WaitMonday night, the Quillians met on Second Life ostensibly to judge the submissions for the Song Inspiration Challenge for July. Those of us who got on early gathered in the meeting room to listen to the Writing Excuses podcast as a group.
Once most of us were finally gathered, the group moderator cracked open the submission box . . .
. . . and discovered that only three people had actually submitted a story.
<sad face>
So we postponed the judgment night until Monday, August 1, 2011. This should give other people more time to complete the challenge.
A Cannibal StarA few months back, I was doing a series of challenges organized by The Quillians, my writing group on Second Life. I managed to miss out on May’s and June’s challenges because of the Project That Ate Summer™ at work. But I’m back for July.
The challenge was simply this: in 250-350 words, write a flash piece inspired by a song. Bonus for guessing the song!
(The bonus is because what we do is gather together one Monday night at 6pm Second-Life Time, read all the entries, and then vote on which ones we like the most. The votes are then tallied, and the winner gets a cash prize (Second Life in-game cash, that is), as do the second- and third-place winners. This time, whoever can correctly guess which songs inspired which stories gets an additional prize.)
Now, I can’t give the name of the piece or the song that inspired it, because I know some of the Quillians read this blog. :) The name comes from the lyrics of the song that inspired it, so I’ll just call this “Name Withheld” for now. I’ll update this with the actual name and the song later. Or make a new post. Whatever.
Once again, when given a word limit, I tend to hit it exactly. But this time, I hit the LOW end instead of the HIGH end. Hm. Interesting. So this is exactly 250 words.
He parked the ship just inside the orbit of the third planet, the one they used to call Jupiter after a long-forgotten myth. The eyes of the worlds were watching, and he wanted a good vantage point, but it would be stupid to endanger himself just to get a story.
He was not the only one here. The proximity sensors indicated several million other ships of various sizes and configurations, some further out, some closer in. All positioned with an unobstructed view of Earth.
Humanity, in all the forms it had assumed and in all the far-flung parts of the galaxies to which they had migrated, still remembered home, or at least some few of them did. Still felt enough nostalgia to mourn—or at least mark—its destruction. But for most of humanity, Earth wasn’t news. It wasn’t even a distant memory. It had been uninhabitable for several billion years. All that was left was just a burnt husk. A useless cinder.
Still, that cinder was the cradle of one of the most powerful civilizations the Cluster had ever known.
He cut unneeded systems to conserve power, unfurled the solar arrays, launched and programmed the recorders to capture all wavelengths at maximum bandwidth and density in three dimensions. Stellar transitions weren’t predictable to split-second accuracy, but it would happen long before he ran out of supplies.
He got comfortable. When Earth was engulfed by the expanding sun, Man would be here to bear witness, after all.
Hope you enjoyed it. I think I really like this piece. I tried making it longer, but I hated it every time I did.
We’ll meet Monday (7/25/11) night and vote. If you do have a guess as to what song this was inspired by, do feel free to guess. I moderate all comments, so if someone guesses, I can just hold them until after Monday, then let them through. I’m interested to see if it’s obvious.
I kept running into walls. I’d write part of a scene, and nothing worked. It was all too contrived.
But today after a critique session of the Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers, I had one of those “audible click” moments where it came to me all at once how I could not only introduce the new character, but bring her into instant conflict with one of the existing characters, while at the same time make something that I’ve been using as a running joke have a more serious meaning and give a little more depth and insight into a well-liked1 existing character. Maybe he’s not always as even-tempered as he wants people to think he is.
I’ve written more than 1,200 words today and can feel myself getting back into wanting to tell this story.
Yay!
By most of the members of my Tuesday night critique group, The Fountain Pen.
Downtown Atlanta at Night, September 2009I used to do a fairly regular exercise that I lifted directly from What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter. What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers I think the exercise was fairly early on in the book (like maybe even in the first few pages) and consisted of this: Every day, write one or more first sentences for stories. It can be one you don’t ever intend to write, but make it a good first line (it has to engage the reader and make them want to keep reading). For the better part of the next three years after I read that book, I made a kind of ritual out of writing (by hand in a notebook) at least one first line every night before I went to bed. Sometimes I’d have to force it; other times they’d flow like a waterfall and I’d have to just stop.
I eventually moved them all into digital format, and over time, the exercise became every few nights, then whenever I remembered it, then once in a while, and finally I just stopped until I needed inspiration.
A couple of years ago, I needed inspiration, so I sat down and wrote first lines. Several bad ones came out, followed by: “The man Nick Damon1 had come to kill was already dead.”
“Ooooh,” I thought. “I like that.” I forgot about first lines and ended up typing several thousand words of what I thought might be a short story. It’s now two novels in progress plus ideas for at least two or three more. In other words, a series.
It quickly became apparent that this was an Urban Fantasy novel. Problem: I didn’t know anything about that subgenre. I’d only read the Anne Rice books, but wasn’t sure they really qualified as Urban Fantasy.
Someone who had read an excerpt of that story pointed me at Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files series. I picked them up and started reading . . .
. . . and yelled “GAAAAHHHH!”
Seems that without ever having read a word of Mr. Butcher’s writing, I had managed to “steal” one of his characters. And I don’t mean that my character sort of resembled his if you squint at night from a quarter mile. No. I mean that my character is virtually indistinguishable from his except that their names are different. Yeah. I don’t have an explanation except that perhaps we both tapped a certain stereotype and decided to deviate from it in almost the exact same ways.
Well, that’s . . . unfortunate, but I can change mine so that other people won’t just automatically assume I lifted the character from Mr. Butcher. Sure. No problem.
A friend loaned me a box of books that are all samples of Urban Fantasy series. I read a few of those and am slowly honing down what I like and what I don’t like.
One of the ones I like is Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series. It, too, is set in Atlanta in the present day (ish), only magic works. But, hey. Atlanta is a rich enough setting to support more than one Urban Fantasy series, right? Especially when they’re quite different. [And while we’re on the subject of Atlanta, take a look at that night shot of the Atlanta skyline up there at the top of this post. That was taken by my friend Brian during Dragon*Con a couple of years ago. I asked his permission to use it, and if I ever get my series published, that image will be the banner at the top of whatever dark theme I choose to use for the website for the books. I love it. And now, back to our regularly scheduled post, already in progress.]
Then I picked up Kat Richardson’s Graywalker series based on the recommendation of a different friend. I liked the first one and started avidly reading the rest of them . . .
. . . and yelled “GAAAAHHHH!”
It seems that the way I chose to visualize magic in my Urban Fantasy is almost identical in every way to the one she chose. Again, without my having read a single word of her work. Well . . . maybe we just tapped into a certain trope and both decided to use it in almost the exact same way. I mean, stranger things have happened. And mine’s only superficially similar. I can change it so it’s even more obviously different. Sure. No problem.
Last Tuesday, I was in a local Barnes and Noble for my critique group and decided to look at the latest arrivals on the science fiction/fantasy/horror/manga/gaming shelf. An author’s name caught my eye: Katharine Kerr. I adore her Deverry series. She couldn’t write them fast enough for me. I picked it up.
“Ooooh!” I exclaimed. “It’s Urban Fantasy!” I stifled a fanboy squee and quickly flipped it over to read the blurb . . .
. . . and yelled “GAAAAHHHH!”
Kerr’s main character is a secret agent in a . . . well, secret agency . . . of the Federal Government that investigates paranormal incidents.
Oh, just great. Now my underlying premise itself is going to look like I lifted it from another author. Except that after I read a chapter or two of Kerr’s book, I realized that hers is much more irreverent (so far), the agency (and therefore the paranormal aspects of the world) is so secret that not even the government knows it exists. And the readers aren’t even told what it’s called (yet). In mine, magic/the paranormal is much more open, as is the agency I created to police it. In fact, I think mine is the only one among the ones I’ve read in which the public actually knows magic exists. Although many of them don’t actually believe it.
I’m sure there are others. I haven’t read the genre extensively. Well, I’ve read it in depth, just not broadly. :) I still have a bunch of books in Terra’s Big Sampler Box of Urban Fantasy Series.
Meanwhile, I need to see if I can diverge some of these characters of mine from what apparently exists in the authorial collective unconscious.
Sure. No problem.
[Note: This is all tongue in cheek. I’m not sitting at home, gnashing my teeth and rending my clothes over how I have to ditch my characters or whatever. I just find it amusing that without having read any Urban Fantasy before backing into writing it, I just happened to come up with some of the same ideas as several published authors. Maybe that’s a good sign, right? Great minds, thinking alike? Right?]
Actually, the original name I used wasn’t Nick Damon, it was something else, but I didn’t like it. Casting about for something better, I happened across this name I had used in an earlier story that I could never get to work. So I reappropriated it.
The Quillians‘ challenge for April is to write a scene of no more than 350 words consisting solely of dialogue. No tags (…, he said; …, she asked, …the constable exclaimed), no narration (He raised his eyebrows, her lips were set in a thin line), no nothing except pure dialogue.
Now, I was given a word count, again, so of course, I hit it exactly, almost without trying. It’s sort of getting uncanny.
Since we are given no opportunity to create character, setting, or plot outside of dialogue, this was an interesting challenge. How do you get all those things across while at the same time making it interesting to read as a conversation?
Well, from the get-go, I knew I wanted to do something . . . a little odd. (Who, me?) So once I had the character name you’ll see shortly, <cliché alert> the rest of it just sort of wrote itself </cliché alert>. Phone conversations are, perhaps, the easiest to portray this way, because they’re naturally all dialogue.
So, anyway, I now present my entry to the Quillians’ April Dialog Challenge: "Kit-napped"
"What exactly do you want me to do?"
"If you ever want to see Miss Princess Pants again, bring a trash bag of catnip—the fresh stuff, not that over-the-counter crap—"
"Oh, I would never—"
"Shut up! Bring the goods to the park at Webber and Clouseau at 12:00 sharp. There’s a bench near the sandbox."
"Yes, yes, I know the one."
"Lie on the bench watching the birds."
"What? Watch the—? I don’t understand."
"I’ll be watching. Stay until you’re sure no one else is around, then bury the bag in the sand and walk away."
"But, how will—?"
"If you do what we’ve asked—"
"We? I thought there was only one of you . . . Hello? . . . Oh, sweet goddess, hello?"
"If. You do. What we have asked. Miss Princess Pants will be returned to you, unharmed, by 3:00 pm. Understand?"
"How will—?"
"Do you. Understand. My instructions?"
"Y-yes. Bring a bag of fresh catnip—"
"Primo stuff, remember."
"Yes, high-quality catnip. To the park at Webber and Clouseau at noon and bury it in the sandbox."
"Come alone. If I catch whiff of the K-9s—"
"Oh, no! No. I just want . . . I just want my baby back, safe."
"Then there should be no problem, provided you don’t do anything stupid."
"Can . . . Can I speak to her? Please, I . . . I just need to hear her voice."
"Lady, I don’t have time for—"
"Please! I’ll do anything you ask! I just need to hear my baby to make sure she’s OK."
"Oh, fine. Anything to shut off the caterwauling."
"M-Mom?"
"Princess! Oh, my Bast, Kitten, I’ve missed you so much! Are you OK? Are they treating you all right?"
"Mom, I’m OK, I’m OK. These jerks are assholes, but they haven’t hurt me. Can’t say the same for them, th—"
"All right, that’s enough, you little spitfire. Lady, are you satisfied?"
"Yes, yes! Oh, thank you. You aren’t going to hurt her, are you?"
"Not if you follow our instructions to the letter."
"I’ll be there."
"See that you are. Remember: I’ll be watching you."
And there you have it. Three hundred fifty words of pure dialogue. In what I hope is an entertaining little vignette.
We’ll present them and vote on them probably around April 11. I tied for third on the poem challenge for February. I took first place for the Pot of Gold story for March. We’ll see how I do for April. :)
Oh, and two more things. First, I’d like to thank my friend Patti for the names of the two streets. Once I saw her suggestions on my Facebook page, I knew I had to use them. Oh, the puns . . .
Second, this is the first post I’ve done using Microsoft Live Writer. I have no doubt it’ll look great on WordPress. What I am a little trepidacious about is how it’ll look when it’s cross-posted to LiveJournal. Well, we’ll see, I guess.
But in the dream, no one would believe me. I’d describe how I was seeing whatever it was out of the corner of my eye. I’d see it, turn . . . and it wouldn’t be there.
Finally, in the logic of the dream, there was one—or possibly more—person I was trying to convince of my sanity, and I did this by standing under a street light in the middle of a sidewalk, screaming at them that I would show them!
And then, in the dream, I turned my back on my friend(s) and took a step.
Into Death.
It was Death who had been stalking me. Him I’d seen out of the corner of my eye.
It was a horrific dream. Probably the worst nightmare I’ve had in recent memory.
But what I remembered more than just the dream was that when I woke up, I wasn’t screaming. I didn’t yell. I didn’t cry out. I didn’t do any of that.
I whimpered.
One, terrified whimper as I stepped into the chill of Death incarnate.
Now, being a budding writer, my first thought after reassuring myself that I was, in point of fact, not dead was, “This would make a great story.” I jotted down as much of the dream as I could remember.
I didn’t write the story right then, though. No, I wanted the story to be as perfect as possible, and the only way it could remain perfect was for me never to write it.
Logic. It’s a bitch.
I overcame that, eventually. After listening to an episode of the I Should Be Writing podcast (hosted by the multi-talented Mur Lafferty) in which Mur talked about having finally written her ‘inspired by a dream’ story that she had put off writing to make sure she never sullied it by actually trying to write it, I sat down and, in one sitting, wrote about 3000 words of the story. I had several false starts. What POV should I use? Where does the story start? How do I make that whimper scary? I eventually realized that to make it truly horrifying I needed to tell it from another POV than the protagonist. Enter the friend.
I wrote it, workshopped it past the Fountain Pen group, and then set it aside for a while.
Recently, I picked it back up, intent on making it better. So I edited it, making the dialog cleaner, cutting out unnecessary words, etc.
I ran it past the Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers group (seriously, guys, we need a shorter name), and got a lot of very helpful commentary.
Part of that commentary was that the ending I had written just didn’t work for several people. I’d heard the same thing from the Fountain Pen group as well, but I was convinced I could force it to work.
During the critique, one or two people offered some ideas on how the ending could work better. And I really liked a couple of those.
Over the last couple of weeks, those have been percolating through my head. And last night while driving to the Fountain Pen meeting from work, a gruesome, horrible ending popped into my head—poing!—based on one that someone else had given me during their critique.
I think I finally have something that could work. That I could . . . submit?
All I have to do, now, is write it. Heh.
Now, what does this have to do with the title of this post?
Way back in 1916, a British author and literary critic named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch published a book called On the Art of Writing. It was a collection of his lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1913-1914. The twelfth and final lecture is called “On Style.” In it, he talks about first what style is not, and gives an example. Then he says the following:
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. [emphasis his]
We still quote this, today, although it’s often erroneously attributed to other writers. I hear it all the time.
The way it’s usually used is when an author has written a particularly clever turn of phrase or bon mot or whatever, they often will try to keep it during the editing/rewriting process because they like it and not because it serves the story. This ultimately hurts their writing.
So, “Murder your darlings.”
My darling in this story that I’ve preserved through all the edits has been that the protagonist turns and walks into Death with a whimper, and disappears. The guys in the Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers (Pen-acles? The Write Stuff? Wordniks?) made me finally confront this, and I’m going to murder my darling.
<sharpens axe> Heeeere, darling! Come to papa! He has a present for youuuuu! <insert evil chuckle here>
For March, our challenge is to write a 250-word flash story that includes the phrase “pot of gold,” but not leprechauns.
Well, begosh an’ begorrah! How are we supposed to do that?
Here’s my submission. :)
“What did we hit?” Jen asked.
I pulled off the road and turned off the wipers. Blood was smeared on the windshield over a spider web of cracks.
“Whatever it was, it was big.”
I squinted out the windshield. The rain was sluicing what was left of the blood away.
“Did you see anything?”
“No,” she said. “I was too busy screaming.”
I laughed. “Don’t worry about it. One of us had to.” I sighed. “I’d better check it out.”
She didn’t protest, and I popped open the glove compartment and grabbed the flashlight.
I got soaked immediately.
I wan’t sure exactly what I was looking for.
Wait. What was that? I shone my flashlight toward where I had seen a glint.
It looked like a Barbie doll. Twisted and obviously dead, diaphanous wings crushed beneath her, still oozing blood, which was washing away in the rain. I bent closer. The tiny female form was blonde, dressed in leaves, and a tiny wand lay near her outstretched arm. And something else . . .
I grimaced, then scrunched up my face and reached out to pick up what she’d been carrying.
Back in the car, Jen turned to me, her eyes wide, and said, “Did you find anything?”
I held up the thimble-sized pot of gold.
“Another fairy? You’d think they’d figure out eventually not to fly so low over human roads.”
I tossed the tiny pot into the glove compartment with the flashlight. At least it would pay for a new windshield.
Exactly 250 words. Don’t give me a word count on something this short unless you want exactly that many words. :)
Who knows, I may come up with something else before the deadline. But this is what came to me in the shower this morning and then wrote during lunch.
One thing she said resonated with me, because once again, I think it’s something I don’t always do well, and it’s something I need to keep in mind when I’m writing.
She mentioned Plato’s Theory of Forms. Essentially, Plato hypothesized that objects in our reality exist as mere shadows of their perfect, ideal Forms which exist outside of reality. Thus, a table is merely a representation of a Table, which is the purest, most perfect representation of “tableness.”
I’m probably doing a horrible job of explaining it, but it’s really a tangent to her real point. You can read the Wikipedia entry if you want to know more than you ever thought possible about it.
Sherrilyn’s point was that when an author writes, “He picked up a pencil and began to write,” you don’t have to explain that a pencil is seven and a half inches long, wooden, painted yellow, hexagonal in cross-section, with one end sharpened to a point of compressed graphite/clay composite, and the other a soft, rubber nub fastened to the shaft of the pencil by a crimped, aluminum sheath.
Why? Because when a reader reads the word “pencil,” they already have almost a Platonic ‘form’ of it in their mind. They know what a pencil is. Some of them will picture it as I’ve described. Others may picture one that’s red, or one of those big, fat ones we used to use in Kindergarten that weren’t faceted. Still others might picture a carpenter’s pencil or a mechanical pencil. Some might see it as sharpened, while others unsharpened.
And her point was that all we, as writers, have to do is use the least number of words possible to describe something and let the reader’s own experience fill in the rest.
“He picked up a sharpened pencil and began to write.” That’s all we need. We don’t need to mention which hand he wrote with, either (unless it’s important to the story). How many of you who just read that pictured him picking it up in his right hand, and how many his left? I’m betting about 89% of you pictured right and 11% left, because that’s about the distribution of handedness.
You probably also pictured him leaning over and kind of “hunkering down” over the paper. Because that’s what you do when you write. So unless he’s doing something different, don’t bring it up. Let the reader fill in those gaps.
Ms. Kenyon says it amuses her when she reads a review about how descriptive her writing is, because she tries to keep it as bare as possible. Sometimes, she says she has to force herself to add a little detail here and there. It’s kind of like that old trick ‘psychics’ do with cold reading: say as little as possible and let the client fill in the rest. Later, they’ll remember that you told them everything when all you did was suggest, and let them do the hard work.
I get a little wordy from time to time, and not just during NaNoWriMo when every word counts. One of the most common things I see on works of mine after they’ve been critiqued is words and phrases crossed out, often with the notation “not needed” or “too wordy.” I tend to forget that the reader brings a lot to the table. Or the pencil, as it were.
Now I just have to figure out how to get the reader to picture a 12-tentacled, multi-eyed, trilaterally symmetrical, purple and green alien trying to pet a cat.
Yes, I’m finally, finally done with the first draft of Killing Time.
And there was much rejoicing. <insert half-hearted ‘yays’ here>
I wrote 4,423 words yesterday and today. Not all of them are good words, mind you, but at least I got the last of the big reveals revealed, the good guys and the bad guys reconciled and group-hugging, and all the time-travel loose threads re-raveled and/or knotted together into some semblance of coherency.
Then, of course, there are the 3,000+ words of notes I wrote to myself, like “Go back and add a couple of scenes from Breda’s point of view to explain why she does this here.”
I am now officially ignoring the thing until at least April. I will not look at it. I will not obsessively read it. I will not…well, okay, I probably will continue to make notes to myself, both written and with my handy-dandy voice recorder. But that’s all I’ll do is make notes.
So anyway…yay. And stuff. That was grueling. But I’m so glad I finished it. I can now say I’ve completed a novel.
Huzzah.
Project working title:Killing Time (First Draft) New words: 6,747 Current total words: 92,561 Goal: 100,000
I have just (during lunch) finished the penultimate scene of Killing Time! I’m mostly happy with how it came out, but I am going to have to go back and tweak a few things here and there. I made copious notes. I’ll bet, in fact, that if I were to count all the copious notes I have made along with all the words in the story, I’m a lot closer to 90,000 words.
That being said, my word count now is 87,164. Maybe just another 3000 to 3500 words, and this sucker will be done.
Done! DONE, I TELL YOU! DONE!
Then I can work on those short stories I have waiting.
Project working title:Killing Time New words: 1,350 Current total words: 87,164 Goal: 100,000
Reason for stopping: I completed the scene and lunch hour was over. Very over. It was lunch hour-and-a-half or so.
The Quillians‘ challenge for April is to write a scene of no more than 350 words consisting solely of dialogue. No tags (…, he said; …, she asked, …the constable exclaimed), no narration (He raised his eyebrows, her lips were set in a thin line), no nothing except pure dialogue.
