Category Archives: On Writing

Editing Resolutions

Posted by natechen on

Hey look, it’s New Year’s Day! Lots of people are probably making resolutions about how they’re going to spend the next year. For a lot of people this is an important tradition, it helps them focus and determine what they hope to accomplish in the next year few months day or two. And that’s great. If you recall, last year about this time I did that as well.

But what many people don’t do after putting their resolutions together is go back and look over them later to see how they’ve done. Such a thing can be pretty depressing, after all. But I’m a writer! Writers do that all the time, and in the process they tweak things in order to make them better – you’ve probably heard this called ‘editing’ and it’s an important part of the writing process. So this year, I’m not going to write a whole new set of resolutions. No, I’m going to go over last year’s and note how I did, and possibly make some tweaks. Below are my original ten resolutions, with notes and edits in italics and stuff I’m taking out of my goals for this year struck out.

  1. I will maintain this blog, doing my best to continue to post on schedule, no matter how many toothpicks I break keeping my eyelids open. This goal was pretty successful. I didn’t miss any posts except those I had planned for in advance and gave my readers notice for. I hope to do the same this year, although maybe with less toothpicks. 
  2. I will not poke myself in the eye with a toothpick. It impedes the writing process. Yeah, see my notes for point 1. No more toothpicks. It’s all around unhelpful. 
  3. I will try to read less garbage in my continuing attempts to understand what kinds of stories currently drive the writing market. Sadly, it’s hard to pinpoint all the garbage. I need to keep working on this one. 
  4. I will read more garbage with the intent to discover what makes bad writing bad and how to correct those flaws. This would be easier if reading the garbage wasn’t so painful. I’ve gotten a few lessons from what I’ve read, but I’m afraid I still need to work on this one too. 
  5. I will remember that finding ways to resolve apparent contradictions helps a person become more creative and flexible, it’s exercise for the imagination and every writer needs more of that. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but in practice takes up way too much brainpower that could be used more productively. I’ll do it when absolutely necessary, but it’s no longer something I will go out of the way to accomplish. 
  6. I will continue to offer shameless critique of people who have succeeded in an industry I have not yet broken in to, as well as people who work in industries I know little about. If they want to sell me stuff, they better make it a worthwhile product. Consciously aiming to develop a critical mind has resulted in… my being very critical of how I spend money. This has resulted in my buying less low-quality stuff overall, even if I haven’t made much progress on the publishing front. Saving money is always a worthwhile goal, however. It’s good for another year. 
  7. I will do my level best to get an e-book assembled and available for purchase from Amazon.com, so that my work can be held up for ridicule in the largest forum available. This is me being grossly ignorant of the kind of time and work I would need to put in, above and beyond what I already do to maintain this blog and my real life. I’ve made almost no progress here and that’s no one’s fault but mine. While this isn’t a bad goal to keep for this year I think that sometime in the next month or two I’ll need to try and break it down into it’s component parts to see how I plan to accomplish it this year.
  8. I will attempt to finish and publish at least two short stories this year to help build name recognition for my work that will hopefully help when book proposals start going out. This is a new and hopefully worthwhile goal.
  9. I will add as much suspense to my stories as is humanly possible, because day to day life does not contain nearly enough uncertainty. Lately I find myself craving a little more certainty in daily life. Not getting it, but craving it. Alas, I’ll have to keep going for suspense because verisimilitude is still important… 
  10. I will add more romance to my writing, because write what you know is more a loose guideline than a mandatory requirement. This remains absolutely true. 
  11. I will hire a person to stand behind me with a rolled up newspaper and periodically whack me over the head yelling, “Make with the funny!” This should keep my writing from being overly gloomy. This year my stories have included: the death of a woman, which emotionally devastated her husband, a man nearly going insane when confronted with the mind-numbing darkness of the deep ocean and a man getting frozen into a Schmidtsicle. BUT you were entertained, were you not? So probably not too gloomy! (Still, the guy with the newspaper can keep his job, it helps the economy.) 

 So there you have it! My plans for this year. If you have any suggestions or goals of your own to share, please feel free to share! And here’s hoping your year is a time to experiment, adjust and set new goals.

I Am Not Making This Up

Posted by natechen on

The title for this post is one of Dave Barry’s favorite phrases, one he trots out whenever he’s found something so bizarre, so ridiculous, it seems like there’s no way it could actually be a part of the world we live in. Except, of course, that it is. And really, for a humor columnist, what could be better than that? Why spend all his time and energy making up halfway funny stuff when Barry could let us find stuff twice as funny for him? By the end of his syndicated column’s run he actually had people all over the nation who would scour newspapers, flip through ads and watch news broadcasts just to find new absurdities to send to him.

And they didn’t even get paid!

Why do I mention this? After all, the primary focus of this blog is fiction, am I right? (Of course I am.) Well, for a moment or two I’m going to wander into the territory of nonfiction. See, while I write fiction for this blog my degree is actually in Journalism, a field that actively blends nonfiction and fiction.

Okay, I kid, I kid. To all those newspaper editors around the country who are about to denounce me from your pages, I ask that you resist the urge. In spite of some high profile cases, there are still such things as journalistic standards and fact checking. It is a form of nonfiction writing, just as humor columns, editorials and technical writing are. In this post, we’re going to look over three things nonfiction needs to do well in order to succeed and how being a good nonfiction writer can help your fiction writing succeed as well. The things that nonfiction needs to work are facts, structure by importance and a clear evolution of ideas. These things are present in all forms of nonfiction writing and, if you manage to write them well in nonfiction applying them your fiction will benefit you as well.

The first thing nonfiction needs in abundance is facts. This is kind of a “duh” thing, but if you’re making up what you’re writing about it’s fiction. You can only be writing nonfiction if you start with facts. Gathering facts and organizing them is where a nonfiction writer starts. So if you’re writing fiction, guess what you need?

Facts! Not facts in the same sense as a nonfiction writer, of course, but facts about your story. I’m not just talking about outlining here, I get that some writers don’t find that to be helpful. But you need to have facts about your story – where is it taking place, who is at the center, what are they doing when it starts, when it ends, what makes them qualified to tackle the problems the story will throw at them? The list goes on and on and on. What’s more, the kinds of questions often vary from genre to genre. A sci-fi tale will need more information about places, new technologies and societal changes than a romantic comedy.

The second thing nonfiction does is structure it’s information by importance, particularly in journalism. Rather than starting you at the beginning and working through to the end, most nonfiction starts with a premise and explains why it is relevant to the reader, then begins with the foundation of it’s argument and works it’s way through to the conclusions. Fiction is the same – not every story should begin at the beginning. Every story should begin at the part most likely to grab the reader’s interest. The ‘beginning’ of the story may not be revealed to the reader until they are part way into the story because it reveals too much about the plot, or it’s just not interesting enough. It’s important to start your story where it will interest your readers – not at the beginning.

Finally, nonfiction has to clearly work from it’s premise to its conclusion, that’s the whole reason nonfiction gets read. Fiction needs to be just as clear. Even in stories like Pulp Fiction, where the timeline is convoluted, there’s clear purpose and drive to the story and the audience can follow what’s going on all the way to the conclusion, even if the exact order of events doesn’t make complete sense to every member of the audience. Fiction is more than a series of unrelated events, no matter how clearly those events are told. If they don’t tie together into a cohesive whole with a purpose in mind they’re not good fiction. Reading (or writing) well written nonfiction gives one a good sense of how to tie fiction together in a similar way.

In short, don’t underestimate nonfiction as a resource for the fiction writer. Reading works of history and journalism in particular of great value to you as you seek to hone your craft. You could do worse than seeking them out actively.

Naming Right

Posted by natechen on

Names are tricky business. The name of your story tells prospective readers a lot about it. By the same token, the way you name the characters in that story says many things about them. How you choose character names is at once complicated and simple.

Now some people might say that the name you get when you’re born doesn’t really say a whole lot about you, so why should fictional characters be named any differently?

The answer, of course, is because they are fictional characters. Fiction does aim to replicate real life to an extent, but it also aims to tell a story that evokes an emotional response from its readers. One of the biggest ways fiction connects with its readers is through its characters, and that means every aspect of the character must be chosen to maximize the reader’s reactions. That includes how the characters are named.

So what kind of things should you think about when naming characters?

First, you have to like the relationship between the character and the name. This is not exactly the same thing as liking the name you give your character, although that certainly helps. It’s entirely possible you will want to create a character who’s name is a loathsome thing because the character is not that nice (or they are nice and you want to create some irony, more on this later.) What you have to do is love what your character’s name is saying about your character.

So the next thing to do is find a name that actually says something about the character you are naming. For example, in the Project Sumter stories Teresa Herrera is a young Hispanic woman who acts as a calming, more positive foil to Helix’s sometimes cynical and always temperamental personality. Naming her after a famous, nearly sainted member of the Catholic church does a couple of things. First, the Hispanic community and Catholicism are closely linked, so it speaks to her culture. Second, it emphasizes her approach to life and highlights the contrast between her and Helix. The inverse of this would have been to give her a name that contrasted starkly with the idea of compassion and empathy, such as Ayn (for Ayn Rand.) Such a name would have been weird and highly ironic given her personality.

Be careful playing around with ironic naming, though. A character’s name is what the reader is going to see every time your character comes into the story. If the character is a big enough part of the story their name may come up so often that their name ceases to be ironic and starts putting the character at odds with itself, destroying the impact rather than enhancing it.

One way to get around this problem is nicknames or titles, ways of being identified that the character has earned through previous actions or that they have been assigned by people who know who they are. Of course, the talented people in Project Sumter’s files are a perfect example of this. Double Helix’s codename comes from his long line of ancestors who worked with the Project – the double helix being the shape of DNA and thus heredity. Likewise, the incredible stability vector shifts have results in their being named after mountain ranges, beginning with Shenandoah and continuing up through Aluchinskii Massif. Nicknames let a character have an ironic or just plain meaningless given name but still be known to the reader and other characters in a more appropriate fashion.

Finally, it sometimes helps to build the identity of your setting if you respect certain naming conventions. For example, the patronymic is an old, reliable way of coming up with last names in European cultures, so choosing to use it extensively is a good way to give a sense of cultural continuity in a story. Likewise, Project Sumter codenames tend to be abstract, chosen more to be cryptic than to be impressive, since it’s a secret government organization. This helps set a Sumter talent apart from the average superhero. Loose naming conventions like this will help build the identity of the story through the names of it’s leading characters.

Of course any story, regardless of length, benefits from having someone named Sam in it.

Seriously.

There’s more to naming characters than just flipping through a book of baby names or hitting up a few websites. Everything from saying the name out loud so you can hear it’s cadence and tone to considering how important a character is, and thus how awesome his name should be, goes into the process. It’s important that you like the name, that it be fairly easy to remember and that it make a good impression on your readers. But more than that, for a fiction writer, the name is powerful and has to be chosen with care. May you find the process a little easier with these things in mind.

Writing Men: Objectivity

Posted by natechen on

It’s time to talk about writing men a little bit more. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, clicking that link will take you to the introduction of the idea a little while ago. Feel free to catch up and check back when you’re done. We good? Okay.

According to Merriam-Webster’s, objectivity refers to a lack of favoritism for one side or another. Throw out this definition, at least until you finish reading this.

When writing men, objectivity refers to the way we love to have goals and seek to fulfill them.

Now some of you out there might object to this by claiming that a lot of men today seem kind of aimless, just drifting around life with no real goal in mind. I’m not going to argue with that, because I’ve met my share of guys who sound exactly like that. However, that just means that they have little interest in life as a whole, if you observe their activities you’ll start to see the objective theme playing you.

For example, the vast majority of men who are drifting through life probably have an obsession of some sort with video game(s). Most video games are objective driven affairs – clear this level, defeat those enemies. In fact, there’s a special term for these kinds of objectives in videogame land: Achievements. And people become obsessed with them.

Even the most free-form video games become objective driven for most guys. Take the bizarrely popular Minecraft, for example. It’s a game that lets people gather blocks and build things out of them. In my day, we called these Legos. The appeal of Minecraft is that it offers an infinite number blocks that are basically free. Some people will use them to recreate famous buildings, others will set out to build the Ultimate Fortress, some people want a life sized model of the U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701 no bloody A, B, C or D).

So even the seemingly aimless men you meet actually have goals, they’re just goals that have been provided by someone else, or goals with little connection to reality. Whether it’s wealth, enlightenment or the World Record for time spent on a unicycle, the odds are that 99% of the men you meet have some sort of objective they’re actively pursuing at any given time. What does that mean for the way you write men in your stories?

  • Men are pursuing goals. Given today’s subject matter that probably sounds obvious but it bears repeating.

  • The goal isn’t necessarily something a man will talk about. Maybe they feel embarrassed about it. Maybe they don’t want anyone else to try and get there first. Maybe they haven’t given their own motivations enough thought to properly articulate them. Regardless, the fact that a man doesn’t mention or understand his goal doesn’t mean he isn’t pursuing one.

  • The objective has a high level of importance, possibly being the most important thing in their life. Men are far more willing to obsess over and sacrifice for their goals than most women. This is why they frequently wind up running businesses, making massive scientific breakthroughs, setting out on quests for vengeance and destroying their families and lives in the process.

  • The above doesn’t mean that men never take a break. In fact, most men have multiple objectives and balancing them can become a goal in and of itself. With the exception of the most obsessive, men are okay with taking a breather now and then. Particularly when there’s nothing more that can be done to advance their project at the moment. But they’re rarely drifting aimlessly. They’re just pursuing a different goal.

  • Men will evaluate their actions first and foremost in terms of their objective. This is why doing something crazy risky like jumping over a spike pit is only stupid to a guy if it doesn’t result in the man getting something of value in exchange. The actions of other men are also evaluated in terms of the impact they have on goals, both the observer and the observed.

  • Men evaluate other men by their goals. The things a man values and pursues are usually viewed as the foundation of his character, at least by other men. This is why men who share interests tend to get along so well even when their personalities seem to have little in common.

If you’ve been reading this with a discerning eye so far you’ve probably already figured out that being objective centric is a double edged sword. Just having something you hope to accomplish and putting effort into it doesn’t mean the goal is good or bad. But when the goal is good, that focus makes it more likely that the objective will be reached.

To men, accomplishing a goal is something to be desired. It’s a foundation of who we are. So when writing men, remember to give them their objectivity.

Genrely Speaking: Urban Fantasy

Posted by natechen on

When people think of fantasy they generally think of something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. In other words, they think of something where the fantastic elements of the story stand pretty much on their own, and are only contrasted with the technology, culture and standards of the mundane world we live in superficially, if at all. However the genre of urban fantasy exists to do pretty much the opposite. While it includes many of the things that the average person associates with fantasy, it puts them in a much different context from the typical fantasy yarn. Oddly enough by doing so urban fantasy actually bears more resemblance to the early folktales that inspired modern fantasy than most modern fantasies do. After all, the people who originally listened to folk tales heard stories about people living much like they did interacting with fantastic creatures and forces.

So, for the purposes of discussions on this blog what defines Urban Fantasy?

  1. The story takes place in a city or large town that would be recognizable to the average citizen of a first world country. It doesn’t have to be a real city or town, nor does it even have to exist on Earth as we know it although that certainly helps, the important part s that the people have access to and be familiar with the trappings that make modern culture tick. Things like modern telecommunications, transportation and mass media are as much a part of urban fantasy as the fantasy elements are. Part of what defines the story is the conflict between recognizable culture and everything else.
  2. The story includes at least one element of myth or magic. This is the “everything else” mentioned a second ago. Whether it be gremlins in the sewers, wizards hiding as librarians or who knows what else, some aspect of the fantastic has to exist as a contrast to the recognizable, modern world. There can be only one fantastic element or many, they can be known to the world at large or hiding in carefully maintained obscurity, they can replace one or two mundane elements such as when teleportation magic replaces cars, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the contrast between modern society and the fantastic.
  3. There must be conflict over how the world will define itself. In short, the first two bullet points tend to be in conflict. Modern society isn’t really built with the fantastic taken into account. Sure, many people would like to have magic powers or be able to shapeshift, but the fact is our society currently doesn’t have the measures in place to police and protect such people from each other or the public at large. All kinds of issues creep out of this. The attempt to strike or maintain a balance that lets both sides exists peacefully is often at the core of urban fantasy.

What are the weaknesses of urban fantasy? First, it has a tendency to become obsessed with it’s fantastic elements. In order to explain how such things could coexist with modern society magic tends to become an uberpowerful fix-all, or vampires wind up holding all positions of political/financial/cultural power or something else that makes the everyman totally irrelevant to the story. While there’s nothing wrong with characters who are exceptional, in fact exceptional characters are pretty much a requirement of good fiction, cutting the everyman out of the story entirely makes it very hard for your audience to become invested. More than anything else, that must be managed.

Second, many urban fantasies feels similar. They frequently begin with, or arrive at, the All Myths are True trope. This is at least in part because they rely so heavily on their fantastic elements and, like all successful book franchises, run as long as the publishers think they can get away with. The constant need for new material keeps authors grabbing new ideas from mythology, but they tend to choose things that readers will be mostly familiar with. This is why there are so many werewolves and vampires in the genre, to give just one example. The best urban fantasies pick one shtick and try and stick with it. A great example are the October Daye books by Seanen McGuire.

What are the strengths of urban fantasy? Well, the author doesn’t need to spend a lot of time bringing the audience up to date with obscure culture or political situations, at least most of the time, because the characters are probably already living in an Earth a lot like our own. This leaves more time for developing characters and plot.

But most of all it makes the characters a lot more accessible to the reader. No one in the last three or four hundred years has spent their lives wishing to get out of their squiring to a drunken knight or cleaning out stables while wishing they could be a squire. The characters in an urban fantasy have problems similar to what readers have, or readers will at least know someone who’s had similar problems. When new, extraordinary problems come up it will make it easier to relate to how the characters are coping. The same goes for all other aspects of the story, not just the character’s problems.

All in all, urban fantasy is a great genre for people who love to tell fantasy stories but don’t feel confident in tackling all the world building needed for high fantasy. It’s also great for people who love more character driven stories and don’t want to bother keeping track of all the cultural, historical and political baggage that seems to come with so many other genres of fantasy. Lastly, if you’re just cutting your teeth on the fantastic it’s a great way to start.

Dialog Part Two

Posted by natechen on

Dialog – when two people get together and talk to each other. In case you missed my first post on dialog, you can browse it here.

So, what do you do when you have a scene with dialog that isn’t quite working? Read it out loud? Start over from scratch and rewrite it? Find another writer to hash it over with?

Those are all options. Generally when I come across a scene with a lot of talking and I don’t think it’s quite working I step back and run it through three layers of scrutiny. Before I get to these three things, let me point out that this isn’t a checklist, it’s more like a troubleshooting procedure. If one of these things work, there’s no real reason to keep going, unless you’re really dedicated to perfecting a scene.

The first thing I do is try and identify exactly what I’m trying to accomplish with a scene. Your writing needs to serve your story. Every scene needs to accomplish something in pushing forward your plot, a sideplot or perhaps even the myth arc. Identify exactly what your scene is trying to do, then go through and trim out everything that doesn’t advance that goal. You might go back and add some of what you trim back later, but at least look at it without all the excess fluff. Most likely, it doesn’t need to be there. Hopefully that will give you better, snappier dialog.

If that doesn’t work, it’s time to look at pacing. I know I said it last week, but it’s vitally important that you keep your characters from saying too much at one time, and from keeping too many people from being in a conversation at once. While conversational free-for-alls aren’t that rare in real life, most people will tend to tune out some conversational threads and focus on others. You don’t want that to happen in your scene. By the same token, people don’t tend to launch into huge, prepared speeches in causal conversation. Yeah it can happen, but if it happens more than once a scene you probably need to rework something.

When all else fails, I resort to the index card method. You’ve probably heard writers talk about laying your plot out on index cards and spreading it out on a desk or the floor so you can see the whole thing at a glance. Well, this is the same principle applied to writing a scene. In this case, instead of writing plot points on your index cards, write out the first line of each chunk of dialog, or each action that a character will be taking between chunks of dialog. Then spread them out and start sorting. Move things around, cut things or, if necessary, add them until the scene starts to work like you want. This is a court of last resort, and by the time you’re done the scene is probably going to need a total rewrite. But not necessarily.

Dialog is a tricky thing. It drives plot, gives insight into characters and makes for memorable moments all at once, but if you don’t handle it well it can also leave your readers confused and lost. I hope these tips from the last few weeks will help you to assemble better written and more believable dialog.

Dialog Part One

Posted by natechen on

Dialog is a major part of just about any story. Unless you’re writing a Castaway or something similar you’re going to write a fair amount of it as you go along. I’m sure a whole book could be written on just the art of writing dialog, but for now I’m going to try and keep it down to two posts. In this first one I want to look at the basics of framing a scene with a lot of dialog. Next week I’ll look at the methodology I use to “debug” a dialog intensive scene that isn’t quite working.

So without further ado, what do you do with a lot of dialog?

  1. Set the scene. It almost goes without saying but all scenes happen somewhere; describing the setting gives you an idea of where your scene happens and lets you set up props or prompts for later. You don’t have to set the whole scene at the start, but at least sketch a basic layout for the readers to keep in mind as the scene progresses.

  2. Have your characters move around. The vast majority of people don’t just sit and stare at each other the whole time they’re talking. They fidget, they get up to get things or gesture with their hands, sometimes they even bury their face in their hands. You don’t have to mention every little tic or gesture, but mentioning these things from time to time keeps the scene realistic and keeps the scene from devolving into huge chunks of talking, which gets tedious.

  3. Place things in the setting your character can use. Have someone at a dinner party gesture with their knife and fork, or a dishrag left in the kitchen can become an impromptu weapon in a squabble between siblings. You don’t have to have a lot of these, in fact not every scene needs them. But a few from time to time are a big plus.

  4. Let the setting of the scene put ideas in your character’s minds. A picture on the wall might prompt a detective to ask about a family’s children, or a pile of clothing left in the corner can spark an argument over whether or not a character is a slob. As with the previous point, you don’t need these in every scene but they help keep the reader grounded in what’s going on.

  5. Give a few of the character’s inner thoughts. People do occasionally stop to collect their thoughts or recall some detail in the middle of a conversation. This is a great way to add background information but you have to be careful not to overdo it. Too much is both unrealistic and interrupts the flow of the scene but the right amount helps break up the dialog and helps the reader get a handle on elements of the scene that might not be entirely clear to them.

  6. Try and keep chunks of dialog short. If you have one person talking for more than a couple of hundred words, at the very most, it’s probably a good idea to find some excuse to break things up. Have the other character interject, or add some business for the character to do.

  7. Try and keep the number of characters in the discussion to a minimum. It’s not natural to have half the characters in the room keep quiet for a page or two at a time, but it does make the scene easier to read. Dialog refers to two people talking, after all. Two isn’t always the ideal number, but fewer is generally better.

When I write a scene with a lot of dialog, those are the things that I keep in mind. Next week I’ll look at some of the things that I do to make a dialog-heavy scene work.

When You Don’t Want To Write

Posted by natechen on

Every writer runs into writer’s block – that dreaded time when your story comes to a screeching stop because you have no idea where to go with it next. This post is not about that.

This post is about when you wake up in the morning and feel like there is absolutely, positively no possible way you could spend an hour or two in front of a keyboard or a blank sheet of paper and arrange words in a comprehensible fashion. You may have five or six ideas on the back burner, just waiting for you to put ink on their bones. You may have a great scene all blocked out in your mind, or even on paper! You just can’t bring yourself to put pen to page and do the hardest part – write it all out.

There’s any number of reasons you may not want to write. It’s too nice outside, or you’re depressed, or the classic – you’re just too busy right now. Add to this list as you see fit.

But the fact is, writers write. It’s kind of a given. So what do you do when you just don’t wanna?

  1. Eliminate distractions. I can usually manage to listen to music and write at the same time. It helps block out distractions, like a white noise  generator, and it gives me a rhythm to play with. But if I’m having a hard time finding the will to write the music has to go – it will just suck me in and I’ll spend all my time singing along or thinking about they lyrics, not about what I want to write. This principle applies in other ways. For example, if you usually write in a coffee shop or something, stay away from it. The traffic in and out will demand your attention and your manuscript won’t get it.

  2. Take five minutes to do something else and get your head in the game. For me this usually consists of doing a few stretches and getting a glass of water. I almost always do this before I start writing and repeating these kind of rituals often at times when you don’t want to write helps keep your focus on what you should be doing. If you don’t have a ritual like this you don’t need to start one, although it may very well help, but find something to do that will get your focus back on writing.

  3. Set a concrete, attainable goal. A couple of years ago, when I was struggling to finish my first novel (still unpublished) I found myself writing in the middle of the holiday season. It wasn’t ideal, and with all the stuff going on I very frequently didn’t want to write. So I told myself just to do one sentence a day. Just one sentence, and I’d be good. I managed to get that sentence in every day and it frequently turned into more than one sentence as the ideas got flowing. An attainable goal is not only a motivator, it gives you a sense of accomplishment when you’ve reached it. It’s okay to shoot low, as sometimes just taking the first step gives you the will to go farther.

  4. Decide not to write. Okay, this last one may sound like crazy talk. And it’s important not to over do it – try not to go more than one day without writing or you’ll lose your edge. Be deliberate. Set a fixed amount of time where you’re not going to try and write, say two hours in the afternoon. Take a nap or get some exercise, run some errands and just get out and about a little. Don’t think about writing at all. Then come back and you might be surprised how much your attitude has changed. Just be sure to come back and write, or else there won’t have been any point in taking the time off. You’re not quitting, after all, just straightening yourself out.

Writers aren’t superhumans that just crank out idea after idea for the betterment of mankind. It would be nice if we were but the fact is that you will get tired of writing from time to time, no matter how much you love it. In this way, writing is a lot like a relationship.

And just like relationships, the fact that you go through rough patches is not something to shy away from. If handled correctly, rough times just makes you a better writer in the end. Hopefully this handful of tips will help you handle them better. Of course, the more tricks in your bag the better, so if you have any good ways of dealing with writerly apathy please share them! I think we could all use the insight.

World Building Stuff: A Glance at Terra Eternal

Posted by natechen on

It’s time for some nitty gritty stuff. Everyone likes world building, at least everyone that I know, and it’s one of the most involved parts of writing there is. Today, instead of messing with all the boring theory of writing, I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of some of the fun world building that I’ve done while writing stories. Today let’s look at Terra Eternal, a major part of the Endless Horizons story setting. If you haven’t read The Doyen and The Dragon, my first short story that involves them, you might want to do that before checking this out. On the other hand, perhaps you’d prefer to browse this first. It’s up to you.

Now technically, Terra Eternal represents all or part of 52 different worlds scattered about under the great sky. So really, working with them is more like worlds building than world building. But at the same time, since all of these worlds are connected to each other and even share something like a unifying culture, in many ways they are actually a single world.

Now I could run you through the entire history, or give you a quick sketch of the overarching government and social systems, but really that would be way beyond the scope of a single post.

Besides, that’s really not how their world grew up. Believe it or not, Terra Eternal actually started out as the villain of another piece, which I haven’t shown you all any part of as yet. However, beyond knowing that they were a vast, interdimensional empire with practically inexhaustible resources, I didn’t bother to set much in stone about them when that project was starting. I simply selected a number of cool sounding ideas and figured I could work out a good overarching structure for a society they could call home later.

So rather than give you the unified theory of Terra Eternal, I decided to just share some of the ideas that now define them, and let you enjoy envisioning the shape of their worlds just like I did. Ready? Let’s go!

  • “Bruja” Magic – In some worlds, magic itself displays consciousness and can form the basis for strange and alien forms of life. This is called bruja magic by theorists in Terra Eternal. The origin of the term is not known, although it’s frequently credited to Veronica Locke. Because it is often hostile or malicious towards humans, bruja magic is considered a bad thing by most in the borders of Terra Eternal.
  • Doyen – Literally means “brilliant” and refers to a small group of crack problem solvers. Doyen are called in whenever the red tape that binds the empire together pulls too tight and what needs to be accomplished cannot be done in good time. They have a great deal of autonomy to deal with problems, and can take great liberty with the resources on hand, but they also suffer a set of fairly draconian restrictions to keep them from running wild. Technically speaking, they don’t belong to the nobility of any of the fifty two worlds, or swear allegiance to any of the three lesser thrones.
  • Friedrich Goltermann – One of the Three Founders. A shrewd politician and philosopher, he is credited with establishing much of the basic theory behind Terra Eternal’s government. The fact that it still functions several hundred years later, on a much larger scale than he ever anticipated, is credit to his brilliance.
  • “Powers” – Refers to any creature that embodies, or claims to embody, an abstract concept. In some cases, can also refer to creatures that embody or claim to embody specific places or the consciousness of things. Exactly what the power embodies tends to severely warp it’s personality and perspective. A form of bruja magic that is considered particularly dangerous.
  • Regula – Term that refers to the commanding officer of a military unit. The rank is always given along with the position and size of the unit the officer commands. Thus a regula millenia outranks a regula decima and a regula centuria.
  • Sail – The foundation of magic is the sail. Just like a ship is propelled by sails collecting the wind, so magic matrices are propelled by sails collecting magic as it rises up out of the earth. Also, just like the sails on ships, more surface area creates a better sail. Thus, those who use a lot of magic tend to wear flowing, many layered garments.
  • Soul of One – The nature and rules governing the many Earths vary greatly, and as often as not the face of the world is different as well. But sometimes there are enough similarities between worlds that even some people are duplicated. People that exist on multiple Earths are known as Souls of One, and Terra Eternal has a special role for them to play in the life of the Empire…
  • “Sterile” Magic – Magic that is simply a resource to be harnessed, like the wind or water. Pretty much the opposite of bruja magic.
  • Throne of Terra Eternal, The – Refers to a massive magical construct built by the Three Founders when establishing Terra Eternal. The exact functions of the construct remain known only to the successors of the Founders, but it is generally viewed as an important part of keeping the empire ticking.
  • Thrones of Terra Eternal, Three Lesser – Refers to those individuals who have inherited the authority of the Three Founders. The roles of the three lesser thrones are defined by the True Throne, making the people who hold the lesser thrones surprisingly limited in their powers. These three thrones are frequently referred to by the name of the founder who’s authority they embody. Thus “the Throne of Vesuvius” refers to Terra Eternal’s supreme military authority, and so on.
  • “Thrones” – A generic term for the individual who rules a specific political group or piece of territory. For example, “So-and-so is the throne of Terra Geodesia.” Frequently used when the speaker cannot remember the local name for such rulers. It’s automatically considered respectful, since it’s also the term used to refer to the seat of Terra Eternal’s powers. Of course, not everyone likes to be reminded that there’s a bigger power out there that they have to answer too…
  • Throneworlds – Refers to the first two worlds of Terra Eternal, which are still the seat of culture and progress for the empire. Unlike the other worlds in the empire, no special measures are needed to travel between the two beyond finding one of a series of “shallowings” between the worlds that were created by Locke.
  • Veronica Locke – One of the Three Founders. Credited with first envisioning the Throneworlds and convincing the other two to help establish them. Many of the spellworks that tie the empire together are based on her work. When they are not direct copies.
  • Vesuvius the Great – One of the Three Founders. Locke’s ideas required influence across two globes to implement properly. Vesuvius led the military campaigns that gave Terra Eternal that influence.

So there you go! A few of the ideas underpinning Terra Eternal. Is there any other part of the world building process you’d like to see me highlight here? Or perhaps another part of another story you’d like to see highlighted? Project Sumter? The Divided Futures? Post it in the comments!

Genrely Speaking: High Fantasy

Posted by natechen on

Welcome to Genrely Speaking! Today we’re going to tackle the genre of high fantasy, a kind of story about the conflict of good and evil, the nature of humanity and formidable legions of heavy cavalry making glorious charges to save the day. Or, at least, that’s what most people think of when they think of high fantasy, probably because they’ve seen the movie versions of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. And in a way, they’re not wrong. The Downfall of The Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King is the definitive example of high fantasy. Tolkien codified many of the things which embody the genre today. It’s true, he based his stories on many of the epic myths he studied and taught as a professor, but stories like Beowulf don’t actually meet all the modern criteria of high fantasy. Strange, but true.

So what are the characteristics of high fantasy? I’m glad you asked!

  1. A world distinct from our own, usually existing in some kind of idealized Middle Ages, with it’s own history, geography, customs and very often peoples. There can be no cheating here. There can’t be connections between our modern world and the world of the story, or really our world at any point. The fantasy world must stand on its own, and any similarities between the two superficial at best. This first and biggest criteria is what keeps the old bardic tales from counting as high fantasy – they all supposedly happen at least in part somewhere in the world as we know it. It also rules out a lot of modern day fantasy such as The Chronicles of Narnia, which contain fully realized fantasy worlds that are visited by people from our own.

  2. An emphasis on the motivations of the character to enter into conflict, usually to protect something or achieve a moral purpose, such as redeem the family name or atone for some crime. This is what rules out a lot of “swords and sorcery” tales from the genre. High fantasy is not about mercenary warriors seeking to amass fortune or wizards delving into lost secrets so they can amass more and more power. It’s about the efforts of people to achieve something they perceive to be a noble end (whether it proves to be noble or not is part of the journey) and in doing so putting the things they value to the test. Most sources will tell you that these two things are the standards by which high fantasy is judged. However, for the purposes of this blog (which is why Genrely Speaking exists, after all) I add one other requirement, as sort of an extension of this one.

  3. The depiction of magic and the supernatural as rare, and outside the scope of everyday life. The purpose of high fantasy is to sketch the conflicts between light and dark in epic proportions. That’s easily undermined if the conflict comes down to who has the most magic mojo. At the end of the day, Sauron wasn’t defeated on the fields of Rohan, or at the walls of Gondor or the gates of Mordor. It wasn’t even because Frodo was willing to go, or Sam turned out to be a determinator made of iron. He was defeated because, decades before, Bilbo had compassion on Gollum and spared his life. Of course, without all those other people working to stall Sauron and divert his attention, it’s unlikely Frodo and Sam could have made the trip to Mount Doom. But without the compassion of Bilbo, none of the rest would have mattered. It was the unforeseen consequences of Gollum standing in the shadow of the volcano with Sam and Frodo that ultimately made Sauron’s defeat possible. In the end, that is the kind of thing that sets high fantasy apart from the rest.

What are the weaknesses of high fantasy? With all the crazy epic plots, focus on the fate of the world and themes of good and evil, it’s very easy to loose track of the individual human characters that are caught up in the whirlwind. Since no experience is really meaningful to us unless we can relate to it, that means the impact of high fantasy can be significantly weakened if not done well.

Note that this doesn’t mean there can’t be nonhuman characters in high fantasy in order for it to resonate with us. Hobbits strongly appeal to the human desire for safety and comfort, things just about everybody wants. They’re relatable, in fact much more so than some of the technically human characters, like Aragorn (how many here are born to be kings?) The importance is to keep these relatable characters in the spotlight as much as possible, while still keeping events moving as well.

What are the strengths of high fantasy? The ability to look at ugly things about ourselves from a safe vantage point. The veneer of a fantastic setting makes it easier for us to look head on at the kinds of evil that high fantasy tries to portray. While it’s very easy for the evil to become totally remote because of the fantastic skin put over it, the best writers remember to keep pointing out the potential for evil that exists in the best of us. Saruman the White and Denethor, Steward of Gondor are both excellent examples of Tolkien reminding the readers that the enemies were not orcs – it was evil. Sure, Sauron and the orcs were handy personifications of it, but the selfish cruelty they represented can easily show up everywhere.

High fantasy is a troubled genre. In many ways Tolkien, as it’s codifier, casts a shadow that people have had a hard time overcoming. Elves, dwarves and rings are all fantasy tropes that are deeply rooted in the audience’s mind. However it also has great potential as a storytelling medium, potential that is at least partly untapped. It’s worth an occasional read, at least to see where the genre is at. What works do you think embody the genre best?