Magical Words

Perfect characters are boring as hell.

Really, they are. Think about it…when the main character is physically gorgeous, runs faster, jumps higher, knows every trick, can pick a lock with his nose while blindfolded and never loses a fight, why bother reading any farther? The excitement of reading a good story is the thrill of not knowing what’s around the corner.

The trouble for some writers, in the beginning, is the love we have for our characters. “Look at this fabulous person I created!” we think.  “She’s so amazing, she must be able to do everything I wish I could do in real life.”  It’s okay to feel that way. Ask any mother if her baby isn’t the most perfect creature ever born. *laughs* But loving your character isn’t what makes a story great. The best characters aren’t the ones who sail through the events of the story as easily as they might walk down their hallway. No, the characters we stick with are the ones who make mistakes, trip over branches, lose their way, get thrown in prison for crimes they didn’t commit and worry about whether they’ll live through the night.  A character who has no flaws can’t change and grow.  Did you read Gone With the Wind?  Whose story was more compelling - Scarlet’s or Melanie’s?

I fell into the trap myself, some years ago.  I was writing Kestrel as a Mary Sue - a character who could do everything better than everyone else, and couldn’t be defeated.  When I finally started digging deeper, looking for the feelings Kestrel must have been feeling to drive her on her journey, I was amazed at how much better the story became.  These days, I watch carefully to make sure none of my characters are superpeople. They’re jealous, quick to anger, grumpy in the morning, superstitious, impatient and greedy. My friend, writer Lisa Mantchev, was talking about this very thing, and challenged us to share our character’s flaws. So today I challenge you - and I’ll begin.

Kestrel, a pirate, a fighter and a beginner in the use of magic, is FLAWED.
- She is slow to trust, and quick to believe the worst in people
- She is fearful of the magic, even though it’s a natural part of her.
- She is stubborn, sometimes to her detriment.
- She doesn’t believe she’s worthy of love or admiration.

Your turn! Tell me, in the comments, the ways in which your character is scarred and layered and real.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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I am still trying to shake the sleep out of my head and rub it out of my eyes. And it’s my day to blog. And lucky for me….I received a rewrite letter on Monday and am still trying to process it. So here goes with some general thoughts about rewrites and specific thoughts about this particular rewrite. In no particular order, because, hey, I’m still half asleep.

First – I didn’t cry over this one or even have to put it away for a several days to let it settle into the bottom of my brain and ferment a while. My new Lady Editor gets what I was trying to do and wants to make the book tighter and darker and with a greater clarity of purpose, all of which I totally dig.

As rewrites go it isn’t bad: Lady Editor pointed out inconsistencies, topics I duplicated or changed midway through, sections where one character is narrating (multiple POVs) and my editor doesn’t like the voice, wanting more backstory in the main character up in the first 40 pages.

The last part is a problem because my character is on a journey of self discovery while being a kickass killer of rogue vampires. The fact that Lady Editor asked for more means that:

1. either I did a poor job of pointing out that she has no memories of her early life, in which case I have to beef that up or

2. well, she wants more and I have to give Jane more memories out of the ones she has forgotten. None of which I yet know.

Fortunately Lady Editor has left how I satisfy her curiosity up to me, which I appreciate.

Over the years, I have had editors who were closet writers and who totally rewrote my books. My first rewrite letter made me cry for three days. It was like date rape. Really. I mean – hey, Mr. Evileditor wooed me and bought the book because it tripped his trigger, and he raved about the book and how wonderful my co-writer and I were and how totally fantastic the novel was yadayada. And when he sent the rewrite letter back he also sent a line by line (yes, already done, can you believe it?) and had rewritten the book in *heavy* dark pencil. Entire pages of backstory were X’ed out.

And that was the date rape part. He wanted everything except knives, guns, cursing, and sex removed. We were writing a bang-bang-shoot-em-up cop novel and the editor wanted only killing and blood. He said no one wanted to see why the character was what he was, no one wanted backstory or his home and date life. Just blood. And the more the merrier. Sick cookie. Not my character or co-writer, Mr. Evileditor.

And my agent was no help. He said, and I quote, “If you don’t like the changes you can send the money back.”

Ulp. That was the beginning of my shell. You know, the hard shell writers have to develop and wear to survive this business. A shell to protect us from the rare Evileditor, the less rare bad review that is like a knife to our spines, and the even more common self-defeating and self-beating voice, the comments made by our altermuses, the ones who don’t inspire but accuse. (You suck. You’ll never write another book. That voice.) My personal shell is pretty dang hard, but that little voice can get in through cracks I can’t see. It is far more evil and dangerous than Evileditor, and I work to seal against it nearly every day.

Okay, back to the rewrite. While the character names will mean nothing to you, here are some specific things Lady Editor wants:

*Similarly, Jane should tell us more about what she knows about vampires quite early on—how the vamp scene is organized, etc.

*I’d like to see a little more sleuthing on Jane’s part, so that her human investigations compliment her Beastly tracking. The tracking of land ownership seems to be her only real line of investigation, but I was never quite sure how that linked to the rogue—why should he hunt specifically on land that he owns? Could she do a little more investigation?

* As characters, I had trouble distinguishing between Bruiser and Troll. Maybe it’s because Jane reduces them to their similar nicknames? But could you make sure they seem a little more differentiable?
*Maybe Jane could call Molly a few more times to discuss things/report in so that she’s more of a presence in the book?
*If you see opportunities to do so, I don’t think it would be a bad idea to pump up Jane’s involvement with Katie’s Ladies. The scenes she has with them are really engaging, and it seems like they could be developed. Maybe if not in this book, then in the next one (helping Bliss explore her witchy powers for example.)
So, as rewrite go, this one was a really good one. Yes, it was 5 pages long and I only gave you snippet of that, but the letter was concise and easy to follow. So, now is the real treat. A total rewrite letter… below the break.

Faith

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Tags: Nothing To See Here by faithhunter
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I have (pretty literally) just gotten back from the South Carolina Writers Workshop, where I taught some writing seminars this weekend. One of my classes was on writing dialog, and I’m going to…well. Not so much ‘modify my notes for Magical Words consumption’ as ‘cut and paste my notes for Magical Words consumption’, because I haven’t got nearly enough brain today to make this any tidier or more web-format-friendly than it is. It’s kind of long, so I’ll just drop it all behind a cut.

Catie’s Thoughts On Dialog follow:

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Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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I’ve posted about character recently, and I’ve written a few posts about worldbuilding.  Today I’m wrestling with plotting, so I thought I’d post about that.

I’m mostly through the worldbuilding for my new project — my shiny new toy — and I know a good deal about my lead character.  What I need now is a storyline for the first book in the series.   This project is going to be a true serial, as opposed to an extended story arc, which is the more classic fantasy structure.  I posted on this back in September at the weblog of my agent (and Faith’s agent), Lucienne Diver.  Briefly, as I wrote in my post for Lucienne:

“A true series consists of a sequence of stand-alone novels that are connected by a recurring character or world or theme.  For instance, Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels are parts of a true series.  Each book stands alone as a mystery, but taken together they tell us about Harry’s life and career.  A project like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire on the other hand, is best described as an extended story arc.  It’s a multi-book sequence, but taken together it tells one story.  A project of this sort can have many narrative threads, but it is, in the end, a single tale.”

Up until now, everything I’ve published has been part of one extended story arc or another.  What I’m writing this time around is a serial.  Each book will stand alone, though some of the characters, including the main protagonist, will recur and their lives will change with each book.  (In other words, it won’t be like an episode of “The Brady Bunch,” where each episode seems to exist in a bubble without affecting what comes next.)

So how do I come up with a plot?

No, I’m really asking.  How do I come up with a plot?

Okay, I’m not really asking.  But I am struggling a bit.  I have great ambitions for the series in general and for this first book in particular.  I want to develop a mystery that ties together multiple strands of the worldbuilding and character development I’ve done thus far.  There are large political issues that need to tie in, but I also have a conflict between my protagonist and his arch rival.  And ultimately I want the central mystery of the book to be gritty and fun and interesting for my reader, even as it brings in some of the basic social conflicts in my world surrounding religion and magic and class.  As I say, I have great ambitions for the series.

As I’ve mentioned before many times, I often develop ideas and overcome problems by brainstorming at the keyboard — basically typing stream of consciousness.  I ask myself questions and answer them until I work through whatever is holding me back.  I imagine that’s what I’ll be doing for the next few days, as I try to develop the plot for this first book.  And as I brainstorm I’m sure I’ll fill out some of the remaining worldbuilding and character details that have eluded me thus far.  It’s all connected — the worldbuilding tells me more about the character; the character development gives me plotting ideas; and as the plot develops I’ll come up with other things I need to do with the world.  Round and round I go.

As “How To…” posts go, I guess this one is pretty lame.  I’m feeling my way through this part of the process.  Sometimes when I get an idea for a book or a series, the plotline is one of the first things that comes to me.  Sometimes it works differently.  This time the main character and the contours of the world have been there pretty much from the beginning, but the plot has been slower to develop.  I suppose it bears repeating:  There is no right way to do this.  Even those of us who have been doing it for a while don’t do it the same way every time.  And maybe that’s the most important thing to take away from this post.   There is no hard and fast technique to harnessing creative energy.  For me the process is always changing.  That’s the challenge.  That’s the fun.

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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The other day, I was led to the website of Mighty God King, who had created a series of LOLcovers (the covers of famous fantasy and science fiction novels, but with the titles changed to make fun of them. For example, one of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar novels was retitled “My Little Pony Goes to War”.) Within hours, the site had been suspended, and no one had cached the pages, so if you didn’t happen to see it, you’ll just have to take my word that it existed. Mighty God King’s LOLcovers were hilarious, and the suspension probably happened because he didn’t have proper rights to display the covers or something. I can’t help wondering if it’s gone because someone was hurt by his joke.

Many years ago, I wrote book reviews for the Rock Hill Herald. At the time, I was of the opinion that an honest review, even when I hated the book, was not just my choice, but my responsibility. I did not pull any punches. Snippets of my more favorable reviews sometimes appeared in mass-market editions of books. Occasionally, snippets of my less-favorable reviews (edited to look as if I was praising the book!) would also show up. Writing reviews helped me see books with a critical eye, in a way that reading alone never had. Suddenly I was noticing flaws that I’d been willing to overlook when I was reading for myself alone. That was a valuable skill to apply to my own work, and I appreciate the time I spent learning how to read that way. But I hate that I might have caused anyone distress.

I quit reviewing a long time ago, for many reasons, not least of which was that I didn’t need to be ruffling the feathers of the people whose ranks I hoped to join. Flash forward to yesterday, laughing over the LOLcovers. And suddenly every opinion I ever shared in print came back to haunt me. How did all those authors feel when I didn’t love their work? Did I hurt someone’s feelings, and because of the anonymity of the newspaper to protect me, now have no way to apologize? These days, unless I loved the book with a burning passion no wine can quench, I’m keeping my opinions close to the vest.

Well, about other people’s books, anyway.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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My agent is celebrating this week with free giveaways from her clients to our fans. I have a short story on the site today (My second this week) which is a bit of backstory about a character in my new Skinwalker series staring Jane Yellowrock.  She is a Cherokee Skinwalker, the character developed from Cherokee, Hopi and other legends and my own odd imagination.  First, here is the link.

http://varkat.livejournal.com/44597.html

Second, this brings up the job  description of a literary agent. What *exactly* do they do?  The most important job of a literary agent is to sell your work, natch, though some agents do much more. When you are considering your first lit agent, you make not get to pick and choose between 4, 6, or 10 agents.  You may only have one agent interested in repping you, and in that case, you don’t have a lot of wiggle room. You may feel you have to take what you can get — but you should find out what you are getting into before signing any papers.

I have unpublished writers ask if an agent is supposed to:
1.  Do free editorial work
2.  Do free PR work
3.  Make you a personal loan (seriously)
4.  Always have an auction for book
5.  Accept a client and a book on first blush

And the answers are well…mixed. Let’s take them one at a time.
1.  Do free editorial work
Many writers feel that if they send a book to an agent (or for that matter, an editor) and he passes on it, that the agent/editor should send a detailed letter explaining why the mscpt was refused. Not in the job description, ya’ll. In fact, even after keeping your mscpt for 18 months, he may not read beyond the first paragraph.

Why so long and why the quick refusal? Because he had 157 books in front of yours, and it was Christmas/summer vacation/ Mardi Gras, and he had the flu and you used the word advise when you meant advice and you didn’t know the difference, and it was a pet peeve and he has another 157 books more to get through this month, and his office cat took a bathroom break on the carpet, and the moon was in the wrong phase. Or maybe you sent a romance novel to an agent who hates them (didn’t do your research.) Or maybe you opened the book with a tried and well-used opening that he has seen 4,000 times.  He can’t give you an editorial letter because he didn’t read the book.  And he doesn’t get paid to write you an editorial letter when he has no intention ofrepping you. If you *do* get an editorial letter from an agent or editor, celebrate, because it means he read the book, liked it well enough to consider that it might sell if you did a little work, and invested a bit of his own time in the cause. Rewrite (save the original version just in case) and get it back to him pronto.

I recently heard a horror story from an agent who had sent in a manuscript to an editor and the editor had some changes he wanted made before he considered a purchase. The stupid idiot of a writer said, “No. “I’ll make any change he wants after he buys the manuscript.” Said idiot lost editor and agent instantly. I could go on all day in this vein, but you get the drift.

2.  Do free PR work
After a sale, before a book hits the market, an agent *may* offer suggestions on marketing your novel. But the marketing is usually the writer’s job, especialy if a first time novelist. If you get an agent who is willing and able to help out, you are one lucky writer!

3.  Make you a personal loan (seriously)
I have heard of writers asking for loans from an agent during (or even after) the selling process, before any advances are made. Loans are to made by bankers, not your agent. Don’t ask.

4.  Always have an auction for book
May happen. May not. If you get an auction, *excellent*.  But don’t count on it. The agent may have only one house interested in it.

5.  Accept a client and a book on first blush
You *know* you have the best book ever written. Your mom/girlfriend/boyfriend/guru/preacher/mental health professional/brother/teacher/grocer/neighbor/paperboy told you so. Hey. If they like, it let them sell it. An agent can only sell something he likes and believes in. It may well be the best thing since sliced bread. But the agent may not eat bread, you know?

There is a *lot* more that can be said on the agent’s job. But I have to get writing. That’s *my* job!
Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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My editor at Del Rey, Betsy Mitchell, does a weekly blog called “What I Learned This Week” at Random House’s SF site, Suvudu. This week she wrote about rewrites. I’m one of the authors whose manuscript she re-read last week.

I think this is the first time I’ve actually gotten a *secondary* revision letter. I almost always say, when I turn a book in, “If there’s anything I’ve missed or anything else you think I should do, let me know,” but I think this was the first time I’ve ever gotten a new set of notes back. The really bizarre thing is that I was surprisingly *pleased* to get further notes: I suppose it’s partly that thing where we always feel we could do *better*, with just a little more time.

The letter’s requests were brief and easy to take care of–maybe 2 hours worth of work, as opposed to 2 weeks for the initial revisions. Some of it was stuff like “how about using ‘madness’ here instead of ‘idiocy’”, which was such a good call I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it myself. Some of it was stuff like a simple complimentary comment on what may be my favorite line in the whole book. So we’re talking about genuinely minor stuff here, but also things that can make a subtle and important difference in the quality of the final product.

I do not at all enjoy doing revisions. What I enjoy is the end result. The changes I made in THE PRETENDER’S CROWN during both revision passes were not story-altering sized changes. One subplot, which initially had very weak structure, was strengthened enormously, and is somewhat different from its original shape, but is still the same plot and does precisely the same thing. It just does it better now, and I am *vastly* more pleased with the result than I was when I initially wrote it.

Yesterday I was chatting with a fan and fellow writer who’s recently finished his first novel and who is working on edits and revisions. He asked me if they get any easier. “Even 1% easier would make it seem worthwhile,” he said.

I think it does get 1% easier. It might not get as much as 10% easier, but it does get one little tiny itty bitty percentage point easier. The things that make it get easier are practice, professional-level feedback, and stronger initial drafts. The ability to recognize something that’s weak–like my subplot, which I *knew* was weak but couldn’t work out how to fix right away–makes revisions a little easier. But the thing that makes them worthwhile is the improvement in the story when you’re done. I think if I got a *third* revision letter I might be a bit despairing (my God, I screwed up *that* badly in the first place?), but two–two seems like, “Yeah, ok, I can feel confident that I’ve *gotten it right* now.” It’s a good feeling.

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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A few weeks ago I finished the initial draft of the third and final book in my Blood of the Southlands trilogy.  Today I begin the final read-through of the draft before I submit the book to my editor at the end of the week.  So I thought that this would be a good time to describe the purpose of this final read-through, and how I go about readying the manuscript for submission.

Whenever I finish a story or a book, I put it away for a while — at least a week, usually two weeks or more.  I’ve found that four weeks is ideal, but with deadlines that’s not always a luxury I have.  The point of doing this is to give myself a bit of distance from the story, the characters, and the prose.  When I’m in the middle of writing a book, I pretty much live and breathe it.  I immerse myself in the book for seven or eight hours every day of the work week.  This is a good thing; it allows me to focus, to get inside the heads of my characters, to see the plot from every conceivable angle.

But there’s also a down side to this immersion.  I become so consumed by what I’m writing that I begin to miss things that might diminish the effectiveness of my work.  For instance, like many writers I sometimes develop bad writing habits, verbal tics of a sort.  I’ll find a certain word or phrase that feels comfortable, that I can fall back on when stuck, and I’ll use it again and again without really being aware of it.  Or one or more of my characters will begin to drift away from himself or herself.  He/she will begin to act like someone else, or (God forbid) like me instead of like him/herself.  Or I’ll just lose track of my worldbuilding and do something that breaks a rule or deviates from something I’ve been trying to do with my world.

Chances are I won’t notice any of this stuff while I’m in the middle of writing the book, particularly as I’m nearing the end, when my writing speeds up and the conclusions of the various plot threads come in a frenzy of creative output.  But if I then put the book away for a while and read it fresh a few weeks later, I begin to see those errors.  The verbal tics are more glaring, the character drift stands out more, the worldbuilding mistakes bring me up short.

I also find that when I finish a book I have precious little sense of whether it’s any good.  Sometimes I’ll finish a book thinking it’s pretty good, only to find a few weeks later that it still needs a great deal of work.  More often (fortunately), I’ll finish a book thinking that it pretty much sucks, and then discover a few weeks later that it’s really much better than I thought.  Either way, the distance provided by taking this time, even if it’s only a short while, gives me some perspective on the book that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

So I’ll read through the entire book this week.  Sometimes I’ll read passages out loud.  I do a lot of this on the screen, but if a section really doesn’t seem to be working I’ll print it out and attack it with a red pen.  I know I won’t catch everything.  This is just the beginning of the editorial process.  I’ll send it to my editor and we’ll go through revisions.  It’ll go to my copyeditor, who will find prose problems and inconsistencies in plot or character that I’ve missed.  And at the end I’ll proof the entire book, as will readers who work for my publisher.  But if I can anticipate a few of the problems with this first read-through, then my editor and I can concentrate on more subtle issues later in the process.

To those of you who are starting out and perhaps finding yourselves stymied somewhere in the middle of the book, I highly recommend this approach.  Even if you’re still in the middle of the book, it can be enormously helpful to distance yourself from the project for a little while.  You’ll come back to it feeling fresh, and not only will you see things that need fixing, you might also be surprised by how often you read something you’ve written and go, “Wow!  That’s pretty good!”

And now, a request for input.  This last book of the series is still untitled.  The first two volumes are The Sorcerers’ Plague and The Horsemen’s Gambit.  I’ve narrowed the choice for this final title to The Blood Curse or The Dark-Eyes’ March.  Which do you prefer?

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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Not my day to post, but…

I promised a short story and a short-short story.

The first is a short-short about Thorn, on my agent’s webblog.

Enjoy

http://varkat.livejournal.com/43945.html

Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
2 Comments »

I forgot to post on Tuesday (again. sigh.) so I’m posting today, instead.

My excuse is I’ve been working on critiques all week. Critiques and I are an interesting clash. I kind of like doing them, but–with exceptions like this, when I’m doing it for the South Carolina Writers’ Workshop at which I’ll be teaching next week–I rarely make time to, even if I say I will. I am not a good critique partner in that sense. At all. And I know it, so I don’t volunteer, or ask people to critique my work, because I know I won’t get around to returning the favor.

On the other hand, I’m reasonably good at it. My friend Sarah and I had a writing teacher once who would say he wasn’t being paid enough to lie to us. I try not to be quite that, um, blunt, in my critiques, but there’s a fair degree of needfulness in that. Utterly pussyfooting around doesn’t do anybody any good. And one of the things I’ve learned about critiquing in general is that up-and-coming writers often need to focus on “show, don’t tell”.

That’s one of those phrases that gets bandied around all over the place, and it’s bloody hard to properly explain. It’s even hard to describe to a new writer without actually taking their own words and rewriting them (which, er, is what I usually do, in that situation). I think I learned my own lesson about show-don’t-tell when I was writing IMMORTAL BELOVED, a Highlander novel (see how I tied that in with David and Misty’s postings, eh? eh? am I clevar or *what*?) I wrote about ten years ago. At about 40,000 words into what I imagined would be a 100,000 word book, I had already written 2/3rds of the story. So I had to go back and rewrite and *show* things: get into the guts and the details and expose them to the world, rather than just relate what was happening. At the time I didn’t think of it as anything like that. It’s just in retrospect I think that’s probably when something clicked in my leetle brain.

So now I’m going to try to give an example of show versus tell, to see if it’s of any use at all to anyone.

TELL:

Rodin ran up the stairs in the tower to the locked door. His heart pounded and he heaved for air. A wooden bird was at the top. Rodin poured water on its head and it sang, making the door open. It opened and on its other side was a beautiful princess.

SHOW:

The tower steps went on forever, hard granite edges catching Rodin’s toes as he stumbled from weariness. Too much water had sloshed from the birchwood bucket he carried: there was barely enough to perform the task set to him, and not nearly enough to slake his thirst. His thighs burned and breath came raw in his throat, as if the stale air pulled blood from his lungs when he dragged it in.

Endless curves finally circled to the tower’s solitary room, blocked by a threatening iron door. Torchlight danced shadows over the curving walls and illuminated the room’s solitary guardian: a nightingale, carved of dark shining wood. Rodin staggered to a halt a few steps below it, half uncertain the delicate bird could be all that stood between himself and his goal, and all disbelieving that the spell he’d been given would work. A glance back down the stairs reminded him of what he’d come through to be here: fairy tales or not, he would at least try his hand at breaking the spell.

His hands shook as he poured the water. A few drops beaded on the bird’s finely-shaped head; the rest absorbed into the dark wood as if it was desert sand, hungry for liquid’s touch. For a few seconds nothing happened, and defeat slumped his slender shoulders. One thousand and one steps; he had counted. One thousand and one steps up, and that many to go down again.

The nightingale tipped its head back and sang a note, pure and sweet as the spring water he’d carried from below. Rodin yelled and scampered down a few steps, the bird’s trill following him like laughter on a breeze. It spread its wings with a rustle of thin wood: feathers detailed in chisel marks caught the air, and its voice lifted further still.

Ancient and blackened iron began to crumble.

There you go. An object lesson in show versus tell. And I don’t know about you, but I’m expecting the princess to be waiting arms akimbo and with a pencil stuck through an unruly mop of hair and an ink smudge on a freckled nose. What do you think?

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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