Category Archives: On Writing

Writing History

Posted by natechen on

It’s one of the most absurd truisms of the modern age that the victor writes the history books. I’m not really sure how this idea got started. The original quote is typically attributed to Winston Churchill, although no one’s quite sure who said it first. My biggest problem with this idea is how vigorously actual history seems to contradict it.

Take the Peloponnesian wars. Thucydides wrote a history of them, one of the early scholarly histories. He was from Alimos, a small place just outside of Athens. But they lost the war, so Thucydides had no business writing history books about it, right?

Another example from antiquity is Josephus, the historian who wrote a history of the Jews while they were under the rule of Rome. The Jews would not have a nation to call their home for more than 1800 years, living an existence that was pretty much the total opposite of a victor, but Josephus still wrote the history of his own people.

Or, more recently, consider the American Civil War (or War Between The States, or what have you). In spite of the fact that no one has fired a bullet in that conflict in nearly a hundred and fifty years, no one can agree on the history of it. Was it a war of northern aggression? Was it a war to liberate slaves? Was it a war to protect the Union? Do they even mention protecting the Union in history books any more? How did the premier cause of the victors wind up getting so totally lost in the retelling? Weren’t these people writing the history books? And how did the South get away with creating the legend of the Lost Cause if they weren’t writing any of the history books?

There are other examples, to be sure. From monasteries on the British Isles writing records of being sacked by raiders to Masanori Ito’s book Fall of the Imperial Japanese Navy right up to the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, the defeated have been chronicling their own history and doing their best to both remember and learn from their defeats ever since the study of history first came about.

To me it frequently feels like this idea that the history books are written by the winners actually has its roots in a famous quote from someone on the other side of the English Channel from Churchill. Joseph Goebbels told us that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will come to regard it as truth. We’ve come to accept this as a truth, that if we can just get a platform to push out agenda loudly enough and often enough, we can make people think whatever we want about anything, even history.

However, in spite of telling his lies for 12 years, Goebbels is not now thought of as a great historian, a visionary thinker or a leader. He’s thought of as a liar.

Perhaps the real problem is the lack of scope in this way of thinking. There are no victors in history, there are only people who come for a short time and then quickly fade away. We don’t write history. Rather, history is written on us, its letters and words the lives of people and the traditions, values and literature they leave to their culture. History shows through how we live and what we do far more than what we say. After all, you can’t know the winner until everything’s over, and in history, the end has not yet been written…

Points Of View

Posted by natechen on

By this point you’ve probably realized that Heat Wave is told from two different perspectives: Double Helix, a member of Project Sumter, and Open Circuit, a wanted man. You’ve probably also noticed that so far, Helix has had more time in the driver’s seat than Circuit has. You can expect that pattern to continue, at least for the near future. But here’s a fun fact: When I originally had the idea for these two characters I actually intended for Circuit to provide most of the perspective.

Helix is pretty much an accidental viewpoint character. I never even intended to use him to provide perspective. When I first created him, Helix existed pretty much entirely to provide a foil for Circuit. So how did he wind up becoming the primary point of view?

Well, as you might already suspecte, it had very little to do with his character and a lot to do with Circuit, and a little bit with the needs of the story (Circuit and Helix existed in a number of forms before they found a home in the world of Project Sumter.)

The protagonists of Heat Wave started off in a series of unpublished short stories told from the perspective of Circuit that served to help me refine their voices and establish many of their important character traits. I hadn’t been working with Circuit and Helix long when I came to realize that, while Circuit could be fun to write and has a unique way of looking at the world, prolonged exposure to him steals much of his charm.

For one thing, he’s very superior and sooner or later your going to get the feeling that he’s looking down on you for something or another (which is understandable, because he is.) For another, he’s not very sympathetic to others, which also serves to make him hard to sympathize with. But most of all, he’s given to sermonizing on the importance of his own point of view, which can really get dull.

Worse, he wouldn’t be as effective a character as he is without those qualities, so I couldn’t simply sort through a box of writer’s tricks for replacement quirks. Circuit really needs to be a sanctimonious, arrogant know-it-all in order for Heat Wave and some of the ensuing stories to work.

In addition it quickly became clear to me that only showing things from Circuit’s point of view wasn’t really working either. The stories needed some kind of insight into how Circuit’s enemies were working against him to really be effective, and Circuit himself couldn’t provide that insight without introducing a whole new host of problems (like, how does Circuit even have trouble with Helix if he understands him so well?)

When Project Sumter was added to the mix to keep track of talents and serve as an the organizational foil for Circuit, it only seemed natural to have a point of view on that side of things. Helix, as the most thoroughly established character in the story after Circuit, was the natural candidate.

As the story progressed Helix came to take more and more narrative time away from Circuit, in part because he has the more interesting early parts of the story and in part because Circuit with time on his hands is truly obnoxious. If you enjoyed Circuit’s opening narrative, worry not! Once he has something constructive to do it will be safe to let him out more often. In the meantime, hopefully Helix will be able to keep your attention.

Changing History

Posted by natechen on

History is vitally important to writing a story. Everyone has history, so it’s important that any story you write not actually start at the beginning, but before it. The backgrounds of your characters influence their prejudices, interests and reactions to new situations. By extension, the history of a society and a world influence how it reacts to large scale changes in circumstances or the ideas of individuals.

The farther a world is from what we know, the larger its differences from our own history must be. But changes in history have large ranging repercussions, and if you’ve decided that you don’t want a world radically different from what we know in the modern day you’ll have to take steps to compensate for that. (Of course, if extrapolating the changes to the modern day situation is what you want to do, that’s fine, but we’re not all Harry Turtledove.)

There are a lot of options for how an author might make significant changes to history and still manage to keep their fictional world similar to what we know.

The simplest is to make your changes very recent, occurring within the last twenty-five years or so. In this case you can generally get away with saying that whatever your unusual element is, it hasn’t had time changed the world too much yet. A corollary to this is to make whatever change you want to take place totally apocalyptic in nature, like a zombie plague or a sudden ice age, changing all the rules after the point of departure, keeping the old and developing the new.

Another option is to make the changed history an occult element, in other words, totally secret. If only a select few people know about the different history, it’s really easy to justify it not making any real changes to history as we know it.

A third possibility is to hand changes to historic figures with such overriding circumstances or goals that they could only do one thing with them, which reinforces our own history. Abraham Lincoln, for example, is going to use just about any innovation or discovery handed to him to preserve the Union. Likewise, Churchill would probably have used anything he could against the Nazis. If Albert Einstein had laid the foundation for practical nano-tech instead of figuring out how to split the atom, I guarantee it still would have gotten used against Japanese sooner or later. Not that World War Two with nano-tech would ever make a good story.*

Heat Wave is, in many ways, a combination of approaches two and three. This is one difference between Heat Wave and the early days of comics, where superheroes were typically a new occurrence. I’ve chosen this approach for a number of reasons, but the biggest one was to allow for the back story I have in mind. Also, it’s different from the norm, which is a good thing so long as it doesn’t make things any harder to grasp, which I don’t really feel it does.

So as you read, keep your eyes open for hints to Project Sumter’s slightly different understanding of world history. Hopefully it will be as much fun for you to figure out as it was for me to put together.

*Note to self: Story idea..

The World You Know…

Posted by natechen on

It’s one of the great goals of a science fiction or fantasy author to create their own world and their own rules and then run with their story as far as they can. Look at Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Who wouldn’t want a work of fiction of that caliber to their credit? These worlds were different and captivating, in Tolkien’s case so captivating that a whole generation of writers chose to pay homage to his Middle Earth rather than write different worlds that might be overshadowed by his towering work.

Now there’s a whole ‘nother essay or two on the subject of being original versus being derivative, but that’s not exactly where I want to go today. Rather, I wanted to talk about why I’ve chosen to set Project Sumter in what is essentially the world we know, rather than attempting to write a story in a world that is built from scratch.

When you are writing a novel there are any number of reasons you might choose to set your story in the everyday world, or at least a world that is very much like it, with only one or two major differences. You might want the familiarity to help readers adjust to the more fantastic elements (after all, not all readers are ready for full fledged fantasy), you might not have a fully developed world on hand or you may just feel that some element of your story is heavily invested in the real world and doesn’t make sense if transferred over to one you create.

In the case of Project Sumter, the Helix and his friends occupy the real world for three basic reasons.

One, living in something like the modern day real world is part of the superhero genre. Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, Batman and, of course, Superman, along with legions of other comic book characters have always inhabited a world strongly based on the one we live in. While Heat Wave is obviously not a comic book, many of the elements it plays up find their modern day roots in comic books, and in order to emphasize that, one of the things that makes sense is to set it in a world virtually identical to our own.

Two, I am not yet confident in my ability to lay out the breadth and richness of a truly great original world. The kind of careful thought that creates a Middle Earth is breathtaking in its scope. Tolkien wrote about it for his whole life and, even after his death, the full backstory of the world was far from complete. I’ve considered writing my career for barely ten years. I’m not sure it’s reasonable for any author to be up to that kind of a work after such a short period of time. For now, the much smaller tweaks to history that come with writing fiction in the real world will serve to hone my skills. Perhaps one day I’ll have the necessary skill for an endeavor of the world building scale. We’ll see.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the story doesn’t demand it. Superhumans are nothing new in the history of storytelling. From Merlin to Hercules, stories about people with strange and wondrous abilities interacting with normal people are nothing new. If a story does not call for some radical departure from recorded human history to tell, it is probably better of told in the confines of our own world. A story that is made needlessly complex isn’t necessarily better, just more complex. And a complex thing is much harder to do right.

Heat Wave wants to be a piece of speculative fiction set in the real world and I want to do it right. The best way to meet both goals is to set it here in our world, with a slightly different past, perhaps, and see what happens. I hope that you’ll come along for the ride.

Project Sumter

Posted by natechen on

Starting on next Monday, October 1st, I’ll be posting weekly installments of the novel I’ve been working on for the past four or five months, so I suppose it’s time I talked about it some. So let’s start at the beginning: It’s called Heat Wave, and it’s the first of the Project Sumter files.

So what is Project Sumter?

Put simply, its the federal government’s talent management division. No, it’s not an agency for wannabe singers, actors and songwriters. It’s the semi-secret governmental organization dedicated to monitoring and enforcing the law among people with what we would call superpowers.

Its been a long time since the Project was inaugurated, longer still since the very first government sanctioned talent took to the field at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln. But in all that time its been a firm policy of the government to never coerce the talented people it knows of and to do their best to afford them all rights of normal citizens.

Unfortunately, sometimes Project Sumter finds itself confronted with people who are determined to flout the laws of the land using their talents as enablers. And when that happens, the Project’s own talented agents and their highly trained supervisors and support teams step to the forefront. This is their story.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of changes that an ambitious man with a lot of talent of the normal and unusual kinds might want to effect in modern society. A man with the vision, skills and organization to make things happen could go a long way. People might even rally behind him, rise up and try to effect their changes through force. Maybe because they think it’s their right, maybe because they think it’s the only way. This is their story as well.

Project Sumter, like most law enforcement agencies, has a very simple mission statement: Serve and Protect.

Revolution has a very simple objective as well: Change, whatever the cost.

Heat Wave is not the story of their struggle. No, that might be as inevitable as the Civil War that spawned Project Sumter, but the time for that struggle is not yet.

Before every conflict a breaking point is reached. Sometimes its the last straw on the camel’s back. Sometimes its the steady dripping of water that finally drives you insane. Sometimes it’s the slow charing that finally burns through a cord or burns down a fuse.

And then the heat is on for real.

Trial By Fire

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Sooner or later, life gets hard. It’s the way of the world. You can’t get out of it, and how you respond is part of what makes you who and what you are. It’s in the hardest times that you have to show what you’re made of. Perhaps for that reason more than any other, fiction focuses on times of conflict and difficulty in the lives of its characters.

The people you see in a story, the heroes and villains, the protagonists and antagonists, show you who and what you could be. In some ways, they are set to destroy one another. It’s that possibility that brings tension to the story, makes it gripping and makes you pay attention.

But at the same time, its very rare for destruction to be what people want. Once again, verisimilitude rears its head. Most people don’t want to be destroyers, they want to be creators. Unfortunately, both are a part of our nature. In the struggle of conflicting goals and ideas, either can result. A person can do a great deal of both in a single story, to say nothing of a full lifetime.

The result is a dynamic as familiar as story and song themselves. Sometimes, when people pass through conflict they find on the other side that the people they’ve struggled with have made them stronger and better. The book of Proverbs says, “As iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.” While they may not thank their adversary for the lessons they’ve learned, they are still the better for them.

Crucibles purify gold and men alike.

I have always been fascinated by the dynamic between protagonist and antagonist, and I’m far from the only one. Lots of people have tackled the issue. There’s even have a particular term for the relationship between people who don’t hate each other, but can’t help fighting from time to time: “frenimies”. (Also, marriage, although that implies a closer relationship.)

Next week I hope to kick off a story that examines exactly how people change during conflict. The struggles we work through are not just circumstances or unfortunate happenstance, they are a chance to grow. We may not like it or want it, but if we want to really become the people we’re meant to be, we’ll have to seek that growth.

Because when iron strikes iron, the sparks will fly. And if we’re unlucky enough, the sparks will catch, and the sharpening of iron can become a trial by fire. Whether we come out tempered or broken will depend on what we’re made of.

The Glory of Edits

Posted by natechen on

Ask any writer and they’ll tell you that a large percentage of what we do is actually editing. The exact ratio varies from writer to writer, but it’s always more than 50%, usually more than 75%. Editing is something that needs to happen in order for us to do our best work.

Think of a first draft as a kind of experiment. You come up with an idea and write it all out as fast as possible, sometimes going so far as to ignore basic things like spelling errors or blatantly bad grammar (I’m not one of those writers, I tend to be kind of compulsive about squishing the red squiggly lines, but perhaps you are.) Then you sit back and look at the actual text you have an compare it to the idea that inspired it. How’d that turn out for you?

If you’re anything like me, not too great. Unfortunately, that’s the way of the world. Somewhere between the primordial idea soup of your imagination and the harsh reality of solid state digital memory a lot of the vividness and life in your ideas has a tendency to bleed out.

Now sometimes you have very helpful aids to keep your writing on course. Some authors assemble photographs of celebrities who bear a resemblance to their characters, or keep actual objects they intend to write into their stories sitting on shelves in their rooms. Visiting locations and taking pictures of buildings or rooms is another big help.

But at some point writing is about your ability to put word to page and make others see what you thought. It doesn’t have to be a perfect copy, because you’re never going to get that. But a close approximation is always nice.

So you edit. Go over your writing carefully. If possible, get another set of eyes to look at it. Do everything you can to make sure the words you write and the ideas in mind match.

Editing is hard work, and sometimes it can seem to create as many problems as it solves. Finding the right pacing, the right words, the right sentence structure and the right flow of story can be daunting at times. Often, after looking over a first draft there can be an overwhelming compulsion to take the whole manuscript and throw it in the trashcan (or at least the digital recycling bin.)

Sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do. But often times, if you take the time, you’ll find that what you wind up with was worth the effort.

I hope that you’ll find the story I’ve been writing and editing at least makes a decent effort at finding the kind of writing that engages you. If you’re wondering exactly what kind of story it will be, well, be sure to come back next week! I’ll be writing about what inspired the story. Then, a week from next Monday, we’ll kick things off.

Heroes and Villains

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So there are people we call heroes and people we call villians, and no matter how enlightened and insightful we claim to be, we can’t seem to get away from those labels. So how do we decide which is which?

In the old days, it was white hats and black hats. The good guys dressed so we could recognize them, they were polite to the ladies and they could always stand up to the bad guys no matter how bad the odds. The bad guys, on the other hand, were cowards and lechers. Their wardrobe was just as obvious.

It happened most in Westerns, when everyone wore hats. It worked in gangster movies for much the same reasons. Or look at that great of classic movies, Casablanca. Rick and Victor Lazlo are almost always shown in a white suit, while Major Strasser appears in the traditional black uniform.

But in no medium have heroes and villains been more clear cut than comic books. With every character wearing brilliantly colored costumes that make them easy to identify, villains and heroes were never so clear cut as in the golden age of comics.

Today, people have taken great pleasure in blurring the lines between heroes and villains. To an extent that’s a good thing, because it forwards verisimilitude, or how realistic fiction is. Realistic fiction is good fiction, because it’s more likely to last a long time.

For an example of this, look at Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (or Emma or Sense and Sensibility). In spite of the fact that few modern readers can sympathize with the lives of young daughters of English landed gentry, the books continue to resonate with readers and, in fact, be very funny. Why? Because Austen was an astute observer of human nature, and her larger than life characters reflect people we ourselves know.

However, her central characters are riddled with flaws – Mr. Darcy’s pride, Elizabeth Bennet’s snap judgements, Emma’s inability to understand the intentions of many of the people she meets. This doesn’t make them weaker characters, it makes them more believable ones.

The problem with modern fiction is that it has a tendency to go too far. Central characters in many stories are now self-centered anti-heroes, or cowards who stumble to heroism entirely by circumstance, deliberately shying away from the character traits that life and experience tell us makes people good for themselves and their communities. This is just as lacking in verisimilitude as the white hat-black hat attitude embodied in the old western.

All too often the attitudes that fiction show us make us more fragile and disconnected human beings. Maybe it’s time to push back. If you drop all that in the fire and cook it good, what comes out?

Care to have a look and see?

Make Work

Posted by natechen on

A huge part of writing is finding the time to sit down and write on a daily basis.

It’s harder than you think. Ever tried to keep a daily diary for any length of time? It’s really hard work. Of course, you can make excuses for yourself, because if you’re anything like me you probably have a very boring day to day existence.

Got up this morning, ate toast with peanut butter, got dressed, went to work. Yay.

See writing isn’t just sitting down and trying to find five hundred or so words* to say. You have to find five hundred or so interesting words to say. And then you may want to check to make sure they have great rhythm, sparkling wit and poetic overtones if you have any ambitions of standing out of the crowd.

Like any skill set, that doesn’t just happen. I’m sorry to say that it takes a lot of work, the kind of careful repetition and constant mistakes that you’ll only be willing to put up with if you’re really dedicated to the craft. It’s one of those things that prompt writers to smile tolerantly when people say they’ve decided to write a book. Those poor fools, we think, they have no idea what they’ve signed up for. I wonder if they’ll make it through?

It often feels like make work, because half the stuff you crank out you realize almost instantly will never be fit to be seen by others, unless, of course, you’re trying to convince them that everyone makes mistakes. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever tried any kind of serious writing, the kind that aspires to something besides a B+ in a college course you don’t really care about. It’s the kind of writing that, no matter how hard you go over it, will never yield value comparable to what you invested in it.

It’s a lot like athletics. No one cares how many times you post a four minute mile, that’s not a real achievement anymore. But unless you can do that, you’ll never get anywhere close to posting a time that counts in competitive cross-country running.

I want to assure you that I don’t view what I publish here as make work. I take everything I do here very seriously, just like an athlete in training. But just like an athlete, I’m not always going to be in top form. While I’ve got lead time and the power to edit my work, and I’m trying to keep ahead a few weeks and to allow for unexpected events, I’m pretty sure I’m still going to post some downright bad stuff from time to time.

Hopefully you’ll stick it out anyway. It’s not easy to write fiction that is both fun and thoughtful, but I want to do it well. Things kick off on October 1st, and I hope you’ll tune in and let me know how I’m doing.

 

*When I first wrote this sentence it said, “five hundred words or so” instead of “five hundred or so words”. Fortunately I caught and changed the wording in a clear example of the kind of exciting editorial decisions writers must make on a daily basis.

Echoes of Granduer

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I’ll admit that last week I may have made a poor analogy.

People aren’t metal, you can’t just beat the problems out of them. Life would be much easier if we could. All those incredibly detailed, well thought out schemes for perfecting society might actually have a chance of succeeding. We wonder, if it seems like fixing our problems should be so simple, why is actually doing it so difficult?

More than that, why do we even find ourselves wanting a fix in the first place?

Let me try a different example, one that I think is a little more suited than the metal smith analogy. Picture if you will, an ancient stone castle now abandoned to time. You’ve probably seen pictures of them in England or Europe. Fortunately, you don’t have to have visited them personally to appreciate this analogy, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to come up with it.

Now, there’s not doubting that these buildings are impressive in their own right. Their towers and walls fill us with a sense of the size and accomplishment that just building them must have been for men with only hand tools and human ingenuity.

However, for all the greatness that we see in these buildings, they are still obviously incomplete. The are lacking the rugs and tapestries that warmed the halls, the furniture that made them comfortable and, in many cases, they are even lacking important structural features like walls or a ceiling. They’re not complete, not what they once were.

We are a lot like those castles, I think.

We feel like we should be a great building, safe, comfortable and useful. We see what we once were, and we want to be that again. But the roof is missing, the walls are crumbling and the flagstones are damp and uncomfortable. Clearly, we think, some adjustments need to be made. So we bring in some new carpet and hang some new tapestries, maybe even try to rebuild the walls with whatever is on hand.

Yet, even with a decent understanding of what the castle might have looked like we’re likely to find that, after a few months exposed to the elements, our attempts at repair start to look shabby and moldy. Without the blueprints, without materials of the original quality, we’re not likely to get far.

The conflicts and struggles that come between people, the kinds of conflicts that a writer struggles to portray in a good story, come when people cannot agree what the castle once looked like, how to rebuild it and make it great. Given free will and the need for each person to make their own decisions, that kind of thing may be inevitable.

That doesn’t make it easy or pleasant. And the fire of conflict is, in some ways, much like the heat of the forge. As we struggle over the nature of our castles the petty furnishings we’ve put up burn away and leave only the enduring stone, and we find that, as often as not, we’re back where we started, wondering what it is that will truly endure.

When the heat is on, will what we’ve made really last?