Category Archives: On Writing

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

Posted by natechen on

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?

Why Speculate?

Posted by natechen on

Most of what I write falls under the genre of Science Fiction, but that’s a label I don’t really care for. You see, the term Science Fiction comes with a certain degree of bias built into it – it expects to be based on, you know, science. In fact, there’s a whole sub-genre called ‘hard’ Science Fiction that revels in providing the full scientific argument underpinning everything that happens, much to the detriment of the flow and pacing of the story they are presenting.

Apologists for hard Science Fiction insist that this is correct, because the whole point of Science Fiction is the science, not the fiction. We are, they tell us, in the age of science and it is the duty of conscientious authors to educate people about the science that will drive us into the New Age. Okay, maybe not all of them think that way, but the most vocal certainly seem to.

My biggest problem with Science Fiction is the Science. I’m not talking about the day to day observation, postulation, experimentation and conclusions of the laboratory. I do that kind of science in my day to day just like everyone else. I even try to be conscious of the process and direct it with my full faculties. I’m talking about Science, or, if you prefer, the Orthodoxy of Reason.

See, a lot of the big Science advocates insist that, with a little more time, they’ll have the numbers they need to make the world perfect and then, once all the people indoctrinated by Science Fiction and ready for the Coming Change fall into line, Science will usher in the Golden Age of Humanity and we can forget about all those pesky social ills, relational problems and personality disorders we have to deal with. This all sounds pretty good, to tell the truth.

My problem is, I observe history and note that people said those kinds of things in France and Russia while making sweeping changes to society. In France they even built statues to Reason, but what they wound up with was Napoleon. At least the Russians got Lenin, who was better looking and taller. I postulate that any new attempt in this direction is likely to end the same way.

Except this is America, so our guy will be even more hansom that those jokers.

Due to the immense human cost those last experiments in the bounty of human reason exacted, I’m loathe to accept a new one. No matter how appealing it might seem to have an Asimovian system like psychohistory in place, the past suggests that these kinds of things are pipe dreams.

So I’m not here to write science fiction. I don’t want to write about science, as fascinating as that subject can be. I want to write about people. One way to highlight what makes people people is to show them in vastly different settings and let how they are similar to us show through.

Sometimes those different settings will look something like our future. Sometimes they’ll look like what our world could have been like if something in our past changed. And sometimes they’ll look like a world that never existed. Officially, these kinds of stories would be considered science fiction, alternate history and fantasy.

But I prefer to use the term speculative fiction. It’s purpose is to show us different worlds, but it’s also to show us humanity, and only if the humanity rings true can we really call it a success. I hope that, as you read along with the story starting October 1st, you’ll find that I have managed to do just that, and that you’ll let me know what you think.

Terminology

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Authors tend to eschew the terms “hero” and “villain” for a variety of reasons, some of them technical and some of them emotional. We tend to use the terms “protagonist” and “antagonist”. These terms give us a lot of flexibility. For example, a story can be told from the perspective of a person with no heroic, or even admirable characteristics, someone who we wouldn’t want to call a hero, and we don’t have to change our terminology.

On the other hand, these terms also embody a more realistic perspective. People are not all one thing or the other, and stories need to reflect that. This is what’s called verisimilitude by authors, and it’s so important that we try to include it in every aspect of the story, even in how we talk about that story.

At the same time, authors, just like everyone else, have a problem with antagonists. If you look at them closely, you tend to find that you have a lot in common with them. Sometimes, the antagonist is much more beloved than the protagonist of a story. And we don’t like to call them villains, because who wants to be a villain? Much better to go with terms lacking any kind of moral overtones. Then, there’s no need to loose any sleep over who you sympathize with more.

Now even protagonists who are meant to be heroic tend to have something wrong with them. Once again, that’s verisimilitude. People have issues. And since I am the protagonist I am most familiar with, as I’m sure you are the protagonist you are most familiar with, and I have issues, I expect the protagonists I read about to have issues as well. I suspect you are much the same.

In fact, if you look at it closely, you’ll find that protagonists and antagonists are very similar. They tend to be flawed people driven into conflict with one another by decisions they have made. And sometimes you’ll look at a story and find hero and villain very hard to parse.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled over that. We want people we can understand to be good people, so all kinds of things have been proposed. Morality has been dismissed, good and evil called constructs, and, of course, terms have been changed. The intelligentsia of the modern age have a thousand and one reasons for why you should stop worrying about good and evil and just get on with protagonizing* your own story.

But when we come face to face with life, when it beats us over the head until we’re ready to run screaming for the hills, or at least to mommy, when we’re tired of the grind and we just don’t want to get up any more and we know there has to be something more than this, we find the lie in that stance.

We realize that we don’t want to be protagonists. We want to be heroes.

Everyone wants to be a hero.

And everyone is corrupt. No matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to be the heroes we want to be. Are actions are tainted and leave us unsatisfied.

What does it take to get rid of the corruption? In olden times, flawed metal had to be melted down and the slag either burned away or siphoned off in order to be purified. Are we the same? Is it all the melting and pounding worth it?

There’s a heat wave coming. Are we ready?

 

 

*Protagonize (proh – tag – uh– nize)

verb

1 – To present your story in the most philosophically and existentially correct way possible, thus causing unimaginable agony to those reading it. Not recommended for parties.

Mission Statement

Posted by natechen on

Hi, I’m Nate Chen, and as you may have guessed from the title of this blog, I’m an author. This being the Internet age, I’ve naturally decided that blogging would make a good an excellent platform to hone my craft and put my work before you.

I know, a real surprise, right?

My emphasis is fiction, so don’t come here if you’re expecting hard headed opinionating on the latest news. That’s not really what I do. Instead, I plan to structure this blog around a Mon/Wed/Fri update schedule, with each day of the week devoted to something a little different.

Starting in October, Mondays will be devoted to a piece of serialized fiction which I’ll be talking about more in the next few weeks. In the mean time, I’ll be writing about the philosophical thoughts that led up to my writing that story. Yeah, real exciting, I know, but authors live to write their forwards. I hope you’ll indulge me.

I’ll admit to being something of a heavy thinker, but all thought and not play makes for a dull blog, so Wednesdays are focusing on cool things, which is why this post is going up on a Wednesday, even though I’m not planning to officially go live until next Monday, Sept. 3. Because what out there is cooler than this blog?

Don’t answer that.

Finally, Fridays are where I’m going to talk about my actual writing process and the general day-to-day trials of being a writer in a world that thinks of writing as, well, kind of slacking off. It’s a tough life, sitting here in front of my keyboard, and if you should ever feel like joining me you should read some of these posts first. I’ll do my level best to scare you off.

So there you have it. I fully intend to make additional posts as the mood strikes me, but I hope that, from here on out, you can expect to see those three subjects addressed on a regular basis here on this blog. I look forward to hearing from you, so let me know what you think!