The IdeaIt never fails. When I really really should be doing something else, that’s when ideas come to me.
Alternatively, they come to me when I can least do anything about them, like while I’m in the shower or driving. Luckily, keeping a notepad and pencil in the shower (hey, don’t judge me) and a digital voice recorder in the car have solved those particular problems.
Today, I need to finish something else up. But I keep getting side tracked by this little voice in my head.
Every year, I participate in NaNoWriMo, which if you do a little looking around on this site, you’ll find several references to. The goal during National Novel Writing Month is to write a complete novel of 50,000+ words in just the 30 days of November. You can plan and plot and world-build and character-develop all you want before that; but the entirety of the words of the novel itself must be composed between midnight of November 1st and midnight of December 1st.
Last year, I ripped NaNoWriMo a new one, to put it indelicately. I wrote 78,000 words, then went on to write another 15,000 words or so to get my time travel novel (Killing Time) done.
But this year, I have four unfinished novels, dammit. I don’t need to start another one. But I want to participate. And yeah, I could use the month to concentrate on finishing one of the unfinished novels, but…well, I don’t want to. I think part of the fun of NaNoWriMo is the thrill of writing something new.
For the last month or so on the podcasts Escape Pod, PodCastle, and PseudoPod, they have run promos for a series of 34 stories co-written by four well-known authors (Tim Pratt, Jenn Reese, Heather Shaw, and Greg van Eekhout) that are collectively called “The Alphabet Quartet.” Each story title starts with a different letter of the alphabet.
You may be wondering two things right now. One: Why are there 34 stories if there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet? Two: What do all these disparate, seemingly unrelated facts have to do with the price of tallow in Ecuador? I’ll take those in order.
One: There are 34 because although there were originally 26, some of them were published elsewhere, and the magazine that agreed to publish them (Daily Science Fiction) wanted original works, so the quartet wrote brand new ones to replace the ones that had already been published elsewhere. But those of us who contribute to one of the three Escape Artists podcasts (listed above) get all 34. Because we’re special.
Two: I’m about to tie it all together. Stand back. Watch me.
I’ve been trying to come up with some ideas lately for shorter works that I can play with. Stuff that doesn’t require a bunch of world-building, character development, and plotting. When I heard about the Alphabet Quartet, my brain seized on the idea of writing 26 stories, each one beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. It was a cute idea. I filed it away.
A day or two later, a rhyme from Sesame Street long past (which was also featured in the film E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial) popped into my head: “A is for Apple. B is for Ball. C is for Cat that sits on the wall.”1 It played over and over in my head.
Eventually, I put the ideas together. To wit: I should write 26 short stories, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, but the titles themselves should make a little doggerel rhyme of that sort.
I jotted down a few ideas in Evernote. I tried to come up with single-word titles beginning with each of the 26 letters of the alphabet in such a way that each three-letter combination formed a ‘stanza.’ But the words had to be evocative; that is, they have to conjure up several ideas. They have to give me a spark. And I have to be able to rhyme the final word of the third line of each stanza with the second title. Think that sounds easy? I’m not a poet. :)
Oh, here. This will explain it better than I’m doing.
A is for Apothecary,
B is for Bard;
C is for Clowns that creep through the yard.
D is for Dragon,
E is for Earth;
F is for Forgetting what some things are worth.
G is for Graveside,
H is for Him;
I is for Innocence wrapped up in sin.
J is for Justice,
K is for Kiss;
L is for Lightning: a strike or a miss.
etc. You get the idea.
The third line of each stanza will give a clue to what that letter’s story should be about. And I’m not saying that these are by any means the final choices. Each alphabet word gives me a number of ideas. I especially like “C is for Clown” and “U is for Uranus.” Those are the two for which more or less complete story ideas popped instantly into my head.
So, the idea that came to me while I was trying to do something else—which then inspired me to write this post, which further keeps me from that something else—is that if I write 26 stories of about 2000 words each (on average), that’s more than enough words to win NaNoWriMo, and it gives me a finished “work,” even if it’s not a novel.
Now, if you remove the four days of holiday at the end of November (where we here in the US celebrate Thanksgiving)…well, golly! That equals 26, doesn’t it?
I think this sounds suspiciously like my brain done went and ambushed me with a plan! :)
The irony of this is that I can find no reference of this anywhere on the Internet. I distinctly remember it, yet I’m probably wrong. It would be amusing in the extreme if my misfiring memory of something that never existed sparked this idea. When I get home, I’ll see if I can find ET and watch that sequence to see what it actually says. The one screen capture I saw online shows Drew Barrymore standing in front of a TV on which is displayed “B is for Banjo,” and it is on a wall.
But there’s a reason I’ve been quiet. I’ve been writing and reading a lot. I don’t have a lot of new words all in a row to show for it, but what I do have are redesigned character backgrounds, re-imaginings of characters, new characters, societal development, a rather huge mindmap, background information, a framework and logic for magic . . . and probably about 4500 to 5000 new words. Doesn’t seem like a lot when I summarize it like that, but when you look at it from a certain point of view, all the stuff I’ve written down that no one will ever see will probably nearly double the size of the story when I go back and rewrite it from the beginning. I’ve got about 46,500 words of it written, but most of that will have to be rewritten with all this new stuff taken into account.
Which, unfortunately, means that my most favorite and best darling of all has to go: my first sentence, which is what sparked the idea for the whole novel, which then became a novel series.
The man Nick Damon had come to kill was already dead.
Unfortunately for that awesome first line, Nick is no longer the type to set out to kill someone in cold blood. He never really was, but I just couldn’t give up that line. <le soupir profond>1 “Kill your darlings” has never been so hard. :-/
Anyway, the whole purpose of this post was to ask a question.
My novel, tentatively titled Perdition’s Flames, takes place in modern-day Atlanta, only magic works, but there are no sexy vampires (that do or do not sparkle) or sexy werewolves. Specifically and purposefully, because I’m sick and damned tired of that overused trope.
I picked Atlanta for a couple of reasons. First, it’s where I live, and I’m familiar with it enough to set stories in and around it . . . with a little research. :)
Second, the other cities I’ve lived in have been too small to set something of the kind of scope that I want to write in (diagram that sucker). I have nothing against Tuscaloosa/Northport, Alabama, but the streets do have a tendency to roll up at 10:00 pm. And my hometown is just 1800 people. I think a maniac murdering people left and right would overwhelm the police and the inhabitants.
So, Atlanta. :) One of the great things about Atlanta: it’s a distinctly southern city, but with a lot of added diversity.
But I noticed that in my novel, three of the four main characters are white and three of the four are men (not necessarily the same three both times). Only one main character is a woman, and one is Hispanic2 (again, not the same character). I have a minor character who is Asian (I’m considering changing him to a her), another who is a black woman. A few others are of various races and genders. Picked basically at “random” as I wrote and needed a body to fill a role. And I’ve added a couple of new characters in my head who are both women and who may come back in future stories, assuming I ever get this one written.
I wasn’t intentionally going out of my way to try to have the novel reflect the racial diversity of the city it’s set in, nor was I attempting to gender-balance it. But then it occurred to me that I had no idea if other readers even noticed such things. Or cared, if they did.
I suspect that white, male readers — for the most part, anyway — pay little to no attention; white, female readers may notice the male-to-female ratio of the cast, but may or may not care much about the racial component; and members of other races may pay a bit more attention to race, but maybe not a whole lot.
Again, these are merely speculation, and I have no idea if it’s even in the ballpark of right.
Which brings me to my question. Do you pay any attention to that sort of thing? Does it take away from the story if the city is diverse, but most of the main characters are white guys? (Now, granted, I am a white guy, so I’m probably best at writing from that POV.)
I’m just curious. I don’t really know that I intend to “fix” it. I think I sort of subconsciously/unintentionally stumbled on a pretty good mixture of characters that I’ve grown to like (even though some won’t make it to book 2 <insert dramatic minor chord here>).
Don’t ask me why I decided to ‘heavy sigh’ in French. Like I understand the inner workings of my mind any more than you do? We’re in this together.
I’ve heard that this term may have become derogatory while I wasn’t looking. I certainly do not mean it that way. I just don’t know what else to use, if, indeed, it has taken on negative connotations. I just mean people whose first language is Spanish, but who are living in the US.
Magic Abound[As an aside, as soon as I knew what the content of this post was going to be, you can probably guess (from the title if nothing else) what song has been in my head.]
The Shiny™ came back from Apple, all fixed up with a new logic board (the sound card is apparently integrated), a reseated cable which had come loose, and with the hard drive wiped and re-initialized with the latest and greatest version of MacOS. When I got it home, I cranked it up and the first thing it asked for was for me to supply a drive on which I had backed up with Time Machine, and it took about 2 hours to restore it to pre-problem status. I was back up and running in less time than I thought possible (because I used to use only Windows).
Of course, then I started having to type all those ideas I was flooded with into Scrivener.
The good news is that I finally worked out (I think) how magic works in my Urban Fantasy series (la de da, doesn’t that sound high-fallutin’?). This may sound trivial and ho-hum, but you have to remember that I’ve been writing this thing for the better part of two years and have two novels at various stages of completion, plus ideas for a couple or three more. It’s about time I figured this out.
It uses elements from a lot of things that have come before, and probably isn’t unique, but since I’m not writing a “How to Cast Magical Spells” book and am trying to tell a story within the framework, I don’t intend to actually ever lay out how it works for readers. (Plus, that also gives me wiggle-room for changing it as time goes on. :)
There’s definitely some stuff in here from Babylon 5/Crusade, a touch of Star Wars, a smidgen of Dungeons and Dragons, a healthy dose of ancient Greek mythology, a soupçon of The Belgariad, and a sprinkling of Actual Science™.
Now, here’s my question. Although I need to know How It All Works™ (I’m not going to stop doing that ™ thing any time soon, by the way, so get used to it) in order to have some internal consistency (hopefully), how much does or should the reader ever know? Is it enough to leave it something of a black box, or should I sort of have the characters who can perform magic explain it a little bit as they go, for the reader and/or other characters who are not able to do it (and who therefore ‘stand in’ for the reader)?
I’ve seen it done both ways, and to excellent effect. I think it depends on the writing, but . . . still, I’m curious.
The ScreamI’ve been writing like a fool for the last couple of weeks. Once I figured out how to get past the snag I was . . . well, snagged on, it all started to flow, again. I’ve written two complete chapters, started a third, and added copious notes.
And then I ran up against another snag, but this one didn’t have anything to do with writing. Or at least not directly.
I use a MacBook Pro 17″ (I call it The Shiny™) to do all my writing, and I use a lovely application called Scrivener to do it in.
After an ill-timed mishap involving a falling laptop, a cat, a bottle of Coke Zero (Elixir of Life™), and a USB cable (insert your own interesting story here) . . . I think something was a little wonky with The Shiny. It would play sounds if I had the headphones in, but not through the speakers.
Now . . . I need my sounds. I share a house with someone who goes to bed at 8:00 (because she gets up at 3:00 AM for school), so I wear headphones much of the time, but you can only wear them for so long, you know? I mean, ear-sweat is not a topic to discuss in polite company, so I won’t.
On Saturday I took The Shiny to The Apple Store where I had an appointment with a lovely Genius1 named “Mike.” Of course, when demonstrated for Mike, the problem miraculously went away (and the nearby patrons all got an audio demonstration of my abiding love for A-Ha as their 13th album began to play at high volume), in the way problems since the Dawn of Man™ have gone away whenever demonstrated for the person who is intended to fix it. I can easily imagine two Homo habilis dudes sittin’ around the campfire, chillin’, makin’ flint spearheads. Og can’t get it right to save his hairy neck, but when he tries to show Zug, it works perfectly every time. Of course, as soon as Zug leaves, Og can’t make a single correct blow on his flint with the striking stone.
I also imagine this was immediately followed by the first-ever (l)user joke and the first-ever 3-hour wait on a tech support “hotline.”2 But I seriously digress.
Because of all the symptoms I described for Mike, he suggested—gently, I might add—that the problem was almost certainly hardware-related and that even though nothing showed up on a hardware diagnostic he ran, I should leave The Shiny in the capable hands of Apple so that they might fix whatever might be wrong once they crack it open. <wince>
After assuring Mike that I do, indeed, do regular backups (I use Time Machine—as opposed to a time machine, which would be awesome—and it runs hourly, plus I ran it about 11,394 times in the 15-minute period leading up to the time I needed to leave the house to get to the Apple store on time), I handed The Shiny over and . . . and . . . and left it there. Alone. <twitch> <lip-quiver>
He assured me I’d have it back in about a week. Maybe less.
Since all my writing is on there, I have, of course, been absolutely inundated by ideas. Poughkeepsie3 must be practically empty by now.
Of course, on top of not having Scrivener to write in, I have had to go several days, now, without podcasts.
Podcasts, to put it bluntly, are why you have not heard about me on the national news. You know, along the lines of
MAN, 46, GOES BERSERK IN ATLANTA TRAFFIC, SLAYS 32
“Morons! It’s the pedal on the RIGHT!” — Insane Atlanta man
I can’t stress enough how much of a calming influence they are on me. (I might be exaggerating just a bit.)
Luckily, I have a backlog of some podcasts I’m catching up on, and I’m in no danger of running out of them any time in the next week. But this means I’ll get behind on the ones I regularly listen to. But I’ll catch up. I always do.
So, anyway . . . That’s how my weekend went.
(I’m not <twitch> twitching, yet, am I?)
I’m not being facetious or snarky—that’s actually what they call their support techs. I do wonder, though, if there is a clause in the employment contract with Apple that requires all male Geniuses to grow a beard, whether they really should or not. I’m just sayin’. . .
I can only imagine that the poor drummers’ arms got tired relaying the hold music. . . “Short and hairy and young and lovely, the girl from the next cave goes walking upright, and when she passes, each one she passes goes, “Aaaah!”. . .
There is an old story, probably apocryphal, which claims that Harlan Ellison used to get asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” just one time too many, and he finally answered, “Poughkeepsie.” It’s been attributed to others, and some stories say it was Schenectady instead. I’d probably say Walla-Walla.
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>
All of that link soup is merely a lead-in to tell you the source of the quote I’m about to use from the podcast. It was one that stood out for me the first time I listened, so I restarted the podcast, listened to it again, and this time transcribed what Tracy Hickman said.
Dan (I think) asked Hickman what advice he would give for self-publishers to be successful. His answer was as follows.
Forget about the idea of mass audience. Get rid of the idea of mass audience and deal with individuals. You need to contact people individually, and that’s why things like virtual tours—virtual blog tours—are so important. You need to get in touch with the readership. You need to find the audience. And you find that through the gateway of people’s blogs and personal connection with them. I think that the old time of the old school book tour where you go and fly to some book store in San Francisco and sit there with ten people is done. I think people don’t do that anymore. And book stores—brick and mortar stores—are having enough trouble as it is. What is the case, though, is that you have to concentrate on reaching your audience one on one, and that means going on virtual book tours. That means having a website that is open to people communicating with you, and engaging your audience in a conversation. If you engage your audience—not in a sales conversation, but in an intimate, personal conversation—then they will read your words, and your words will come to life. Your words do not live or breathe until someone reads them and puts life to them and so you need to have the intimate, personal connection with them. So it’s not about mass audience. If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to anybody: it’s about you making a connection with every individual who is going to read your book—at some level—online. [Emphasis added]
And that’s a very good point. I can write and write and write and (I hope) get better and better . . . but until and unless someone gets2 to read my words, I might as well be shouting into a hurricane for all the good it’ll do me.
The “personal connection” thing I think I have. After all, I have this handy-dandy website right here just waiting for people to read it. I have samples of my work up for people to read, and I’m relatively easy to contact (or will be when I get the email for this site working like I want it). So there you go.
I just thought it was important to put those words in bold up there somewhere that I could find them to remind me why I write: because I think I have a story to tell that other people might find interesting.
Oh, and if you’re not already, do listen to the Writing Excuses podcast. If I had to recommend just one podcast for aspiring writers like myself, it would be that one. I’ve learned a lot from Brandon, Dan, and Howard.
Where that number is 81, plus five new evaluations ongoing for “new” ones (to me). Of those 81, I’m “catching up” on 10 of those (i.e., I am downloading new episodes, but listening to them from episode 1, and I’m not up to current, yet). A good many are monthly or on indefinite hiatus at the moment. Of the full 86 (counting the five in evaluation), a whopping 26 deal with writing, reading, books, fiction, language, grammar, and the like. And that doesn’t even count a few that could have gone either way, so it’s probably closer to 30.
“Gets” sounds like it’s a privilege, and some might consider that arrogant. I don’t mean it that way, though. Anyone who reads my blogs or any of my work does so because they chose to do so. I meant it as a stern reminder to myself that no one can choose to do so unless I choose to make them available.
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.
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.
