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.
She recently sent out a newsletter with advice that really hit home for me and underscored something I’ve been struggling with in my own writing.
She said that instead of building a huge world and then showing it to your readers in every sentence, we should build big . . . but only give the reader as much as they need to know to tell the story we want to tell. With her permission, I’m quoting a little bit of her newsletter here because this is the part that really struck me.
We humans do not live in the world. We live in whatever three square feet of space we’re occupying at the moment, and in order to care about the things going on in the larger world, first the world has to reach into our three square feet of space and touch us.
Think about some of the books you have read and enjoyed that had huge world-building. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit spring to mind easily. Tolkien had built an astounding world, rich with mythology, with a history, races of people, languages, and a gigantic, overarching arc of the world itself.
Yet, when he wrote The Hobbit, virtually none of this mountain of world-building was seen. He told a lovely story about a single, unimportant man (well, a Hobbit) who had adventure thrust upon him. The world did, indeed, reach into his space and touch him.
LotR begins the same way, focused on a small band of seemingly unimportant people who have the world impose itself into their lives. It’s only over the larger arc of the story that we learn what’s going on in the outside world. And even though there was a pile of other information Tolkien developed, he left it out of the story, because it would have been too much. That, of course, later became The Silmarillion, which took me years to get through. Probably precisely because it wasn’t about people but Peoples (elves, men, dwarves, orcs, ainur, etc.)
But even though he didn’t tell us all about Eru and the creation of the Ainur and of all the mythology, he knew it, and it informed everything he wrote. And so when the elves sang A Elbereth Gilthoniel, you caught a glimpse of something much deeper.
The Chronicles of Narnia has much the same feel. So much else was woven through these stories than I was even capable of realizing at age thirteen when I first read them and fell in love with them. But virtually none of it was there in those first couple of books. Later, of course, he wove in some of the universe(s) he developed.
Another that jumped quickly to mind was Babylon 5. The TV show. If you’ve never heard of it, go to NetFlix and watch them. All. The series’ creator, Joe Michael Straczynzski (JMS to fans) created a million-year history of the Universe and set the show into a particularly interesting five-year part. Hints of the whole history were dribbled and drabbled to us over the five-year run of the show, until we knew enough to glimpse the depth of his world-building. But he only revealed that which we needed to know to tell the story.
But when I look at the books that are being published, today . . . <sigh> It feels one of two ways, a lot.
Sometimes, it feels as though the writer has gone through all the pain and suffering of developing a world for his characters to inhabit, and he will by God tell you every word of that pile of world-building. Some people call these “map-quest” or “map exploration” stories. You know, ones where the author gives you a map of his world, and you end up exploring every square centimeter of it.
Other times, it feels as though there simply is no more there than the writer has chosen to show you. As though they simply made stuff up as they went along, or added something because it seemed like a good idea at the time. And I suppose if you’re writing a short story or a stand-alone novel, that’s okay. But if you want to sell more in that universe, you should probably have, you know . . . a universe. :)
I know of one author who pretty much did just that. I was reading her books and very much enjoying them, and I wrote her an email to tell her that, and asked how she came up with one of the most intriguing aspects of the world she had built. In her reply, she admitted to me with a winking smily that she had only tossed it in there because it seemed like a neat kind of thing to add, and then later had to go back and come up with a backstory to explain it.
Another couple of authors that do this kind of thing very well (in my humble opinion) are Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files series) and Terry Goodkind (The Sword of Truth series). The worlds they have developed are deep and wide, and full of rich histories and interesting people(s). Goodkind’s first book, Wizard’s First Rule, gave almost nothing of the depth of the world that he had created, focusing only on Richard and the immediate problems presented to him. Likewise, in Butcher’s first book, Storm Front, there are only glimpses of the huge amount of information that he will gradually give us over the course of the next dozen or so books.
This is one of the problem I have. I have done a decent amount of world-building, but I tend to want to sprinkle a bit too much of it into the story. Because I think it’s fascinating, I figure you will, as well. You want to know about the inner workings of time travel, right? Or how the tentacled alien species discovered space travel? Right?
And then I think of The Silmarillion and my ten-year struggle to read it. :)
So that’s what I’m struggling with right now. What to say and what not to say. How much detail to give, and how much to withhold. Ms. Lisle concluded her newsletter thusly, and it will be what I try to keep in mind as I am writing.
All the world you give your reader when you start your story is one moment. One place. And something that matters to pull us in.
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
“Just for fun, and for those of you battling writer’s blockages of various sorts: Write an ANTI-Valentine’s Day poem (that is, not a typical romantic poem). Any length, any style. Have it ready to share at our Feb 14th meeting!
Have fun!”
Well, I ask you: how could I pass that up?
Now, there’s a reason I don’t usually write poetry…
The first thing I thought was, “Valentine’s Day. Love. What are some of the clichés about love that I can think of to parody?” I asked a friend to help me think of a few, and we came up with “can’t live without the other person,” “my other half,” “consumed by love,” “love is blind,” and “you stole my heart,” among others.
Then I thought about the format the poem would have to take. Well, Shakespeare wrote one of the most enduring ones, and it was a sonnet. And would therefore have to be in iambic pentameter, 14 lines long, and with a very strict rhyming scheme.
I could do that.
For several days I’ve been working on it. I now share with you my anti-Valentine’s Day sonnet “Mine eyes were ne’er to roving so inclined.” (In keeping with Shakespeare, the title is just the first line.)
Mine eyes were ne’er to roving so inclined,
But each contingency you sought to cull.
You quoth to me, “’Tis said that love is blind,”
Then left two empty sockets in my skull.
My love, you stole my heart away from me!
Our lives together destined to be blessed.
My lonely heart, you vowed to set it free,
And left a gaping wound within my chest.
Consumed by love I said was my desire,
Our souls entwined forever; two as one.
You tossed my lifeless corpse into a fire,
And then consumed my flesh upon a bun.
My death turned you into a necrovore,
And now we’ll be as one forevermore.
Did…I mention that there’s a reason I don’t normally write poetry? :)
Keep in mind that this is intended to be funny. It’s also written for a Fantasy and Science Fiction audience. And the sing-song rhythm is intentional and is intended to mimic the sound of a beating heart. Lub-DUB. Lub-DUB. Lub-DUB… (You know…an iamb?)
So…yeah. Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you from all of me. :)
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 problem is that I keep coming up with just one more idea. “Oooh, I can…” or “Oooh, what if…” or “Oooh, maybe instead of…” My hope is that the novel will be stronger in the end. I also have a pretty good concept of the size of the editing task ahead of me. I have to plant seeds of all this stuff I’m adding at the end in the beginning so it’s not something I just sort of pull out of my butt at the last second. I won’t name titles, but we all know books like that. And we all hate them. I don’t want to be That Author™.
I’ve worked in all the disparate (as opposed to desperate, of which there might be an element, as well) pieces and am just about to wrap up the events that are happening in my hero’s future, but most of the novel’s present. Or past. Or…
Tenses are so weird when time travel is involved.
I expect I’ll finish it in another 3000 or so words. I’m at just under 86,000, now, which is close to where I thought it might end, so that wasn’t a bad guesstimate. I started writing the scene where all the “good” guys and the “bad” guys (they’ve all done questionable things, really, which is one of my Themes™, I think; no black or white, but shades of gray) are about to have their Group Hug™.
Well, not really, but that’s as good an explanation as I’ll give right now. :)
The end is actually in sight. I can almost smell the sweet, sweet aroma of “completed novel” wafting my way on the breeze. It smells like … victory. And nutmeg. But mostly victory.
Now, I’ll restate my associated writing goal, but with a little firmer date. Once this is done (probably in a few more days), I’m going to put it aside until April. I will then edit it with all my copious notes laid out before me. I don’t know how long it will take, because there’s quite a bit of…
You know how, when there’s an earthquake, you sometimes see pictures of roads that used to be one, contiguous path, but are now shifted anywhere from inches to yards out of alignment? That’s this story. I mean, even in places where I don’t want that to happen. (Time travel. Oy.) There are many places where the ends don’t meet, and I have to go back through, find them, and wrench them back into alignment.
So maybe April and May? Part of June? I don’t know: I’ve never edited a complete novel before. :)
I’mma say that one more time because I like the sound: complete novel.
Project working title:Killing Time New words: 4,259 Current total words: 85,814 Goal: 100,000
Reason for stopping: Various, over the course of several days. Usually because lunch was over. :)
The problem with time travel stories is this: what’s to stop a character after the story is “over” from going back to undo the entire thing and thus negating the entire sequence of events? Since the life of the main character has been presented in anything but chronological sequence, what constitutes an “ending”?
It was a thorny problem, and one I’ve been struggling with. But as it turns out, I left myself an opening way back on day two of NaNoWriMo. I had a somewhat sinister character that was sent back in time to cause havoc and later had her “die” (read: I forgot about her, and when I remembered her, I just had the other characters remark that they hadn’t heard from her in a while, and therefore she must be dead).
Now she gets to the be one who shoots the female lead character and the reason time travel is stopped, all in one fell swoop. It makes more sense in my head than it does written down here for those of you who haven’t read the story. Which is, you know…everyone.
My goal to finish this story was “before the end of January,” and that is looming next Monday. But I think I can do it. I wrote 78,000 words in 30 days. I can write 10,000 in a week. And if not, I can just travel back in time and…wait. I think I’m getting too close to the story.
After this one is over, I have three short stories I’d like to finish and another new one I want to write in its entirety. Two of the four are werewolf stories (not sexy werewolves), another is a comical first-contact story told from the viewpoint of the aliens, and the new one is set in the same universe as my urban fantasy novels Perdition’s Flames and Death Scene, excerpts of which are available at the top of the page, if you so desire. The short will tell the story of how Nick, the main character, came to realize he had magical powers. I can’t wait to start it, which means I have to hunker down and get Killing Time done.
But right now, I’m off to my regular Tuesday night critique session with the other Fountain Pen members.
Project working title:Killing Time New words: 1,938 Current total words: 81,555 Goal: 100,000
Reason for stopping: Lunch was over.
Notes:
As I said above, I finally found how to “get out gracefully.” This is, after all, a story about time travel. How do you exit that gracefully, and make sure the story is over when it’s over?
Made copious notes on how to fill out this rediscovered character and make her be the fall guy (gal?) that is the catalyst for the climax of the story.
"Killing Time" by ..stina.. used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licenseTonight I wrote another 628 words on Killing Time, bringing my grand total to 79,617 words. It’s not a lot of progress in the scheme of how much I was making per day during November, but it’s not bad considering.1
I think I have everything set up, now, for the next several “climactic” scenes, each taking place from a different POV or in a different time frame. Did I mention that Killing Time is a time-travel story set simultaneously in the present; multiple, parallel pasts; and the distant future? Well, it is. And keeping track of all that may prove to be too much for me, but we’ll see if I can pull all the threads together and make the ending a little less unsatisfying. That was one of the big complaints of the people who read it when it was a 12,000-word novelette. Too much exposition (for a 12,000 word story, probably 6,000 of that was exposition. <cringe> Exposition about how time travel works. <double cringe> Yeah. I know. I promise that ratio is much better, now. And the ending was anticlimactic. That was partly by design, and I’m keeping some of that, but adding more detail to clarify why it’s designed that way. Hopefully, my alpha readers will get it.
At least no one died in this scene. That’s a nice change. (No, really, that’s not facetious. I have a truly staggering body count in this one.)
There are between four and eight more scenes left to write, depending on how I feel when I start writing them. I have a lot of loose threads. If each scene is between 2500 and 5500 words long, I’ll crack 100,000 for sure.
Um, yeah. A chapter should be around 2500.
Well, we’ll see. :)
[Note: I’m experimenting with using a photo from Flickr that is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, but I’m not 100% sure exactly how to do that other than what I did, so I apologize heartily if I got it wrong and I will fix it if someone lets me know.]
I have a bad respiratory infection, causing me to cough like mad, and the medicine is making me a little loopy.
Last night on Second Life at our regular Monday night meeting, The Quillians (the SF & Fantasy writing group I belong to) were discussing writing goals for 2011.
Ideally, these goals should stretch us as writers, but not be so bold as to be impossible. I mean, that’s the definition of a good goal, right? It’s all well and good to say “I’ll write four complete novels in 2011,” but it’s quite another thing to find the time—and the ideas—to do it.
I’ve taken a seminar on goal-setting. They stressed the importance for goals being SMART. That’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. Well, the Measurable and Timely are already taken care of: Measurable = a finished project and Timely = by the end of 2011.
So I’m left with Specific, Attainable, and Realistic.
Specific is also pretty easy to do in writing. Specific for me will be either a novel, novella, novelette, short story, or flash. So that’s another one out of the way, and I’m left with Attainable and Realistic, which sort of go together.
For the last five years, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo. The first two years, I crashed and burned because I didn’t have an idea what I was writing before I started. I foolishly thought I could just pound out 50,000 words in 30 days with no preparation. With no idea of a plot, characters, or setting.
Yeah. Right.
The last three years, I won1 by completing 50,000 words in 30 days. All three times, I intimately knew my characters, setting, and where I wanted the plot to go. The rules say you don’t start writing the story until November 1: you can do as much preparation as you want before that.
This is where Attainable and Realistic come in. I know that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I know that, in fact, I can write 78,000 words in 30 days if I’m really motivated, because that’s how far I got in November of 2010.
But it really burns me out. I haven’t written but about 1000 words since November 30th. So being able to do a thing for a short while and being able to do it every day for a year are vastly different things. At 2,500 words/day, I could, conceivably, write 912,500 words before the end of 2011, but that would drive me clinically insane, I think.
So, that being said, here are what I believe are Attainable, Realistic goals:
Finish my 2010 NaNoWriMo SF novel Killing Time by the end of January.
Edit/rewrite Killing Time before the end of June.
Finish my urban fantasy novel Perdition’s Flames by the end of June.
Edit/rewrite Perdition’s Flames before the end of December.
Write 15,000 words of new short fiction by June 30, 2011
Submit at least one piece of short fiction for publication.
Submit ~8000 words to Viable Paradise by June 15.
Critique regularly for the Quillians, Lawrenceville SF & Fantasy Writing Group, and The Fountain Pen. (This is a gimme, since I already mostly do this, but I could do better.)
Regularly submit for critique for all three groups.
When put down in writing, this doesn’t seem like a lot. But as of this entry, Killing Time is at 78,989 words and needs to be about 100,000. Perdition’s Flames is at 35,538 words, will probably be right at 50,000 or 60,000 when “finished,” and then must be edited to flesh it out to be about 100,000 words. And 15,000 words of new fiction in half of the year is kind of a group goal that we were challenged to take on by Sherry, one of the members of the Quillians. I have a good number of short stories that are either unfinished or need editing to be ready to submit. And one new short that’s clamoring to be written set in the same universe as my urban fantasy novels.
The two “submit” goals are the ones that are my “stretch.” I’ve never submitted anything to be published because I’ve never felt anything was “ready.” And so that’s where all the critiquing comes in. The only way I can know if I’m getting better is for people to tell me that the story is ready. Or not.
Three of the last four goals aren’t time-constrained because they’re not independent goals. They rely on the input of other people and the completion of other items, so it’s impossible for me to say “Submit a story for publication by March 1″ because I might not have anything ready by then. The Viable Paradise one is constrained because there is a deadline for submission. For those that don’t know, Viable Paradise is a week-long, residential writers workshop held on (in?) Martha’s Vineyard in the fall of each year. As a side goal, I’d like to read something by each of this year’s instructors, as well. Just to get to know their work.
So, anyway, those are my writing goals for 2011. They’re subject to change as situations change, but I hope that I will add to them rather than dropping any of them.
[Note: As an added comment: I first posted this using a Mac-based blog client called Blogo. It pretty much screwed the format, and will not be used again. Thank goodness for trial versions. I hope none of you saw the first version and were appalled.]
You don’t actually win anything other than the satisfaction of having accomplished the seemingly impossible.
Well, after quite a bit of hard work and a lot of cursing and name-calling (I definitely implied that the parents of the designers of WordPress, several widgets, and a number of plugins I’m using, as well as those of the designers of the theme I eventually decided I like were never married..and may have also suggested that they indulge in unsavory sexual acts best left undiscussed), I have finally gotten my newly minted website up and operational.
Huzzah.
There are a lot of reasons it was time. LiveJournal is and will continue to be my first love as far as blogging is concerned, but as a writer who wants to be published, I need a home site where, eventually, my fanatically loyal minions readers can go for information about me as an author. LiveJournal…has a lot more of me than that on display. :)
Mostly, though, it’s because I eventually want to have a story in Mike Stackpole’s Chain Story, and one of the requirements is—you guessed it—a website on which to host the story itself.
I’ve been putting it off for several months. It just seemed overwhelming. Every time I looked at themes and tried to figure out WordPress, it seemed so arcane and I just didn’t want to expend the time. But this week at work, I’ve had some downtime (shhhh!) and so it gave me ample opportunity to play.
I’m going to beg everyone’s indulgence over the next couple of weeks as I iron out the kinks. I may double cross-post a time or two, or who knows what. This will be a learning experience for all of us. I’m going to try to post all my writing posts here on Writewright (catchy, no?) and everything else will be on either LiveJournal, Twitter, or Facebook, depending on the nature of it.
It’s a brave new world, and I just hope it doesn’t bite. :)
Last night on Second Life at our regular Monday night meeting, The Quillians (the SF & Fantasy writing group I belong to) were discussing writing goals for 2011.