characters - ever. I can think of three I have slain in the past, being (in chronological order):

1. An elf sentry. I was at a creative writing camp when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen, and we went to an old graveyard and were told to find a name on a gravestone and write about how that person died. I rebelled at the idea of not writing fantasy, so I went with . . . perhaps a less-than-likely account as regards the actual owner of the gravestone. The story ended with his death.

2. A dragon at the very beginning of a short story; he comes back to life at the end.

3. General Holofernes, in an Advanced Fiction assignment a couple of weeks ago.

It should be noted that I actually felt guilt about having a character read in a history book in one of my fantasy novels that someone had died decades ago. Someone I had never characterized at all, nor did I plan to characterize. Someone who, if pressed, I would admit I had not given so much as a hair color in my head or even a last name (the history book refers to him as "Prince Andrew").

So, this was a big deal for me, even though this was hardly a tragic death. In fact, the character is the novel's villain. Seeing as he was the main driving force for his side of the battle in the last battle scene, I thought it would be dramatic if I could kill him off, but I really wasn't sure whether I could handle it. Nor did I have that confidence in my characters. I debated with myself (at length, out loud, and dragging in the input of my ever-patient roommate, who is luckily also a writer) over whether I could do it, whether they could do it, who could do it, who would be traumatized for life, when they could do it, who could do it most dramatically, and so on. Eventually, I thought I would just finish that first draft of Lord of the Dark Downs without killing off the villain at all, then write alternate endings until I found one I liked. However, when the time came, one of my characters (or two, depending on how you think of it) stepped up to the challenge. I'm really quite proud of how it came out, and fear very little for the sanity of my fictional, death-dealing darlings.

The other big deal, of course, is finishing Lord of the Dark Downs - the rough draft, at least. There's a lot of rough stuff, but a lot I like, and I'm a big proponent of finishing the rough draft and then putting it away for awhile and working on other things. It's also quite exciting because, as mentioned last week, I have a policy of not working on more than one novel at a time (otherwise, I'll just skip over to another story whenever I hit a difficult part and never finish anything), so I can now start on the next piece.

In fact, I have. Our Advanced Fiction assignment for this week included writing the first page of a novel (or non-novelistic story, if such is your leaning) and turning it in. Normally, I'd take more of a breather between such long works - especially because of the policy noted above - but I pretty much knew which story I wanted to write next. I've done the first page, and I'm not sure how much I like it: the story is set in my regular fantasy world, and the very beginning barely hints that it will be fantasy. Still, I'm excited. This next work is tentatively titled The Dogwatchers, and you should be hearing more about it in the future.

Final Prompt and Some Good (Secondhand) Advice

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 03:21:35 GMT

After the first three scene-prompts, our professor handed out the fourth last week with the statement that this would be the last. He had originally planned to do six; had we messed up? No, actually, apparently we had done better than expected, already getting a handle on what he had hoped the prompt would make us grasp. This was mostly about our individual voices, our takes on a scene which was very similar in setup. Anyway, evidently we did it. Good for us!

So! The final scene. We were writing science fiction this time: a spacecraft from Earth is searching for intelligent life in or near a wormhole when it receives a message, possibly from nonhuman sentient beings: "This she-wolf is a gift for my kinsman." (This is, in fact, the oldest known sentence written in a form of English, dating back to the fifth century CE.) The characters we had to include were a commander, his fourteen-year-old daughter, and their humanoid companion robot. This scene had less inherent resolution than the others; he left it up to us to decide whether the message is really from some intelligent life form and, either way, how the humans react. Naturally, there was a wide spectrum of response.

Initially, I wasn't altogether proud of my own piece for this week, but I've come to like it better, and the professor liked it, too. I did notice a few things about my writing, which is what the professor keeps saying these prompts are about: teaching us to recognize our own styles so that we can do what we already do more consciously, maybe be smarter about it, know our strengths and weaknesses, and so on. Thus, I will note:

1. Writing a robot with any degree of intelligence (read: ability to speak) means, for me, overwhelming temptation to make it the straight man in humorous stituations. (Straight machine. Whatever.) There is a kind of "robots say the darnedest things" aspect to it: a machine is not self-conscious, and can answer even silly questions seriously. Excellent fun.

2. I cannot write science fiction without actually including aliens. (Guess what? I included aliens.) This is well, as I prefer my science fiction to mirror my fantasy, only with "science" as the catch-all explanation instead of "magic." If it's got spaceships but no lasers, talking robots, or aliens, then why am I reading it? There may be exceptions; I just haven't seen them yet.

3. Apparently, I can write fairly convincingly from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl. Well, in all fairness, I was one for an entire year.

Also in Advanced Fiction class today, we got what I think is excellent advice on starting a novel (or story, or scene, but particularly a novel; I can see some scenes as actually necessitating otherwise): do not start with one character alone. Obviously, this is not an absolute. Some good novels start with a character alone or even a sentence of setting which doesn't mention any character at all (as with the awesome first line of my favorite book, Howl's Moving Castle). However, interaction is interesting, and it can also be easy to fall into the trap of beginning with a character just puttering around before the action starts - or even, if you're not careful, waking up.

I already tend to open frequently with dialogue, especially in short stories, but this simple piece of advise gave me exciting ideas on how to edit the beginnings of both Rabbit and Cougar and Lord of the Dark Downs, neither of which seemed quite good enough to me. Guess what? Each of them starts out with a main character acting alone. (In the case of the former, he actually is alone; in the latter, other people are in the room, but she is not interacting with them, and they really aren't important.) In Rabbit and Cougar, the second character is introduced just halfway down the page! If I move that up, the beginning suddenly goes from basically non-action to a strange first meeting of two very different people. And in a puff of interest, a story is born.

This is most exciting, as we will each be submitting first page of a novel for our next class. I feel that using an edited version of one I've already written would be cheating, so I will write a new one; I have several files containing story ideas, many of which have definite novel potential, and I think I know which one I will pick out. The only thing that worries me slightly is that this violates my policy of not starting a new novel until I have finished at least the rough draft of the last one (currently, Lord of the Dark Downs, which I have been unable to work on much recently due to much other work). Oh well. I still think this first-page assignment will be great.

Biblical Femslash

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:17:55 GMT

. . . for fun ~~and prophet~~!

Well, the Biblical femslash I wrote today was actually for neither fun nor *ahem* profit, but for my Advanced Fiction class - not that I didn't have some fun with it. To some extent, I was just very relieved to find an angle on the prompt which worked for me.

To start at the beginning, the prompt itself: we were assigned to retell the story of Judith, a beautiful Jewish widow whose city is being held under siege. She goes out, seduces General Holofernes (leader of the enemy), gets him drunk, and cuts off his head, which she then takes home with her. So for the second time in three weeks, our writing prompt has me borrowing my roommates Bible; I think my first problem was that, in my research, I read the story. Bear with me - I'm actually not dissing the Bible. It's just that it told the entire story in a very strong style which is distinctively not mine, so I had trouble afterward with writing it my own way. It didn't help that I know so little about that time period and location.

So here's what happened: I started writing without having a clear angle. My Judith (the story was required to be from her point of view) was a determined woman, but not much else. I had vague ideas of getting her together with Achior, the fellow who is sent into her city by Holofernes (he's angry at Achior for saying that the Israelites' God won't let them fall, so he sends Achior to join them, saying that if the Israelites really will triumph, our man A. will be fine, but otherwise Holofernes will kill him with the rest of the enemy). The occasion simply did not arise. I gave Judith a son; she's been widowed for three and a half years, and the Biblical story says nothing about whether or not she and her late husband ever had kids. I thought this would give her a human motivation for her actions (given that Holofernes' army has been known to kill even young boys in the cities he takes), one with which I could identify, but she did not manifest that kind of personality. Rather, she became a kind of God-fearing lunatic, motivated by nothing but God's will. I could only too easily see her killing someone - there was no stretch, no drama or tension in her committing such a terrible act. It was God's will, so she was gonna do it, so there. I wasn't enjoying the story; the dialogue felt forced and unnatural, and the motivations much the same. The piece was being largely carried by one (admittedly rather awesome) metaphor.

Well. About halfway through this, I came up with a better idea: I could still humanize Judith with love, but with a love which fit more naturally into her story. Right. So, who does Judith have oodles of opportunity to get to know and spend time with? Who would make her perfect partner? Well gosh, look at that: there's another woman with her in the Classical paintings of Holofernes' death scene. That would be her maid, Abra. Her maid who runs her household, who goes with her right into the enemy camp and helps her smuggle Holofernes' head out, whom she would later free when she went on to never remarry . . .

So I was rather amused by my own motivations for writing Biblical femslash: not to make a bold statement or be rebellious or offensive to anyone (though I'm certainly not shedding any tears over the ideas of having done those things, if indeed I have), but to humanize the character through love. I mean, honestly, I was going to put Judith with Achior pretty much because I liked his name. This makes much more sense. Plus, it's just dripping with compassion and humanity: Judith and Abra, secret lovers, raise Judith's young son together in a world that doesn't understand . . . And actually, in the brief appearance Abra made in my first attempt at the piece, she was my favorite character. That was partly what led me to this approach.

I feel triumphant. This piece was mopping the floor with me, and I have conquered it. Also, this doubles the number of pieces of fanfiction I have written in my life, and expands my repertoire to include slash of both men and women. And I did it for class! Life is so cool sometimes.

In other news, I submitted a short story to a writing contest on my campus. The contest is a small one, sponsored by WordShop (our writers' group), and the story an older one (because the word count limit ruled out most of my newer pieces), but of course I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

PUBLICATION!!!

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:18:31 GMT

It hasn't been a week since my last post, but I interrupt this non-posting to bring you the most exciting bulletin of my recent life: I just got notified that a magazine is accepting a short story I sent! Enthusiastically, even! (The e-mail's exact words were "Congratulations! We want your story! YAY!!!") It's a new magazine called "Renard's Menagerie" (Michelle's being published by them, too! How awesome is that?!). They want my story! Oh my gosh!

They even go so far as to assure me that if (as the magazine is new) they fold before the issue prints, they will pay me anyway, and the rights revert to me. (Of course, I really hope they don't fold! But very considerate of them.)

The story is called "This, That, and Th'Other," and I'll let everyone know as soon as I know when it should be printed.

WOO!!! :D

Scene Two

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 03:03:01 GMT

. . . or our second scene, at any rate. My creative writing professor assigned a scene with much more inherent comedy value, or at least better comedic possibilities. The lead guitarist of a blues band is going to his girlfriend's apartment to tell her that - oops! - he lost a hand of poker while using her photo and phone number as an I.O.U. (He thought he had a good hand, and was out of money; while shaking out his wallet for sympathy, he accidentally dropped her photo, and another player said he would accept it and her number instead.)

So that was fun! I got to write humorously, and set the piece in the real, modern-day world, unusual for me. The viewpoint was a new kind (a little older and more jaded, a little more swearing, a little more risqué) - a type which I may not use much in the actual novels I write, but it's always nice to learn a new way to work. I feel my techniques stretching and becoming more varied. :) And even if I never make a character like Razor (yep, that's his name) as a point-of-view character, I may have better insight into the motivation of the next older, jaded, swearing, risqué side character. Hooray for broadening and deepening my abilities!

Of course, the weekly prompts do hinder my ability to write other things by taking up my time (as do other various things, including applications for money to help me pay for graduate school in . . . writing). As if to taunt me still further (and yet delighting me), my Russian Myths and Legends class continues to give me fascinating insight into a non-British medieval world.

WordShop, our on-campus writers' group, met tonight. Last week, I read a short story there, which went well. This week, we dispersed with a possible prompt for the next formal meeting: fanfiction. (Which, to be fair, is not so much a prompt as an entire genre.) I do not write fanfiction. Its existence makes me giggle - a rather happy giggle, but not a "I want to be part of this" sort of giggle, largely because I love my original characters so much. Well, actually, okay, I did write fanfiction one time. One time. It was three o'clock in the morning, and, while watching a movie, I wrote sappy Zelda slash. Go me.

. . . of course, I probably don't have time to write on this prompt, anyhow. But still, the idea of possibly writing Chrestomanci fanfiction is almost irresistible . . .

On My Keyboard This Week . . .

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:03:05 GMT

While I did work on my big action scene (it's nearly done, although I recently had an idea which possibly changed my mind about how a major bit of it will work, so a great deal of editing will probably be in order), I spent a lot of time and effort this week on writing for class. The class, "Advanced Fiction," is a lot of fun, and the professor is just trying out an exercise wherein he hands out one specific, detailed prompt to the entire class (sixteen students), and we all write the same scene (in about five pages - minimum 1,200 words). This week's was about a young Catholic priest who witnesses a car accident in which a Peruvian construction worker accidentally hits and fatally wounds an elderly Russian man. Upon trying to comfort the victim (who speaks no English), he sees a serial number tattoo on his arm and realizes that this man was a victim of the Holocaust (prompt also specifies he is Jewish). There's our scene.

It was really pretty amazing how differently people dealt with it. The professor was highly pleased, beginning the class with the words "I'm just going to unabashedly say this: I am a genius." We wrote differently, and some of us (me, for example) were pulled out of our comfort zones (I generally write light, humorous work, often fantasy). I myself was actually pretty impressed by the seriousness and tenderness that this piece drew out of me - but that was when I wrote it. First came the research.

The priest was required to be the point-of-view character, so I browsed the Catholic Encyclopedia online and had a long phone chat with a friend who is a devout Catholic, currently attending a Catholic university with many priests-in-training. Then, I turned to the livejournal communities little_details; and linguaphiles to get translations for some Russian (I already know a lot of Spanish, so the Peruvian construction worker, specified to speak in "broken English," was all right). A number of people on those communities objected to parts of the prompt itself, saying it is extremely unlikely for even an elderly Russian immigrant to speak not even a word of English; some also argued that he would not be an observant Jew. (My professor said that, if his Russian Jewish grandfather had read that, he would have flown into a rage and quoted the Talmud at the fellow at length.) On the other hand, I had all the translations I needed within ten or fifteen minutes. Both groups are really quite helpful.

This week (we meet on Tuesdays), we got a new prompt, this one lending itself much more to humor. I'll let you know next week how it went!

Write-Minded Anonymous

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:58:58 GMT

I've been thinking about inspiration lately. It seems almost like meta-thinking, to think about something which already occurs pretty much inside one's head, but I feel it's worthwhile largely because inspiration of the writerly variety has, in the past few years, completely altered how I look at life.

To put it mildly, I'm inspired a lot. My mind has some variation of the words "I should write about that" on standby at all times. I think this is partly because I'm so enthusiastic about communication. I talk a lot. I also, of course, write a lot. One of the things that impresses me in the writing of others is when something - some description, particularly, though it may be of anything from a place to an emotion - really comes across to me. If I've been in a similar situation, I want to think, "Yes, that is how that is!" Or, alternately, "Yes, that is how that would be for that character!" If I've never been in that situation, I want to be put there. Thus, when I walk through real life - maybe I should say live through real life, since it's certainly not always a walking experience - I am constantly bombarded by the wish to express things to people. Maybe it's because I have a keen interest in . . . well, most things. Yesterday, for example, it snowed. I could not get enough of the snow. When I went outside, I put my head way back and watched it come down; it really shows you how dizzying far up the sky is. Though snow isn't all that crazy an occurrence, it does put writing thoughts in my head - but then again, everything does now.

It's true. I keep a file of ideas on my computer, separated into Characters, Places, Things, and Miscellaneous; I call it the Plot Bunny Hutch, and I add to and draw from it all the time. While I am inspired at random times - often while walking, even more often while on an elliptical trainer at the gym (brain is getting oxygen and has little else to do, I suppose), I now seek out situations in hopes of learning about things which will help my writing. I take classes here at my college because I think their topics - "Ooh, Japanese architecture!" - will contribute to my world-building. In my job at the library back home, I would spend free time looking up topics like ancient coins and minting; at home, I dug out books on medicinal plants. I'm following in the academic footsteps of my father, an artist who has researched fossils for a series of paintings of trilobites, snakes while doing a poster for the play "Oedipus Rex," and a series of house fires in his hometown when he painted those. Just as his fossil research led him to many more paintings of different fossils - from ichthyosaurs to sabre-toothed cats - some of my paths lead to ridiculous amounts of interest, excitement, and writing.

And some don't. It concerns me a little to consider the flip-side of my interest in all things which might contribute to my writing: because nearly all of what I care to write takes place in one world which I am always polishing (in a few places, I admit, the scaffolding is still up for serious building), there are subjects which simply are not relevant. Some of these subjects are huge. Almost all history since the invention of the gun, for example. Most or all religion. What alarms me is that I occasionally find myself - not quite dismissing, but certainly being less-than-enthusiastic about - an opportunity to learn about a topic that I know I can't build into my world. Is this simply a preference for knowledge that comes with a built-in extra function, one near and dear to my heart? Is this my subconscious' awareness of the fact that it would be hard to actively pursue knowledge of everything? Regardless, isn't it a spectacularly bad idea to ignore knowledge that is highly applicable in our real, current world in favor of, say, castle construction? It is, and I try not to do it, while being aware that there are only so many hours in the day, and I want my writing to be its best.

So there is my issue: Inspiration, almost addictive, leads to an active search for further inspiration. This search becomes so extensive that I feel sometimes that I have no time for "irrelevant" topics, such as the core belief systems of other people about whom I care very much. I like to think I can make myself learn enough about these things to function - to be sensitive to others' beliefs and hold intelligent conversations. After all, I made myself learn Multivariable Calculus. I suppose my aim, then, is to become a somewhat quirky person who has passing knowledge of current events and topics but is a veritable trove of trivia in other areas. I feel lucky to be, one might say, a victim of an overactive muse. Still, the consequences bear thinking about.

On the other hand, do feel free to ask me about drawbridges. Please.

Take My Epic Battle - Please!

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:39:52 GMT

Of late, I have been working on what will likely be the second-to-last chapter of my fourth novel. (Well, technically my third novel is a novella, but I still tend to lay claim to four.) I'm quite excited, but on the other hand . . .
. . . action scenes.

I'd like to note here that, despite being a fantasy writer, I do not write all that many action scenes. Of course, the term is a little vague, lending itself to an "I know it when I see it" definition: I write many scenes in which actions are taken. Pretty much all of my scenes, in fact, include someone doing something. I would venture to say that most scenes by most writers include something of the sort, even if it is just action tags between lines of dialogue: "He sipped his tea." Most people would probably agree that "he sipped his tea" is not the stuff of action scenes. What about scenes wherein people are acting with great haste and under great stress? Is it "action" to pick a lock if getting through the locked door is your only way to escape from an angry leopard? What if you remove the leopard, and you are picking the same lock in a leisurely manner just to see what is on the other side of the door? My own definition of an action scene is generally danger-based, and might be something like: "Participation in or strenuous avoidance of a dangerous [usually violent] situation."

Right. So, now that we have a definition of an action scene, we are left with my limited knowledge of what makes a good action scene. I don't read a lot of thrillers or even watch a lot of action movies - not that that would necessarily help, anyway - and to top it off, I really do not like writing actual people-getting-hurt violence. Well, that's not entirely true. I can deal with people getting hurt, but I cannot kill off characters - even nameless ones. What this probably means is that I should avoid epic battle scenes. In the case of my current work, however, I did not write *checks* seventy-four thousand and some words so far just to bow out of the scene that needs to happen - or finish happening - in the second-to-last chapter. So, based on what I have gathered from reading action scenes, reading about action scenes, and writing a few of them in the past, I should:

- Use shorter sentences. "Shorter" meaning "as opposed to the ones in non-action scenes." This is largely to serve the purposes of the next two commandments, but it also gives a tenser, more actiony feel.

- Take care not confuse the reader. This has got to be the most important one, but is also fairly general-sounding. It means to keep prose clean and also, very importantly, to make it clear where everything physically is with respect to everything else. It is important to be able to picture everything that happens in the scene, and then to write it in such a way that it makes the reader picture it. Ideally, the two pictures will bear some similarity.

- Leave out things that aren't important, relatively speaking. This is one for me to watch carefully, as I do like my detail. One simply has to weigh the importance of that detail, metaphor, or internal monologue against what else is going on in the scene. In terms of point of view, would the POV character notice the tassels on the armchair onto which she has just leapt to dodge a pouncing leopard? It might not be too much to say: "She leapt onto a tasseled armchair," especially if the tassels will be important in some way; even if not, it does provide a subtle but interesting glimpse of the decor. It would be too much to say: "She leapt onto an armchair with beaded golden tassels hanging from its sham covering." Unless one is going for comic effect (say, "she" is an interior designer and has been noticing every detail about the furnishings in the house so far, which could be tedious, but could probably be done in a successfully humorous manner), "she" would not notice this. Also, think of the poor reader! He wonders how important the tassels are, will look for them to appear again in the scene, cannot understand why they were mentioned. He has nearly forgotten the leopard. ("She leapt onto an armchair with beaded golden tassels hanging from its sham covering like the tails of shining horses, reminding her of the pony she had always wanted," is not to be even considered.)

- Use active and precise, but not silly, verbs. Again, someone who is going for comic effect (which I often am, but not in this particular scene) can certainly get away with "silly." Consider the following:
"She went down the hallway to the window. She opened it, got onto the sill, and jumped through. The leopard followed."
"She dashed down the hallway to the window. She pushed it open, climbed onto the sill, and jumped. The leopard hurtled after her."
"She pitter-pattered down the hallway to the window. She threw the window open, bounded onto the sill, and launched herself through it. The leopard rocketed out after her."

Well, there you have it, for the moment anyway: what I know, or think I know, about writing action scenes. I ought to get back to actually writing said scene now, but sometimes this kind of reflection on and reinforcement of what I need to do helps me out. It's why I read writing magazines, and it may be why you're reading this. Regardless, I hope it's informative, or at least entertaining.

Hello!

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:05:44 GMT

I'm here to talk about writing. It should be noted that I do not have professional credentials to do so; I am not a published author or a professor. I am, however, a writer, an active and persevering one, and, on occasion, I have something to say.

I hope to be a published author someday, maybe not so very far from now, and a professor of Creative Writing. With of these goals and the three novels and many short stories I've completed, it should be evident that I think about writing quite a bit. I'm going to start an MA program in Writing for Young People in October, once I've finished my undergraduate degree, a BA in Psychology which I chose in large part hoping for it to help me write good characters. Do I sound obsessed yet?

I write young adult fantasy. This is the part of the conversation (if this were a conversation and not a monologue) wherein many people either say,
"Oh, so you write little kids' books?" or nod knowingly and say,
"Like Harry Potter."
Neither of these things is the case, I'm afraid, though I am a great fan of Harry Potter (and generally in favor of books for little kids). However, one of the real beauties of literature is that when a tsunami like Harry Potter comes along, it does not crush the competition, but opens people's minds and bookshelves to that kind of work. Books are not like, say, car insurance, such that getting one means you have all you need. Readers read. It's a wonderful thing.

Anyway, I plan to update this journal at least once a week with my thoughts on and progress in writing. It seems a little egotistical, even to me, but then, I read other people's work about writing because the process itself fascinates me. Maybe other people will be interested in what I have to say about it, too.