 Faith Hunter
read all posts by Faith Hunter I’ve been talking recently—well, I guess recently is a bit confusing as I’ve had so many weeks off—but I’ve been covering questions we writers can ask ourselves about our own book to understand it better, spot weaknesses, and make the book better. These are things we can do before we write a book and during the writing of a book, but mostly, it’s things we can ask ourselves after we finish that first draft and we are getting ready for the first major rewrite.
Wait. You don’t rewrite? Interesting. Most writers, professional and soon to be professional, know our books need to be rewritten before they are ready to be seen by NY. We know that we need to know as much as possible about our book/plot/character/conflict before we start with the actual rewriting. It is simple stuff, but important.
Disclaimer: All of us go through certain procedures and the Q&A I’ve been writing about are just one writer’s methodology. Not all. Some of us do it differently, but it all comes back the one most important question — Does it work?!?
05. Primary motivation: What is the protag’s (MC – main character’s) primary motivation? Okay, I admit it – this is an easy one. But perhaps harder, what is the antag’s (BBU – Big Bad Ugly’s) main motivation?
I am going to assume that you know your main character’s motivation. Kill the BBU that is trying to destroy the planet. Protect the MC’s family/children/wife/husband. Learn to dance so MC can sleep with the sexy dance instructor. Steal the golden egg so the MC can save the family farm. Whatever.
But…
So many fantasy books have a BBU with no clear cut motivation. The Big Bad Ugly is just going to destroy the planet. Ummm. Why? What does he get out of it? A circulating ball of rubble. The end. If he is doing it of out revenge/hatred/something similar, then how much better to enslave and torture the people responsible for whatever happened to tick him off so badly. Why does he want to do the dirty deed that you, the writer, need him to do in order to have a story?
04. Who or what stands in the way of the MC?
In Faith’s version of Jack and the Beanstalk, (for the sake of argument. Just go with it) Jack is not a hard worker or very wise, yet he has a goal of helping his mom and saving the farm, as long as he doesn’t have to work at it. So when the magical beans grow into a beanstalk a mile high, Jack climbs it. Everything in the overhead palace is a danger, but he steals the golden egg and the goose who laid it, kills the giant, (who was just being a normal giant) and saves the farm. But nothing really stands in the way of Jack. No noose tightens around his neck. Jack doesn’t grow or change at all. Jack is freaking lucky. That is it.
I am currently reading four or five books at once. One is a book where the MC is trying to—I think—find and kill one big BBU who is doing evil stuff. In the course of that attempt, the MC is facing one after another minor evil creatures and each minor one is trying to stop the main character from reaching that one certain BBU and killing him. I think. It isn’t real clear. Like with Jack, things just happen. The writer doesn’t weave an ever tightening noose around the neck of the MC and force the MC to fight and change and grow to achieve the goals. That is what the increasing conflict is supposed to do—make the main character fight and change to achieve the required ends.
Worse, this book goes back to number 05. There is no continuity and no reason for each of the minor evil minions who come after the MC. It isn’t tied together well. It is just one roll of the dice over and over with different minor BBUs. Yes, the character learns something (very minor) about the biggest BBU some of the time, and the MC occasionally gets closer to the BBU when one of the minions is overcome, but…why are the minions doing what they are doing? They aren’t soldiers under orders. At least I don’t think they are. It isn’t clear. It is so random. So, while the biggest BBU may have a reason, a motivation for his actions, and the MC has reasons and motivations, none of the minor BBUs have any reason to be following orders or attacking the MC. I have put the book down 5 or 6 times over the last few weeks.
As I read back over this, it sounds like a rant. It isn’t. It’s surprise. That surprise has sent me back to my own WIP and I have looked at the last Jane Yellowrock book several times to make sure I know the BBU’s motivation. To make sure the things that stand in her way are real problems and not just something I threw on the page to get word count.
What are your main character’s motivations? What the minor BBUs and major BBU’s motivations? When you write them down do they make sense? What stands in the way of the MC achieving his/her goals? Are the MCs having to fight and grow and change to achieve them?
Faith
www.faithhunter.net
 Misty Massey
read all posts by Misty Massey When I was a kid, I loved to pretend I was someone special. Yes, I know, we’re all special, but that’s not quite what I’m going for here. One summer we visited the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Back then there were a number of shipwreck ruins on the sand. I climbed onto them and played pirates, the wind whipping through my hair as I waved a stick for a sword. Another summer we traveled north from Virginia all the way to Canada, staying in a bunch of lushly wooded campgrounds along the way. My cousin and I wandered among the trees, pretending to be Robin Hood’s men and hunting for magical geodes, armed with my daddy’s hammer and two bows we’d constructed from sticks and string. (My cousin had a sliver of granite in her thumb until the day she died, from our continual rock-bashing.) When I moved to South Carolina, the house we lived in was a few yards from a marsh. There’s something eerie and lovely about marshes, and I spent hours climbing on the branches of live oaks and sitting quietly, waiting for the fae to appear and take me to their land under the hills.
All those things I did because I read books. I read about magical creatures and mythical adventures, places that I could never see with my ordinary eyes, but only with the sight of my imagination. And as I read, I discovered that I wanted to be more than just a school kid. I wanted to fly, to cast spells, to fight evil and emerge triumphant. I wanted to be those heroes I read about.
According to a study published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a reader who becomes utterly engrossed in a work of fiction can find his behavior mimicking that of his favorite character. In other words, you are what you read. It depends on how deeply the reader is drawn, of course, and even on what kind of reader you might be. Not everyone becomes immersed, and I doubt that sort of reader would have the same experience, but generally, I think the study might have a point. I know that I was affected by what I read. I learned ways of dealing with my fellow human beings by reading what fictional characters did. I used to be shy in middle and high school, until the year I read Dune. Paul Atreides was taken from his home, dropped into a world he couldn’t possibly have been prepared for, and then discovered that he was different in ways he’d never suspected. I was different, too (not the level of a Muad’Dib, of course – we can’t all be messiahs!) and now I saw that different was okay. Even cool. If Paul could overcome the tragedies he suffered, then I could overcome high school. And I did. It wasn’t all thanks to Paul, of course, but he helped.
I want to hear today about characters whose behavior spoke to you, made such an impression on you that you found yourself changed. Huge ways or small, it doesn’t matter – it’s the change that’s important. Tell me your tale.
 Lucienne Diver
read all posts by Lucienne Diver That’s right, I’m talking about cheerleaders. Not the ones who wear short skirts and build human pyramids, but the ones who sometimes keep us going.
Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” I’ve always understood this on a level, but it wasn’t until I began my current project that I truly internalized it. Humor has always been a defense mechanism for me. Snark and sarcasm come naturally. Holding it back is hard. Emotion is harder. But the novel I’m working on right now is deep and dark, psychological and suspenseful, and it deals with some extremely difficult issues. Devastating, even. This means several things:
1) I have to GO THERE. You can not write a dark novel without getting into the mindset. Just as profilers need to get into the heads of the killers they’re tracking, you have to be the person or people you’re writing. You can’t just walk a mile in their shoes, you have to live the narrative in their heads and hearts.
2) There’s no safety suit. You can’t shield yourself and still tap the well of emotion that you need to plumb.
3) You need cheerleaders.
To be honest, #3 is true for whatever kind of artistic endeavor you undertake. Art is often speculative in the sense of being done “on spec”—live without a net…or contract. No one can tell you its worth before they actually see the finished product, or at least a really significant portion thereof. In other words, when you’re starting out a new novel or proposal, you have to pour blood, sweat and tears into it, then polish it to a high gloss before anyone ever sees it and says to you, “Yes!” Right? Wrong. Oh, you do want to get it into the best shape of its life before the publishing pro sees it, but sometimes you need some perspective. You need someone to assure you that all the time spent away from your family and endlessly revising that opening scene to the point where you feel you’re making no progress at all will be worth it in the end. You need your cheerleaders. At least I do, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Now, I’m not talking about yes men and women, who will tell you that something is wonderful even if it isn’t. I’m talking about people you trust to tell it like it is, because those will be the people whose opinions mean the most. They might be critique partners or a group, if they can be as enthusiastic as they are brutal. They might be readers (as opposed to critiquers, though they’re, of course, readers too), or even family members, though I’d be careful about that. The important thing is that art, whether visual, textual or experiential, is not just about the artist, but the interaction of the audience with the piece. Sometimes, you just need to know if you’re striking the right chord. That, to me, is priceless.
 A J Hartley
read all posts by A J Hartley This might take a while. It’s a recurrent theme here at MW but not one we’ve addressed much recently so I thought I’d come at it from a slightly different perspective.
Different conversations with friends over the last few days got me thinking about the various forms of crap that gets thrown at writers. Some instances:
bitter, hostile or otherwise unhelpful beta readers/critique partners
snide remarks from friends and colleagues about your literary “hobby” (these don’t go away after you’ve hit the NY Times
Bestseller list, by the way)
rejections from agents, editors and their minions, the tone of which range from the bland to the brutal
blistering, mean-spirited unfair or ill-informed reviews of your published work everywhere from legitimate newspapers and websites
to the dreaded one star reviews on Amazon.
I’d like to say that if you just tough it out, your success will eventually lift you above this poisonous tide and you’ll float free, unsullied by negativity, to your literary goals (critical and fiscal).
But that would be a lie.
So here’s the unvarnished truth and an attempt to wrestle with its implications.
It NEVER stops. Not when you land an agent, not when you make your first sale, not when your book comes out, not when your tenth book garners awards or makes you a fortune. Never.
There will always be people who either just don’t like your stuff or are driven to try and tear you down. The problem of course is that the former (which might be a legitimate difference in taste, values, politics or whatever) easily slides into the latter which is simply hateful, at least in the mind of the author whose work is being pummeled.
The consequences of such negativity are potentially deep and crippling. Writers might suffer huge crises of confidence faced with negative reviews or rejections, and some give up outright, or become so unsure of their own ability and the value of their story that they never manage to get it out at all. The criticism and rejection chokes the author’s sense of all they do well, and they freeze up.
As regular readers of this blog know only too well, I’ve had my share of rejection of negativity, particularly in the 20+ years when I sought to sell my first novel, though there has been more since, some of it harder to handle than the comparatively familiar if grueling rejection of the those early years. I won’t bore you with the details, but trust me; when it comes to negative response to my work, I know whereof I speak.
So. How do you get through it?
The usual answer, one I’ve often offered to writers, is that you have to develop a thick skin, that you just develop a resilience to criticism so that it rolls off you like water off a duck’s back.
But this is only partly true and is, as I think seriously about, at least as partly just plain wrong. People who know me well will tell you that I don’t have a thick skin at all. I take criticism and negativity to heart and I take it personally, whether it’s a snide review on Amazon or the one bad student evaluation in a pile of enthusiastic thumbs up. I dwell on these in ways quite disproportionate to their real value. Why? Because that’s who I am and because my writing (and, yes, my teaching) are deeply personal to me, things I invest a good deal of myself in, things that come out of my very soul. Reject my books and you reject me. Mock my writing, dismiss it as trash, consign it to the dung heap of literary history and I’m going to be hurt and pissed.
So sue me.
I make no apologies for taking such things personally. They ARE personal, and no amount of skin-thickening will make them otherwise. Time, of course, mitigates such things, raises the immunity level and makes them sting a little less (especially as you move on to new projects), but the whips and scorns of the world outside my own head will always have power to wound.
But that’s okay, and I’ve started to think that a thick skin is an overrated commodity. Writers need to be able to feel, to be open to ideas, to sensations, to pain. Numb up our bodies to protect our feelings and those feelings go away. The fact that I feel things deeply is not just who I am, and it certainly isn’t weakness. Only people too scared to feel anything would think otherwise. There’s power in feeling, power writers need.
I’m not saying pain is necessarily good, that all that negativity is somehow doing us a favor and making us better people, better artists or whatever. Too much terrible history has been built on that convenient lie. What I’m saying is that writing is not a business for people who don’t feel, and pain is therefore inevitable. You can turn away from it (ignoring the one star review, the belligerent beta reader, or the petulant rejection letter) but that’s dangerous too, because however poorly expressed those criticisms are, they MIGHT contain a grain of truth from which you could learn and improve.
The key, I think, is to assess the validity of the critique, part of which is an assessment of the source. If you know that one guy in your writers’ group hates you or the genre you write in or anything that isn’t written by, you know, him, then you can ignore him safely. Such things can be healthily sloughed off like old skin.
Trickier are the jabs which hit a nerve, which press on things we suspect—or simply fear—might be true. In such cases I would suggest you ask other readers to look at your work and then talk to them about the very issue for which you’ve been attacked and see what they think. Finally, of course, you have to trust your own judgment. Again, there maybe something to be learned, something that will help you fix a real deficiency, but it might just as easily be a matter of taste or judgment that doesn’t need addressing at all.
Because the bottom line is the obvious one: you can’t please everyone, and though some of us secretly want to, you won’t. Ever. When you get used to that idea, the criticism may still hurt but you’ll be less likely to let it stop you or even slow you down. You’re going to get criticized, even attacked, but you keep going because you’re a writer and that’s what writers do. You have stories to tell, characters to develop. So yeah, feel the hurt and do what you need to for a time: yell, cry, rant, find friends to commiserate with, drink with, watch a movie, burn your critics in effigy, whatever: then get over it, think about all you know you do well, and get on with producing more. If you don’t, the haters win, and the world is a little poorer.
 Mindy Klasky
read all posts by Mindy Klasky Recently, I attended the annual Washington Romance Writers Retreat. This convention brings together 150 romance writers (many of whom — indeed, most of whom — write in other genres, including speculative fiction) from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, for a series of panels, meals, lectures, meals, one-on-one pitch sessions to agents and editors, meals, happy hours, meals, games (such as “Romance Jeopardy”, with category titles inappropriate for a family website), meals, etc.
For a handful of lucky authors (and I consider myself very lucky), the Retreat is preceded by a booksigning at Turn the Page Bookstore, the independent store owned by Nora Roberts’s husband. Picture an antebellum Maryland town, with a small house turned into a bookstore, with a tiny side room filled with tables for fifteen authors, including Nora. Then, picture more than 200 readers who arrive more than an hour before the store opens, to buy books from the fifteen authors. Then, picture three hours of authors chatting with patrons, talking about their books, selling their books, smiling, chatting, and constantly being on.
So, basically, picture presenting a positive public — very public — face from 10:00 a.m. on Friday through 1:00 on Sunday.
Sound like heaven? Or hell?
For this introvert, my answer used to be “hell”.
But over time, I’ve developed strategies for coping with so much exposure, with so much human contact. (Remember, a regular workday for me involves bidding farewell to my husband at 8 a.m. and not seeing another human being until he returns at 6:00 p.m. I love that regular workday…)
I’ve learned how to parcel out my energy when I’m an incognito introvert, when I need to present as an extrovert. I’ve learned how to give myself breaks during the day — even if I just sit in a bathroom stall for fifteen minutes. I’ve learned how to fuel myself with caffeine. I’ve learned how to cut back on alcohol (in my current case, to zero). And I’ve learned how to skip out on the handful of activities that are just too boisterous for me to handle (see above reference to Romance Jeopardy).
I had a great time at the WRW Retreat — I learned things, I taught things, and I made a number of new friends.
And I adored the following week at home, when I worked in near-solitude, each and every day.
Fellow introverts? How do you handle conferences, conventions, retreats, and other aspects of the writing life that require you to be “on”? Extroverts? Do you identify with anything I’m writing about? Do you find other challenges with public writerly events?
Misty Massey
read all posts by Misty Massey Last week, I was invited to participate in SFSignal’s Mind Meld. It’s a weekly feature in which the blog invites various genre professionals to answer a set question of interest to genre fans. This week the question was “If you had the liberty to do so, what genre figures would you crossover in a book, show or film?” It was great fun playing with ideas to cross over some of my favorite characters. Who hasn’t ever toyed with the notion of bringing their best fictional friends together in one place? It’s a staple of fan fiction (although sometimes the physical relationships are so farfetched they become comedy gold. For example, these.) In addition to the crossovers I suggested for the Mind Meld, I’ve always thought it might be fun to see superspy Michael Westen (Burn Notice) joining forces with the Leverage team. Their missions are similar, and their combinations of skills would make for some exciting stories. On the other hand, even though serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) lives in Miami mere miles from Michael Westen, they could never work together. Their methods are too different, and they simply wouldn’t be able to trust each other, to the point that the mission would fail. The attraction of crossovers is in figuring out which characters would get along, or not, and how the interaction would go. It requires an understanding of the characters whose stories you hope to blend together. As I mentioned, in fan fiction, sometimes the crossovers are ridiculous because the characters involved have nothing emotionally in common. It’s a good exercise for getting to know your own characters, by learning what makes someone else’s characters tick.
So today, let’s have some fun. Tell me the genre characters you’d like to cross over. Books, film or television, or any combination thereof. If you want to blend your own characters to some established ones, that’s okay, too, but be careful not to fall into the Mary Sue trap. Create your crossovers, and tell me why those characters would work well together.
 DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoe I’ve been staring at my computer screen for close to an hour, trying to figure out what to write for this week’s post. Every idea I come up with seems to be something that one of my MW colleagues or I have written about recently. This is one of the problems with writing a weekly post for a focused blog site like MW. With my personal blogs, if I’m bored with writing about writing, I can write about baseball or my kids or politics. I can’t really do that here. So what to do.
Well, my solution for this week is to write about ALL the ideas I came up with as I tried to find a topic. Instead of writing 800 to 1,000 words on one subject, I’m going to write a couple of hundred on several. You’re free to respond to any or all of them.
1. First Lines — Yeah, we talk about first lines A LOT on MW. Don’t believe me? Use the site search engine and you’ll see a huge number of first line posts. But I’m thinking about first lines in a short story context, because I’ve been writing a lot of short stories recently. And because the short form differs from novel form, the first lines of each kind of fiction need to accomplish somewhat different things, even as they both do the most important thing: Hook the reader. A novel’s first line can introduce character, narrative, or setting. The key is to begin easing your reader into your story, immersing him/her in what is going to be a lengthy reading experience. A short story opening has to have more punch, and it has to give the reader an immediate and clear sense of where the narrative is headed. Here’s the opening for the Thieftaker universe short story I just completed :
Ethan Kaille first heard people speak of the Dedham witch early in the spring of 1764. By then, of course, it was too late for him to save her life.
Direct, to the point. It even telegraphs the ending of the story in a way. It doesn’t matter (though I think it really would matter if it was a novel opening). The point is, my reader knows exactly what the story is going to be about, because after two sentences we’re pretty much immersed in the story already. So, anyone out there have a short story opening (keep it to 50 words or so) to share? I will be happy to offer a flash critique.
2. Short Fiction — Like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about short fiction in recent weeks, and having a great deal of fun writing Thieftaker stories (five to date with another underway — three have been or will soon be published). And I find myself revisiting past discussions we’ve had on this site about the differences between short fiction writing and novel writing. Looking again at the story I’ve just finished (titled “The Witch of Dedham”), I do something with the story that I would almost never do with a novel. There is a crucial event in the story of the witch referenced in the title of the piece, but in this short piece we only experience this event through the witch’s retelling of what happened. With a novel, I would find a way to show the event, even if doing so meant establishing a new point of view character. In this case, though, while the events described are central to the tale, they are not what the story is about. The story is about Ethan’s interaction with the woman, about how her experiences and their discussion of them impact his emotions, his thoughts about his own life.
We often hear that a story or book is “character driven,” and I’ve always thought that phrase a little odd since, in my opinion, all good fiction is character driven. But in this case the term fits. This short story is entirely about the characters; the events may be incredibly important and dramatic, but they are secondary to their aftermath, to the way in which they ramify through the lives effected. Again, this is not at all an approach I would take with a novel, but with a short story of about 6,000 words, it works perfectly. In fact, if I were to try to work a description of the actual events into the piece, I would wind up with a story of ten to twelve thousand words, which would make it a novella.
Last year I was on a panel at Dragon*Con that dealt with the differences between writing novels and writing short stories. My friend Mary Robinette Kowal, an award-winning short story writer whose novels are now garnering critical acclaim, said that she felt the two endeavors demanded entirely different skill sets. I disagreed. I am now rethinking my position. There are similarities, of course, but the more short pieces I write, the more I feel that I am engaged in a creative enterprise that is entirely different from novel writing. What do you think? How different do you find the two processes?
3. Dialogue — Okay, first of all, do you spell the word as I just did, or do you spell it “dialog”? According to my dictionary (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate, 11th edition), “dialogue” is the preferred form. But in our digital age of “dialog boxes” and such, the latter is gaining acceptance.
But more to the point . . . I’ve said before, at conventions and here on MW, that when you listen closely to the manner in which people speak, you quickly realize that we are remarkably inarticulate creatures. We fill in our speaking with “uhs” and “ers” and “likes” and “you knows,” we take forever to make a point, we wander from topic to topic. As writers, we want to make our characters’ conversations sound realistic and authentic, but that does not mean that we want our characters to sound the way real people sound. Rather, we want them to sound the way we wish real people sounded. We want dialogue to sound natural, but we don’t want it to have all the mannerisms and meanderings of the real thing, because that would be really annoying to read.
I still believe this is true. But (and you just knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you?) in recent weeks, and in particular with this story I’ve been talking about, I have tried something a little different. The dialogue in this story came out a bit more “realistic” that usual in that I allowed my characters to change directions in their conversations a bit more than usual. The dialogue is less linear, less precise, more authentic to my ear. I did it this way as an experiment, and really it’s a difference of degree, rather than type. It’s fairly subtle. Still, I don’t know if others will like it. I’m not sure that I care. I wrote this story as a possible freebie for the D.B. Jackson website, and so it may be that I’ll never actually try to sell it to anyone. And it may be that within another couple of weeks, you’ll be able to download it for free from the site and judge for yourself how you feel about this approach.
How about you? Are you experimenting with your current work in any particular way? Care to tell us about it?
David B. Coe
http://davidbcoe.livejournal.com
http://www.DavidBCoe.com
http://www.dbjackson-author.com
http://magicalwords.net
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