Over at Pat Rothfuss’ blog, they’re auctioning off critiques (some with editing) by a variety of publishing professionals. People donating their time and brains range from agents to authors to professional editors.
If you’ve got a manuscript that needs some love, or will have one in the near future, you should definitely check it out, and maybe lay down a couple of bucks for Heifer International.
It is possible that I’m just a curmudgeon. Maybe there is no poetry left in my soul. But it drives me crazy when I hear people talk about their characters refusing to do something, or taking the story in an entirely new direction.
I think it’s because I have a pretty strong negative reaction to the categorization of anything mundane as mystical and ineffable. It just feels lazy to me. It’s something I picked up while studying martial arts, which are perhaps the single most romanticized pastime in the US. Writing, like martial arts, is work. And if you don’t do the work, counting on mystical forces and autonomous characters to do it for you, you’re going to end up with a crappy end result.
I am not talking about organic modification of characters or plot lines as you make decisions. Sometimes I can end up with a story running into areas I didn’t envision when I first outlined it. Sometimes I make decisions about my characters that make your original plan for them feel forced, or not make sense at all. I may choose to move in this newly recognized direction, or I may choose to go back and change my character to make them fit the original idea. Either way, the operative word there is I. Every bit of that hypothetical situation rides on the back of my decisions.
Those decisions aren’t always conscious. Sometimes they regress back to something that was decided off-the-cuff without a thought to how it might become important later. Sometimes they are truly subconscious. My mind will worry at a character concept in the background the same way it does a story idea.
Mystifying the mundane leads to lazy thinking. It can even lead to complete fallacies becoming canonical and being handed down between generations of practitioners. To return to my martial arts analogy, taijiquan has been notorious for this. “Taiji practitioners are 100% relaxed.” (No, they’d fall down if that were true.) “Taiji makes no use of external (muscular) strength.” Tell that to Chen Xiaowang when he’s in a horse stance with his thighs parallel to the ground. One of my training partners who was largely a rational man used to claim that he wasn’t using his muscles when he did the form. He would “prove” this by pointing out some muscle group he wasn’t using. He didn’t take it well when you poked him in a fully engaged, well developed muscle six inches away.
Writing is the same way. At the end of the day, there’s no net. No recourse. I wrote it. I made the decisions that led my story where it is. I can hide my head in the sand and blame the muse, or failing inspiration, or “characters taking over the story.” Or I can own my part in it, examine what I’ve got to learn why it came out that way, and figure out how to make it better.
I know which one I’d rather do.
(This post was inspired by some awesome discussions we had in the #shutupandwrite chatroom on Freenode IRC. It also inspired a post in the /r/shutupandwrite subreddit with which the chat is affiliated. You should come check it out. Some of the best no-nonsense, results oriented writing advice and support I’ve run into.)
Last night, I crossed the 50,000 word line. It feels like my story is on track for a decent length, somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 words. I’ve identified some things earlier in the story that require fleshing out, as well.
It’s been interesting, going through the writing process. Things have been changing here and there, primarily to add more subplots and ideas. When I started, I really only had the main thrust of the story in my mind. It’s grown, and I like it.
The main arc that takes my character from a victim to an active agent in her own life has been joined by a romantic subplot, some intrigue and a lot more detail for the antagonists, and an internal struggle with an alien being. A group of characters that had been intended as a footnote, almost a part of the scenery, is now an engaged group of supporting characters.
Writing is really agreeing with me, and I’m getting better at taking the reins and getting my writing done when it’s possible, rather than when I’m feeling like it. As a father, IT nerd and husband, getting “feeling like it” and “possible” to line up is why it has taken me three months to hit 50k words.
I’ve been feeling the itch to do a bit of visual art, but time constraints are really a pain there. I’ve thought about splitting my creative time between writing and painting/drawing, but the fact of the matter is that drawing is a much slower process. I can’t get nearly the same amount of stuff done. (I also think I’m better at writing, but that’s not saying that much.)
Tomorrow begins NaNoWriMo, which I completed back when the earth was cooling and Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled the dinosaurs.
I won’t be participating this year. I have a pretty decent pace going now. I’m frankly afraid that if I worked on something else, or tried to complete this book at the NNWM pace, I would screw it up.
I will be trying to write every single day in November, and I’ll be rooting on everyone I know that’s in it. And everyone else, too, but in a more general way.
I was a single dad this weekend. My wife and daughters had gone on a mini-vacation with some friends to a cabin up north by the Canadian border, leaving me and my eight year old son home together. He didn’t want to go, and I just didn’t feel like making a 12 hour round trip in a car to hang out with people I hang out with at home.
As father-son time goes, we had a pretty good weekend. It was cold and gray for much of the time, so we didn’t do much outside. We went to the movies, had some good food, watched TV and played games.
I had thought I might get a decent amount of writing done this weekend as well, when Sean and I weren’t actively doing something together. It didn’t work that way. It seemed like every time I would get my concentration focused, I was needed. I was on the hook to answer questions, give advice, help out with tough spots on games, and generally be the dad. My concentration would be broken, I’d be out of “the zone,” and the process would have to start again. My writing output for the weekend was a big fat zero.
There are other writers with whom I interact who are full or part time single parents. There are others who are part of a parenting pair, but who are the primary caregivers. I really have to respect what they accomplish. At eight, my son is in a pretty good age for this sort of thing. He’s no longer young enough that he needs constant watching and hands-on attention. He’s young enough that he’s not yet a social butterfly, or engaged in half a dozen extracurricular activities. But even so, it was difficult to arrange writing around him. With a toddler, or a fifteen year old, it would have been insane.
So for all you single moms and dads out there, trying to write your book and be a good parent at the same time, I salute you. You have a tough row to hoe.
To my darling wife, who goes out of her way to make sure I get time to write: Thank you, sweetheart. I always knew I wouldn’t be able to do it without you. Now I know it even better.
Normally I’d have tried to get writing done after he was in bed, but I had to work a lot of off hours support this weekend. Nothing unexpected, but it made my late night availability spotty.
The Apprentice Progress: 41,983
It appears that I am a serial writer. I thought I might jump back and forth in my manuscript, since I knew approximately what the shape of the story would be. But I haven’t. Each step has led to the next, and I haven’t wanted to jump around for fear of not knowing everything I would come up with in the chapters between.
So now I have done my set up. I have placed the protagonist and her friends. I have placed the antagonists. I have defined the shape of the conflict. I have fired the opening shots. I have written some interstitial matter that doesn’t directly apply. I know what the final resolution will be to this war.
Now I have to come up with the skirmishes, and I’m finding that much harder. It’s a matter of pacing, I think. I don’t want to be too slow and lose reader interesting. I also don’t want to rush from the middle section of the book through the end in a hurry. I also don’t want to give my villains Bolo Yeung Disease1. There’s the constant threat of deus ex machina to keep your characters alive and hale until the cataclysmic final battle.
This has always been a problem of mine.
It’s caused my output to drop, despite my mental momentum going strong. I have some ideas, now. A few pivotal battles in the war on my characters.
How do you handle it? Do you have the same troubles I do?
1Bolo Yeung, perhaps best known as Han’s enforcer from Enter the Dragon, and Chong Li in Bloodsport, played the villain in martial arts movies throughout the 80s. His character was frequently unstoppable until the final battle, when he would inexplicably lose.
I reviewed this earlier in the month on Goodreads, before I had decided when or if to post reviews here. Marling has been one of my favorite indie finds this year, so I decided not to let Fox Bride pass without a review.
The second story of Hiresha the enchantress lives up to its predecessor and then some.
This book takes us to a new city, Oasis, the capital of the empire that contains the Enchantresses’ academy.
While attending a party there, Hiresha is singled out by the Golden Scoundrel, an ancient god/king believed reincarnated into the body of a fennec fox. Due to his attentions, she is told she must marry him.
Hiresha’s attempts to escape this fate are complicated by a vindictive theft plot against the priests and the fennec. In addition, Tethiel the Lord of the Feast is also in the city, and believes they have a Soultrapper to contend with.
I felt that this book was better than the first (which I also enjoyed) due in large part to the maturation of Hiresha’s character. Her interactions with Maid Janny come off more as affectionate exasperation than Brood of Bones‘ prudish peevishness. She treats her Spellsword as a person more often than before. She’s far less concerned with appearances and propriety than she was in BoB as well.
As well as her personal growth, the enchantress takes her fate in her own hands a bit more this time around. I won’t spoil it, but it does include a new wrinkle in the use of her powers that I felt was well done.
The people and city of Oasis are an excellent example of taking a real world environment and modifying it for your own purposes, and making it truly complex instead of a pale veneer of stereotypes.
An excellent sophomore outing from Marling. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Fox Bride at Amazon.com ($2.99 or free w/Kindle Lending Library)
A. E. Marling’s Blog
