writing life

Ready to Start!

I believe I’m finally ready to start writing. I have strong mental images of my characters, their homes, their villages and cities, and the way they dress. I haven’t drawn a map, but it may be a couple of days before I get to a point when I need that. I’ve written out my ideas of what the world is and how it works. So, after lunch I will dive in.

It’s fitting that I start with Daylight time because that’s when my body really seems to click into gear. I think my body clock is in that zone. Yesterday, I got up earlier for church than I usually do and actually felt alert instead of groggy and yawning. This morning I woke up earlier by the clock than I have been all winter, though I didn’t get out of bed right away because it turns out that the one clock I forgot to reset was the thermostat, and it doesn’t automatically adjust. It was so warm on Saturday that the house was still warm on Sunday morning, and I didn’t notice it, but this morning was a lot cooler after a cool day, and without the heater kicking on to warm up the house in the morning, the house was awfully chilly. I started to get out of bed and quickly retreated under the covers until the heat finally came on. That clock is now set properly, so tomorrow morning should go better.

The development phase of a book is my favorite part of writing because it feels like play. It’s a big game of what if. The moment I start putting it into words, it becomes more challenging, and that perfect idea in my head becomes an imperfect draft. But as I tell myself, it doesn’t do anyone any good in my head. It has to become a book before it can entertain anyone else or make me any money.

I’m trying not to put too much pressure on myself or on this story. I realized that with the last thing I was working on, the book that got shelved, I had this underlying sense that this needed to be the book that would relaunch my career, the book that was Too Good To Ignore that publishers would fight over. I caught myself thinking like that with this book and decided to stop it. I’m going to treat it like I’m writing fan fiction, something I do mostly for myself because it’s fun to make up stories. I’m going to indulge myself and amuse myself and have fun. Then I’ll worry about making it marketable.

writing

Getting Into Specifics

Just as I was ready to start writing yesterday, I realized that I’d hit another issue I tend to struggle with: specificity.

I knew my heroine inside and out, and I’d figured out bits about some of the other characters, but most of the secondary characters my heroine would be interacting with in the opening of the book were shapeless blobs. Even in my mental movie, they were essentially the adults in a Charlie Brown special — offscreen and just making noise. So, I needed to get specific about things I tend to handwave over. I had to name these people, think of what they looked like and what sort of people they were, what their relationship was to the heroine and how they’d be likely to interact.

It’s amazing what I uncovered while doing this. Not only did my mental movie get a lot more sharp and vivid, but I figured out some stuff that may affect the plot and that will definitely add some depth to the story. Now my heroine’s parents aren’t just generic parents. They’re people with personalities and their own goals and beliefs. I also realized I haven’t been entirely concrete about my settings and surroundings. In my mental movie, I see the characters moving through vague settings, and I’m not sure I could put that into words.

I may need to write “be specific!” on the sticky note I have covering my laptop’s camera so I won’t forget. When I’m tempted to just toss something off, I need to force myself to dig into it.

Today’s task is to do some visual world building. I know the history and culture, but I realized I don’t know exactly what it looks like. There may be map drawing.

It is possible that I’m procrastinating on the moment when a potential book has to become a real one by being put into words, but all this stuff is making it so much richer. Yesterday I would have said I was ready to start writing, but what I would have written yesterday morning is so much weaker than what I’d write today, and I suspect that what I write Monday will be so much stronger than what I’d write today if I started writing today. One of my general weaknesses about writing is that I’m impatient. I want to jump right into it and get started, and that means some things aren’t as well developed as they should be. I’m going pretty quickly from the first germ of idea to getting ready to write, and it’s easier to develop all this now and weave it in as I write than it is to try to fit all that in after I’ve written a vague draft.

writing

The Joy of Outlining

I normally consider myself some sort of unholy cross between a “plotter” and a “pantser” when it comes to writing. I can’t seem to start writing a book without at least a bit of a high-level outline — something like the stages on the hero’s journey — but then I never truly know what the book is about until I’ve written it, and then I have to do a lot of rewriting.

For the book I’m developing now, I’m trying something new and doing a scene-by-scene outline, digging into each scene to look at how it progresses the plot, how it affects the protagonist, where the conflict is, what the emotional pivot is, and what the result is. I haven’t started actually writing yet, and I can already tell a difference.

For one thing, there was a scene I envisioned that I thought did a good job of showing what the heroine’s issues were and building toward the decision she ultimately makes. But once I started digging into the scene, I realized I didn’t need it at all. The emotional beats were identical to those in the previous scene, and all this scene did was delay the start of the main action. I think previously I would have written the scene and then agonized over cutting it. This way, while outlining the previous scene I already knew I wouldn’t need the next one, so I didn’t waste a lot of time on it. I’d seen the mental “movie” of it, and I think I got some character insight from it. Some of the bits I like from that scene will probably end up in a later scene that’s more pivotal. The time I spent thinking about it isn’t wasted, but I’ve also saved myself a lot of writing time.

Then there’s something about analyzing a scene this way that forces you to see the nuts and bolts and how they work. One problem I had with a previous project I struggled with and then shelved was that my agent kept telling me my heroine wasn’t proactive enough. She did make decisions about how she reacted to things, but the major turning points in the story were all her reacting to other people’s actions rather than her taking action, and once I’d written the book, it was really hard to fix it without starting from scratch (which is why it’s shelved, at least temporarily).

Once I started digging into my planned scenes, I realized I was doing the same thing all over again. The heroine gets an opportunity to do something, and her parents bring it to the clan leader to decide. The clan leader rules on it, then assigns the heroine to prepare herself for it. After smacking myself on the head when I saw the pattern, I changed it so that the heroine is the one suggesting bringing it to the clan leader for a ruling, then the clan leader leaves the decision up to her, and then the heroine is the one seeking to train to prepare herself. These are minor tweaks to make now, but if I’d already written these scenes when I noticed it, it would have been more difficult. Even if I changed a few sentences to make it her decisions, the emotions and tone wouldn’t have been quite right, and the inner conflict would have been different.

And then after I fixed all that, in a later scene I caught myself setting it up that someone offers her help when really it should have been her asking for help.

Doing this kind of analysis before writing can also help fix those problem scenes — the scenes you need to convey information and set something up but that don’t really have any kind of inherent conflict. By digging into the potential and looking for conflict, I moved the scene to a new setting, made it more active, and added elements from a subplot to it. Now the main plot purpose may be mostly exposition and setup, but there’s stuff going on from a subplot to make it a real scene. I’m not sure I’d have noticed the problem if I’d just written the scene the way I originally thought of it.

Of course, the moment of truth will come when I have to actually start writing and I see if the plans translate well into actual words. That will likely come later today.

Life

Sick Days

Apologies for a few days of silence. I was having some issues with my web hosting service that made updates difficult. I don’t know if all is well, but it looks like it’s working for now.

Meanwhile, I’ve been fighting the aftereffects of a cold. The serious symptoms lasted only a few days, but then bits of it keep lingering, so I’m not really sick, but I’m not entirely well, and I’m fairly exhausted. Fortunately, I’ve been at the phase of the book I’m working on where most of what I was doing was just reading for research. This week, I’ve been doing serious story development. I think maybe I’ll get to actually writing words tomorrow, and I hope by then I’ll have the brainpower for it. The last few days, I’ve been gradually improving, though with the slight problem that the better I feel, the more tired I am — probably my body needing rest after all that fighting it’s been doing. At least I’ve had the appropriate weather for being sick, as it’s been cold.

As I start to get better, I almost feel a little sad about leaving “sick days” behind. I won’t miss the coughing, sneezing, and sore throat, but there’s something rather nice about the suspension of normal operations that comes with being sick. There’s no sense of responsibility, the things you “should” be doing. You can stay in bed all day, guilt-free. When you have a low appetite, you can pretty much eat what you want because you know your body needs energy.

It’s a pity you have to feel bad while you’re enjoying these things. So I think a “sick day” staycation should be a thing, maybe call it a mental health day. Designate a day when you’re not feeling bad but you’re going to act like you are. Stay in your pajamas all day. Lie in bed reading. Watch movies or TV in the daytime. Eat soup and drink tea. For me, this would have to happen on a rainy day because it feels wrong to be sick on a nice, sunny day.

I may have to wait until the fall to really do this, though, because I’ve got work to do to keep me going through the spring, and I’ve had enough real sick days. But the first cool, rainy day of fall, if I don’t have a deadline or some other obligation, I’m totally declaring a mental health day and taking to bed with a stack of books and a pot of tea.

Books

Stories of Russian Winters

In the midst of all the research reading I’ve been doing, I have managed to read a few novels for fun. I read the trilogy by Katherine Arden that began with The Bear and the Nightingale. I’d read that a few years ago when it came out, then somehow missed the second book. The third book came out recently, so I reread the first to refresh myself before reading the whole series.

These are fantasy novels set in medieval Russia, built around some traditional Russian fairy tales and incorporated into bits of actual history. I’ve read some of the tales used in the story, but I’m not familiar enough with them to be able to say how much of these books are a fairy tale retelling and how much they’re something entirely new. At any rate, the result is a fleshed-out world and characters. The look at medieval Russia, which is apparently fairly factual, is almost like seeing something out of another world. It’s a very different place with an unusual (to modern eyes) culture, and their coping mechanisms for winter are interesting. It’s hard for me, a southerner, to imagine a winter so harsh that insulating your home with snow and ice keeps it warmer and the family would sleep on top of the stove. Then imagine traveling in these conditions, and putting coals from the fire in a trench, then building a pallet of branches on top of that to sleep on.

The story follows a girl/young woman growing up in a small village north of Moscow, the daughter of a nobleman. There are stories/rumors about her mother and grandmother and the fact that they might not have been entirely human. Our heroine, Vasya, seems to take after them. She sees all the little spirits who occupy the land and their homes — the ones who care for the oven, for the home, for the stable, the trees, the waterways. But there are darker spirits out there, as well, and they’ve noticed her. Whether she can protect her people from them depends on whether she’ll be allowed to by her stepmother, who’s fallen under the spell of a vain and paranoid priest.

Whether you want to read these in the winter and enjoy the atmosphere as you huddle under a blanket with a warm beverage or in the summer so that the trip to an icy land helps take you away from the heat is up to your own inclinations. I found them the perfect reading for a cold winter day. I put some Rachmaninov on the stereo, made some tea, and settled down for some vicarious traveling.

The pacing of these books is rather leisurely, especially the first one. There’s a lot of time spent establishing the world and the characters and hinting at the looming threat before the action kicks into high gear. I enjoyed playing in that world before the action started, but if you like a fast pace and non-stop action, these might not be to your taste. If you like wallowing in an interesting setting, they may be more to your taste. The later books in the series do kick up the intensity and the stakes. These are definitely recommended to those who want something different from most of what’s been published as mainstream fantasy, or if you liked Spinning Silver and the Russian setting of that.

The Movie in My Head

I was talking yesterday with someone about what goes through my head when I’m working on a book, and I guess it can seem kind of odd to someone who doesn’t live that way.

Strangely, I have both a movie playing in my head and narrative, at the same time, so it’s like a movie that contains voiceover narration that covers everything. I both see the action and hear the words describing the action, though sometimes it varies. Earlier in the process, there may be bits that I see, and then I find the words to describe them. Or I may have just the narration, like in cases where the narrator is talking about thoughts and feelings, and later figure out where these things fit in the action, and then the movie scenes will build.

I never really see a complete “movie” straight through. I see scenes, and not always entirely in order. They may repeat in different ways until I feel like I’m getting them right. I’ve seen some of the opening scenes for the story I’m developing now in multiple ways, sometimes adding stuff and sometimes subtracting stuff as I figure out how they should really go. At times, the “movie” remains the same but the narration changes. That’s when I’m figuring out the exact words.

Not all the scenes in the “movie” make it into the book. Some are backstory that doesn’t need to go in the book but that I need to know. Some are figuring out the characters — again, stuff I need to know but that may not belong in the book. Some are just figuring out the world. Right now, there’s a scene I really like because it says so much about the world and the characters, and it’s just really lovely imagery, but I suspect it won’t go in the book because it’s really just “ordinary world” stuff and doesn’t push the plot forward. It only delays getting to the main action, so it may have to remain a memory for the character that doesn’t play out “on stage,” so to speak.

The other thing that tends to happen to me is that I find myself seeing the world through my main character’s eyes. One of the traits of this heroine is that she’s really good with animals, at a supernatural level. They instinctively like and trust her, and she’s good about sensing what’s going on with them, but she’s not conscious of this as a special gift. It’s just the way she is. Well, yesterday I went to lunch with someone, and while I was waiting for her, I was admiring the aquarium in the restaurant lobby. It was a floor-to-ceiling pillar, and the fish were huge, most of them about the size of my hand. They all rushed over to where I was standing, reminding me of the way dogs act when you visit their home, clustering around you and seeking attention. Some even turned so that their eyes were facing me directly, making eye contact with me. I found myself thinking about how all animals seem to be drawn to me — and then I remembered that was the character, not me. I suspect the fish thought they were about to get fed, so there was no mystical bond happening.

Right now, I have at least bits of “movie” for the first third of the book, and a few random scenes from later in the story. I need to start developing the secondary characters, but otherwise, I think I’m about ready to start writing. It’s a good sign that I find myself thinking so much about these people and their world, but it does make “adulting” hard when I just want to play in my story world. Yesterday was busy, with a business lunch, some errands, and then a meeting in the evening. Today I don’t have to go anywhere, so I can wallow in my imaginary world.

Books, movies

Jane Austen Sick Days

I suppose I should be making some kind of Oscars commentary this morning, but I didn’t watch the ceremony, and I hadn’t seen any of the nominated movies. I think I saw three movies last year. Instead, I was watching the miniseries of War and Peace from a few years ago, mostly to laugh at the costumes (it’s set in the early 1800s in Russia, but a lot of the women’s dresses were more 1930s movie star or 1990s bridesmaid).

I guess I fell into that because I was out of Jane Austen stuff to watch. When you’re sick, as I’ve been for the past few days, Jane Austen is the perfect source for things to read or watch. You don’t have to worry about characters dying, unless it’s a troublesome elderly relative dying offscreen to leave someone a fortune. You don’t have to worry about someone suffering more than a broken heart or the cold they get from getting caught in the rain. If someone we like gets jilted, we can rest assured that the jilter will be smacked upside the head with karma. The people we like and want to end up together will come out well and end up together, while the people we don’t like will get what’s coming to them.

And all of this will happen in lovely dresses on nice, sunny days (unless the weather is needed for a plot point, like that rain to make someone sick). They may talk about needing money, but no one starves, and there are plenty of rich friends and relatives around to help ease the way.

I’m reading a biography of Jane Austen right now, and it seems like a lot of that was wish fulfillment on her part because life was hard and bad things did happen. In her books, she was smoothing over the rough edges, even as she was unleashing the snark and using her pen to create karma that the real world didn’t provide.

Now that I’ve made it through all that Amazon Prime has to offer, I need to get the hoopla app on my Roku up and running because I get that service through my library, and they seem to have the latest Northanger Abbey, which might be even more fun now, since Cathy is played by a young Felicity Jones, and after seeing her in Rogue One, that means I’ll be wanting Cathy to blow stuff up. But that may have to wait until the next time I’m sick. I’m on the mend now and less in need of comfort viewing.

By the way, War and Peace isn’t good comfort viewing if you’re actually paying attention and not just snarking at the clothes or admiring the men’s uniforms. Way too much emotional turmoil, though there is some satisfying karma.

writing

More Fun with Research

I’m still in heavy-duty research mode, having picked up even more books at the library yesterday, and it really isn’t just creative procrastination because I keep finding little details that spin my story off into a different direction or that give me ideas. Or that validate my ideas in an almost creepy way.

I’d decided that I was going to very loosely base my villain on a certain historical figure, but blended with some other stuff so that it’s not just this historical figure. I’d figured out a lot of stuff about his character, adding on to what I knew about the figure. Then I started researching this figure. I didn’t know a lot about him, just the general big-picture stuff. And it turns out that some of the stuff I made up to add to this real person in order to create a fictional character was actually true of this real person. My made-up character loosely based on a historical figure turns out to have been a reasonably accurate depiction of the historical figure.

Which means I may need to make up some more stuff so it won’t look like this person is just a fantasy version of the historical figure, but that means I need to do a little more research to make sure that I’m not accidentally just adding more real-life details about the historical figure. I don’t think some of these things I’ve found are really common knowledge, and my target readership probably isn’t going to go, “Hey, that’s that guy from history!” but editors might.

Meanwhile, since I’m looking at multiple books on the same topic, it’s been interesting to see how widely differing views tend to be. In one reference book, this person was supposedly his mother’s favorite child and he turned out the way he did in part because his mother doted on him so much. In the next book I read about these same people, supposedly he turned out the way he did because his mother was so harsh and strict with him and she never really showed him any interest or affection. The first book is more recent and was based on correspondence among these people that was previously hidden in archives, so it might be more accurate, since it uses the actual words of these people and the people around them rather than speculation based on observations recorded in publicly available documents. That’s why you look at multiple sources for your research. Of course, it doesn’t matter as much if you’re just using the history as inspiration for totally fictional characters in a made-up world that has magic in it.

But it also can show the difference between public and private personas and perceptions, and that’s something that can fuel a plot. It seems that people at the time saw this person as having cruel, unfeeling parents that he was rebelling against, and they had no idea that his mother was actually quite sympathetic and intervened to try to keep his father from being harsh with him. He seems to have been playing the public for sympathy to try to pressure his family and others into giving him more money.

It’s fun feeling pieces of story click into place as I research.

publishing business

Authors Behaving Badly

The writing world has been buzzing in the past few days about yet another plagiarism case. This one opened up a whole seamy underbelly of publishing and what people are doing to get ahead.

Alert readers notified authors that they’d spotted bits of their books in a “new” book they were reading, and it turned out that the book in question was a mosaic of pieces from other books (and an article or two) pasted together, with the character names and a few words changed and a little bit of transition to more or less smooth over the gaps between the stolen bits. The “author” in question claimed to be shocked at these allegations and blamed it on a ghostwriter she’d hired to write the book.

But then that opened a can of worms in revealing that this “author” wasn’t actually writing her books. She was more of a publisher, a content mill, hiring people to churn out books for her to publish. One of her ghostwriters has said that the “author” was actually the one who handed over a manuscript and asked the writer to smooth it out for her, essentially doing a heavy edit, and what was handed over turned out to have been a bunch of chunks taken from other books.

A lot of this comes down to attempts to game the Amazon algorithm, especially for Kindle Unlimited, where authors are paid by the number of pages read. To stay near the top so that your books are more visible, you have to keep a steady flow of new content going, and to do that, some authors are resorting to tricks of various degrees of shadiness. There’s ghostwriting—cheaply hiring freelancers to churn out books for you to publish. There’s book stuffing, in which a “book” is actually a collection of previously released other books, with one new book at the end, so the author gets credit for thousands of pages read when the reader skips to the last book (Amazon tried to crack down on this by changing the rules about what counts as a “book”). There are schemes for click farms, in which people are hired just to click through books so the authors get credit for pages read and so that the books move up in the rankings, so they’re more visible and are more likely to be read. Some of the scammers post fake reviews for competitors’ books, then allege to Amazon that the competitor paid for the reviews, so those books get taken down.

The result is that Amazon is now so full of shady stuff that it’s hard for real books to get noticed. I know my sales have slumped a lot, and that’s one reason I’m trying to find a publisher. I’m afraid the whole independent publishing thing is going to collapse under its own weight. Kindle Unlimited has really just encouraged some of the more toxic behavior. These schemes wouldn’t be so lucrative without that, if each book had to be purchased and had to stand on its own merits. The problem is that Amazon doesn’t care because they’re not losing money. They make the same whether it’s a stuffed plagiarized book or a well-written original book, and the scammer may be even more likely to buy ads from them.

All this to say that legitimate authors need readers’ support more than ever. It’s harder for our books to be discovered amid all the noise, so reviews and word of mouth are essential.

writing

Researching Fiction

Some of the ideas and insights I got during yesterday’s round of research reading reminded me of one of the few points I was allowed to make in last weekend’s Panel From Hell. If you want to create a vivid world that doesn’t perpetuate tropes and stereotypes, you can’t use other fiction as your reference or source material. You need to do actual non-fiction research.

You can see what happens when people use fiction as a source in a lot of the fantasy from the 1970s and early 80s that’s essentially just a take on The Lord of the Rings, or the 1970s and 1980s space opera that’s heavily inspired by Star Trek or Star Wars.

But since magical lands with wizards and elves and great space empires don’t really exist, how else are you supposed to research them?

Everything we humans write is based on human experience, one way or another, so you find analogues in our world that you want to base your fantasy worlds and cultures on. That’s what Tolkien did in the first place. You’re more likely to get something interesting and original by going to the sources he read than you are by going to what he wrote. Read about the history of the era you’re basing your world on, read about the culture. Read world history to see how various things came together to make certain conditions happen. If you’re writing about a space empire, look at how some of the empires on earth have worked.

That doesn’t mean that you have to (or even should) write The British Empire — In Space! But studying the British Empire would probably give you a lot of ideas for what might happen in an empire with far-flung territories and no real-time communication, and the result would be more unique and interesting than yet another thinly veiled retelling of Star Wars.

When it comes to fantasy worlds, you’re better off using your research to generate ideas rather than trying to be meticulous about re-creating our cultures in that world. You probably shouldn’t have an obvious Magical Asia, Magical Europe, and Magical Africa, but studying the ways cultures intersected and interacted might give you ideas for creating your own cultures.

The one area where fiction might serve as a reference is if you read novels written in the time and place you’re basing your story on. That can give you a sense of how they used language and what was going on with the culture in that time. If you’re writing a world based on Regency England (or an alternate history in that time), you really should read the works of Jane Austen. But you can’t just read those works, or else you’ll end up with yet another take on Jane Austen rather than something original. Period novels are part of your research, not all of it.

I do try to read whatever’s been written in the general area of my story idea, but not to get ideas. I want to know what’s been done so that I don’t inadvertently copy it. I can choose to go my own way once I know what others have done. It’s also good market research to know what’s been done and how well it worked.