Character and world-building: two essential skills for writers. I’d submit that our invented characters and worlds are inevitably reflections of our real worlds and our understanding of ourselves and others. Some of that understanding comes hard-won and first-hand. I learn through falling down. I also learn through shifting perspectives. I need a sense of the wider context in which my own life sits, and I need it to believably write people who aren’t me. I also have trouble reading fiction when I’m working a lot on my own writing. Something about the process, especially in the last couple of years, has made it very hard for me to get swept up in a novel the way I used to. I get hung up on the craft of it, like having x-ray vision, seeing the skeleton too prominently beneath the skin. Non-fiction also has its tropes and conventions, but since it isn’t what I am writing, it’s easier for me to read it wholeheartedly. And I’ve read a lot more of it in the past couple of years. So: this is going to be the first of a series of posts about amazing non-fiction that has expanded my understanding of people […]
Writer Blog Hop
Fellow writer Nicole Winters tagged me in this blog hop–the idea is to have a chain of writers all answering questions about our process and tagging other writers we know to do the same. Nicole’s post is here–thanks for tagging me, Nicole! 1) What am I working on/writing? I always have some short fiction on the go. At the moment, I’m revising two stories, which are both very dark–one is about magicians who cut the tongues out of doves, and the other is about a dishonourably discharged soldier waiting out the war and anticipating her army’s defeat. I’m also putting the finishing touches on my second novel, which has been through several drafts; it’s so close to being done that I’m now planning my third novel, which will either be the one about lesbian railway gunners, or the one about the immortal alcoholic badass Gus Hillyard. 2) How does my work/writing differ from others of its genre? I have a foot on each side of the mainstream/genre line: I almost always include an element of magic or the fantastical, but I don’t focus on it as fully as some other speculative writers, choosing instead to centre on the emotional journeys […]
Secrets of writing, unlocked!
Today in my search keywords: “finish a fantasy novel”. Why yes, seeker, I did. Twice. (I’m awesome that way.) How? I will let you in on my secret. Writer + laptop + chair + time = novel. (I left out a few of the nonessential ingredients such as coffee, music and cats… if you are following the basic recipe though, and still having trouble, consider adding one of these.) If you are short of the basics, it is very hard to finish a novel. If you have a laptop, chair, and time, and are still having trouble finishing, it is possible, as Grady Hendrix suggests in a recent post, that you are not actually a writer. It is also possible, in my experience, that instead of writing a novel of fun escapism, you’re writing a novel about hard stuff you have experienced: loss, ill health, depression, abuse, that kind of thing. When I procrastinate, it is not because I’m not a writer. It is because I’m afraid. Once I push past this fear, and take a hard look at whatever is in my path, I make my best work. It doesn’t have to be literally about my experience–in fact, it […]
In which I plan to unleash the Pussy Hurricane
The title for this post came to me from a cherished friend who is one of very few people in my life from whom I’d accept large-scale guidance on the direction of my fiction. She’s earned this right by being the only person to have read absolutely everything I’ve written in the last four years. She’s read a few things in draft which you, the world, haven’t seen yet, since I haven’t sold them yet. She says my fiction really comes to life when I write women protagonists, and she asks me to do more of that (the above-mentioned hurricane). This advice comes at an interesting time for me. When I first started writing seriously, in university, I had a hard time writing believable female characters. Partly due to internalized misogyny: it’s only recently that women’s works have become more included in the cultural canon, and the literary education I received as a kid was pretty heavily weighted in favour of the dominance of men’s works and men’s stories, which in turn influenced how I write. More personally, I’m told I’m a pretty atypical woman in some ways. When I tried to write characters like myself, I’d get feedback that […]
In which I think about bodies
My colleague has an eight-year-old daughter who worries about having fat thighs. Let’s pause to contemplate this. She’s eight. She’s active–she rides her bike and hikes with her dad–and she’s skinny. And so what if she wasn’t skinny… (a) that would be fine and (b) she’s eight. This kid isn’t a woman yet, won’t be for years, and she’s already dealing with the pernicious body-consciousness that women face. She knows the standard, and she knows she doesn’t measure up. What she doesn’t know yet is that it’s a fucked-up standard, and that no one measures up. The most beautiful women in the world don’t even measure up. Tabloid headlines find imperfections in Jennifer Lawrence, Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lopez. How’s a kid supposed to read that? I really want to fight this standard. I want beauty to not even be a standard. I want beauty to be a grace note, something we can enjoy and celebrate, but not a job we have to do, not a price of entry. How does this tie into writing? I think it goes along with committing to diversity in general. Speculative fiction, like romance, has a lot of examples of princessy female characters whose worth […]
In which I have structure
This, my friends, is Hour of the Hag. Each sticky is a scene. Notes in black are what currently happens in the scene; notes in pink are things I have to change or add. Pink stickies are scenes to add. Blue for Maksim’s POV, green for Lissa, white for Nick, and yellow for poor orphaned Jonathan who really shouldn’t have his own POV scene, since there’s only one of it. I’m surprised by how even the scene distribution is. I am unsurprised by how much more I have to do before I can call this thing done. This sticky-map is for the transition from draft 2 to draft 3 and final. I don’t have much sense of how long it will actually take–weeks rather than months, but other than that, it depends on how much I wallow. I have three vac days to kick it off. Hard burn to April–I’d like to get it in the post to agents by May. Oh, and behind the sticky-map, that thing is a pillow with a carrot on it. […]
In which it seems I am writing another novel
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. (a) I always end up writing a new novel shortly before the current one is done, and (b) I think I have a Law of Conservation of Creativity, by which I mean that once I’ve made up something I like, I tend to want to spend more time with it. Regarding point (a), I see this as a psychological prophylactic against attachment to my work. So long as the new new novel is the Shiny Thing, the recently-completed novel can be kicked about and hacked apart and rejected without any personal suffering. Or maybe it’s the other way around–maybe I just get tired of a novel by the time I finish it, and my creative mind’s impatient to start on the next thing. The problem with the Not-a-Werewolf book is that I began it during the period of mental depletion that followed the end of the Dickensian Fantasy. I dicked around with that book for a full year before I really got down to business on it. I don’t know whether to count this toward its clock, or not. If I begin the clock with the current draft, it’s been just over a year […]
In which we make people
Sarah Monette and Justine Larbalestier both posted about characterization recently. It’s always interesting to me to hear other writers describe their methods, because sometimes they are so different from mine, and sometimes very similar. Also–since these are real writers–it’s very, very helpful. I think of myself as a character writer. I usually begin work with an image of a person in a place, doing something. For example: a guy crossing a vacant lot, stopping to look at a caved-in jackolantern. The guy is maybe seventeen, he’s Caucasian and he’s carrying a backpack. He’s wearing running shoes and jeans. The vacant lot is stubbled with grass and the busted-up jackolantern has been there for some days. This image tells me a lot of things about my setting and my character, if I look at it long enough. The time of year must be November, because of the rotting jackolantern. That means the guy must be in the first semester of his senior year, because he doesn’t look quite old enough to be in college. That means his pack likely holds school books. He’s wearing running shoes: maybe he likes to run. Maybe he’s on the school track team. He stops to […]
Galvanized
…in the electric sense, not the washtub sense. Although to someone with a greater level of technical knowledge they are probably the same sense. Apparently this energy extends even to things that aren’t writing. In the last 36 hours I’ve stripped the nasty old carpet runner from the hallway, gone to market, gone to work, typed up all my VP notes, got the photoblog up to date, caught up on email, gone for a run, and slept a whole four hours. I keep having ideas for stories, and jotting them down, and then reminding myself all over again that ideas don’t count. They’re like salt in cooking: never at the heart of the dish. At the heart is the person, in the place, with the problem. That’s the thing I used to know and somehow forgot for a decade or so. I don’t expect I’ll forget it again. […]
And Then I Woke Up
Back here in the real world, so little time has passed that the plums in the refrigerator are still good. I am sitting with a cup of rooibos and making myself a very ambitious to-do list. It commences with tearing apart the Dickensian Fantasy: the very thing I swore I had no need to do. It continues with a whole bunch of other things to write, and a number of commitments which I have no doubt will prove onerous at some point, but at the moment feel like the veriest hit of crack. It doesn’t end, of course, until I end. […]