Why I don’t think highly of creative writing courses
“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do — and they don’t. They have prejudices.” — Ray Bradbury
I stumbled upon that quote today, and it made me realize that I had never written about my horrid experience in a creative writing class in college. I’ve mentioned it, but never really talked about it.
Let me say first that the short story I wrote for that class that’s where 99% of my hatred of it came from was, in quite a few ways, crap. I, as was terribly normal for me, put it off until the last possible minute. The first couple of pages had come easily, so I kept thinking “Oh, I’ll just write it in bits and pieces like that and . . .” Yeah, I, if I recall correctly, finished the night before it was due. Combine this with my normal issue of having images and beginnings and endings in mind but not middles, and, well, crap.
To be fair, some of the criticisms my classmates and my professor had might’ve been about the middle and it’s unconnectedness with the rest of the story. I know some of them were about my unique approach to comma use. (I’m much better than I was, believe it or not! Thanks to the diligent efforts of Elizabeth McCoy I can punctuate dialogue properly nine times out of ten now, for instance!) But those criticisms were lost on me at the time, because they were drowned out by some of the — and mind, even if these were said by students, they were backed up by the professor — dumbest criticisms I’ve ever heard about a fantasy short story:
- It’s unclear which culture is dominant.
- You mention a dwarven king and the elf is a baker, does that mean the humans and elves are lower-class than the dwarves? You should’ve explained that better. (This and the one above it were repeated in a lot of variations.)
- You don’t clearly establish that it’s a fantasy until partway into the story; you should’ve had her seeing a unicorn on her lawn or something right at the beginning to clue your reader in. (This one was from the professor. I described the female protagonist’s husband as having “elven features” in the second paragraph, but this wasn’t good enough, apparently.)
- You don’t describe what an elf, a dwarf, or a troll looks like. You can’t expect your reader to know these things. (I know I mentioned pointed ears for the elf and beards for the dwarf, for what it’s worth. Oh, and this was pre-Lord of the Rings‘ movies, so this one does possibly make a bit of sense. Maybe. There’s enough Christmas movies with elves that I’m having a real hard time seeing a case for someone not having the vaguest idea what they look like.)
- You mention elves being prejudiced against half-elves, but since you don’t give us a breakdown on who is on top in the society, we can’t understand why. (They really latched onto the assumption that it was a stratified society with dwarves at the top, then elves, then humans, or maybe then humans, then elves.)
- You don’t explain how this society came to be. Why is there a dwarf king?
- Your dialogue isn’t realistic. Real people don’t talk this way. (This was also the professor and was on a bit of dialogue that I’d copied verbatim from something Jaye had said. This had happened with an earlier writing assignment for the class too. I’ve since reminded her frequently that she’s apparently not real. )
And on and on along those lines until I finally, tears in my eyes, just wrote in my notebook something along the lines of “They’re bitching because I didn’t write the whole fucking Silmarrillion in the length of a goddamn short story” and gave up on saying anything, because I couldn’t trust myself to keep my temper any more. I don’t recall what I’d said up to that point. The only valid criticism I’d heard was that the (faded to black as soon as they were alone) sex scenes added nothing. I knew that, but needed the length so they’d stayed in. (Yes, this was a college course and the students were complaining about sex scenes that served no purpose. It was Arkansas, what can I say?) Oh, and that the ending had seemed really rushed. I now recall that I admitted that I’d done it very last minute and that’s why those two problems existed. I may have tried to explain that the society wasn’t hiearchical in the way they were thinking, but I might not have bothered. If I did, they immediately forgot and launched into another round of telling me that I should’ve made clearer who was on top in the society it was about.
And I know you’re all dying to know what in the world the story was about that those could’ve been their issues, especially the serious hang-up on societal stratification. Here’s the plot: Elf dude who has a human wife and a half-elven baby, in a society where human/elf relationships are frowned upon (because the author had been reading way too much Dragonlance, if you must know) is invited to cook the gondo bird that’s the main course at some special shindig the king of the dwarves has regularly. He’s the first elf to get this honor. En route, they’re attacked (and I demonstrated quite admirably my lack of skill in writing fight scenes.). En route they also have sex a lot because the baby is with its grandparents so they’re taking advantage of that.
Like I said, there were real issues with it. The fight and the sex are superfluous to the story. Looking at it now, I see the bones of a story that might be entertaining to write, a straight-forward fantasy travelogue kind of thing, and, oh dear gods, there my brain goes, off on a world-building tangent again . . . Brain, I have two or three fantasy settings with nothing but a dungeon or two in them, maybe use one of those, huh? I need to make a map now and . . . fuck. I think I’ll be adding yet another story to the sticky at the top of the blog if this train of thought doesn’t stop soon. I was reading something the other day about how authors need a “just for themselves” project at all times; maybe I’ll use this for that.
Sorry about that digression.
Back to my point, the story had problems, but they weren’t the problems the professor or the students noticed. So what I got from that experience, which was the main event of the course, was . . .
A crippling fear that I wasn’t a good writer because clearly if I had been, then they wouldn’t have had all those complaints about how things didn’t make sense.
Yeah. Thank you, professor I’ve forgotten the name of and classmates. I could be years ahead in my writing career if it weren’t for you. You see, after that class, I didn’t write fiction for several years. I still can’t write fantasy without a little voice telling me I need to explain things better, which pisses me the fuck off because I love fantasy. Universal Nexus is great fun, don’t get me wrong; I’m sure I’ll love playing in the space opera setting of someone else’s I’ve got a contract for a novel in (blogpost some time next month will tell you all you need to know about that, I promise); but since I read The Hobbit when I was eleven years old, fantasy is what I’ve wanted to write. And for over a decade now, it’s been a source of crippling anxiety to try to.
That story I was talking about above? The one that came from me summarizing that short story? I’ll be honest: I’ll be doing damned good if I get 3000 words in before the voice of self-doubt gets to me.
That pisses me off. I know their criticisms were ridiculous. I know that in a . . . five, maybe ten, I don’t know any more; certainly wasn’t more than fifteen . . . page, manuscript format story there’s no way in hell you can show much of the sort of detail they wanted. But that voice won’t shut the fuck up. And that pisses me the fuck off.
It also hurt that there were no positive comments at all, that I can remember. No one in the class had a single good thing to say about my story. That hurt. I’d recently quit being a pre-med major because I wanted to be a writer a lot more than I wanted to retake Organic Chemistry II. And my professor, someone who should’ve been someone who knew what he was talking about, had absolutely nothing positive to say about my story.
If it’d been just that one, maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so badly. But every assignment I’d turned in for the class, he’d had nothing but criticisms of. One exercise that stands out in my mind was one where we had to write one paragraph descriptions of what would be in various sorts of people’s rooms. I had the phrase “books of depressing poetry” in one. He said I should’ve named the books of depressing poetry. How the fuck could I do that?! I don’t read depressing poetry! I wasn’t yet in the habit of googling (was I even using Google in the fall of 2000? Fuck, I think I was still using metacrawler.com) things like that to add veracity to my writing. Hell, I’d only not had dialup AOL that it’d sometimes take two hours to connect to, only for me to get kicked off after half an hour, for a few months. The internet was a place to go read Highlander and Voltron slash, not a place for research!
I remember another one where we had to tell a story mostly in dialogue. As anyone who’s read anything by me knows, this is pretty damned easy for me to do. The hard part is getting me to write the bits that ground the dialogue in something so it’s not two floating heads jabbering at each other. My professor’s comments were about how often the characters said “Uhm”, which was a deliberate choice on my part because one was really fucking nervous and the other was really fucking clueless. He said it made them sound too clueless. The title was something like “The Most Clueless Person Ever.”
And then there were the in-class exercises, where we had to do things like identify what character/person a classmate was thinking about by the classmate answering things like what kind of cigarette the person/character’d be if they were a cigarette and what kind of alcohol they’d be if they were a bottle of alcohol and what kind of color they’d be if they were a color and . . . you get the idea. I still don’t understand how the fuck this is a useful exercise. Maybe the way some people’s brains work it is, but to me, it was something utterly pointless and confusing, a total waste of three hours — the length of the class — of my Thursday. (I have no idea why I can remember the day of the week the class met on but not the professor’s name. My brain is strange.) All I learned was that most of my classmates knew the names of lots more brands of cigarettes and kinds of alcohol than me. This did not, strangely enough, make me a better writer.
Many years later, I was rearranging some books and came across my textbook for that class. I flipped through it and suddenly a lot made sense. The section on genre fiction was absolutely insulting. All genre fiction, it said, is formulaic. It also talked about how it doesn’t matter how well you write when you write genre fiction because the reader wants it to be that particular formula and that’s all they care about. In my opinion, a professor who is going to use a book that dismisses everything that can be called genre fiction as formulaic and poorly written has no business teaching a creative writing course. Well, maybe if he at some point expressly states his prejudices. If he’d done that, then I would’ve thrown together some barely fictionalized account of college life like the rest of my classmates wrote instead of trying to write something I cared about.
I’ve since learned that this anti-genre fic prejudice is the norm, not the exception, in creative writing courses. So, every time I see some ad or something telling me that I’ll be a much better writer if I just take this course, I think they’re full of shit.
You know what’ll make you a better writer? Reading more and paying attention to what your favorite authors do. Writing more. I don’t believe in a strict “you must write 1,000,00o words before you write anything worth trying to sell” thing like I’ve known some people who cling to like it’s a fucking law, but I do very strongly believe that the odds are pretty good that the first thing you write, hell, the first ten or so things you write maybe, aren’t professional caliber. But that’s no excuse to not write them. You’ll learn something from the experience. Hmmm . . . maybe that’s a topic for another blogpost, “Things I’ve Learned From Failed Attempts At Stories”. My next one was going to be a defense of my characters swearing profusely, but maybe that’s better . . .
Anyway, anyone else have any creative writing class horror stories to share? Or, hell, even pleasant stories about them?
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Why I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year
I’ve done it three times and won twice. I enjoyed it, for the most part, but I honestly feel like I’ve outgrown it. For me, getting x number of words per month is no longer a challenge, it’s a goal. And that x isn’t 50,000. I can do 50,000 a month. Winning NaNoWriMo twice proves that. But I can do 30,000 to 40,000 words a month that are good instead of 50,000 that are mostly mediocre, and that’s what I’d rather do now.
I know, I know: the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to get words down, you can fix the quality later. And that’s fine, really. That’s great if that’s what matters to you. Three years ago, it was what mattered to me. Two years ago, it’s what mattered to me. Last year, I did it to try to get in the habit of writing more days than not. For that, NaNoWriMo is the wrong tool. Now, I’m in the habit of writing or editing or revising four days a week with another day spent on other parts of being a professional writer . . . trying to figure out what to title a work, writing a pitch that doesn’t suck, etc. Yes, I know this is in sharp contrast to what I said right after I failed NaNoWriMo last year; I was wrong, it’s that simple.
Well, I was half-wrong. I don’t need to write every day, I was right about that. But I do need more structure than writing x number of words a month. A weekly word count goal is working for me, with me at least trying to devote two hours a day to it five days a week. So far that’s worked out to four days writing/editing/revising and one day doing other stuff, and that seems like a sane and rational way to keep doing things so I shall.
Now, my goal right now, the main reason I’m not doing NaNoWriMo : write stuff that I don’t have to do such extensive revisions to. I can tell the hunks of No More Lies that were written during NaNoWriMo. The first few chapters, the ones written before NaNoWriMo, needed fleshed out. They were lacking in detail, but were otherwise pretty solid. (And the detail thing is excusable because they were written when it was supposed to be a novella.) But the ones written during NaNoWriMo? They’re too wordy, and the dialogue is obnoxiously mundane. I cut an entire scene the other day and it affected pretty much nothing. The effect the scene had on the story can be accomplished in one sentence elsewhere. I might move one small hunk of dialogue from it somewhere else too. But other than that? That scene gave me 1094 more words, that’s what mattered.
I know there are authors, many of them ones who make quite a bit more than me, who put great stock in reaching daily word count goals regardless of the quality of those words. That’s fine. That works for them. I detest revision. I do it because it’s a necessary evil. I’d rather write a clean first draft. Since a clean first draft seems beyond me, I’d like to be able to do a clean second one. I can’t do that if too much of the second draft is brand new stuff replacing bad stuff from the first. I’m a third of the way through revising No More Lies and will have to go back over it all over again before I can reach the point where I’m just copyediting. I’d like to avoid this in the future. So, I’m not doing NaNoWriMo any more.
There are other reasons I’m not doing NaNoWriMo any more, ones that are a bit harder to express, but relate, perhaps, a bit more to me saying “I’ve outgrown it”. While there are professional authors who do it every year, the culture surrounding it feels more amateur. There are too many people asking questions like “How do you get to know your characters?”, “Do I have to have an outline?”, and things like that that anybody who’s already got a few stories under their belt knows the only valid answer to is “Well, here’s how I do things, but you have to find what works for you.” I’m tired of those discussions. I know they’re important to some people, but I’m personally tired of them. Especially since it often feels like what people are really wanting is a shortcut to success, i.e. “You fill out this character chart and follow this plot outline, and you’ll easily get your 50,000 words and be a best-seller!”.
I’m also, and I hate saying this because, as I’ve said, it was a good thing for me when I first did it, a bit burned out on the concept of NaNoWriMo because I have read, or started to read anyway, so fucking many self-published books that were clearly a case of someone “winning” NaNoWriMo and then uploading what they’d produced to Smashwords and/or Amazon . . . in most cases they seem to have at least run spellcheck first, which is nice. Too bad it doesn’t do a damned thing about the fact that most of those stories needed an end to end revision pass or three to not be boring and slow-paced. (I’m not asking for “thriller pacing”, I’d just like not to have to slog through a description of the character getting dressed and having breakfast every single day if it doesn’t fucking matter, okay? Once or twice is fine if it illustrates something about the character or setting, beyond that, you’d better have some damned cool stuff going on in that book or I ain’t finishing it.)
I think, and this isn’t just a NaNoWriMo thing actually, it’s an “aspiring writer” (as defined by Chuck Wendig: writers who do not actually write anything but who sure talk about it a lot) culture thing you encounter on all writing forums, that so much emphasis is put on finishing a novel that far too many people don’t realize that’s only step one. Or they know it, but they think they’re the exception who can skip all the other steps. There are people who can go from first draft to print and it’s fine, with only maybe a little copyediting. Louis L’Amour reached that point, I’ve read. But he reached it. He didn’t start there. He wrote, according to Wikipedia, 100 novels and over 250 short stories over a 50ish year career. That’s a lot of time to develop a knack for knowing what will and won’t work before you put it on paper. (Also, he wrote pulp mostly. It was not as clean as what most publishers want today. I read an article by his son that said when L’Amour did write for the “slicks”, he did write multiple drafts and revise pretty heavily, which I’d imagine means he did the same for the more literary stuff he wrote later in his career.)
And, my final reason: There is so much emphasis put on just moving forward, getting those 50,000 words, in NaNoWriMo culture that it feels wrong to go back and make even the smallest change, especially if it would affect your word count. There are parts of No More Lies that I’ve known have needed fixing since the day I wrote them, in far too many cases I saw how to fix them by a few hours later, but because it would change my word count, I didn’t do it. I’m tracking, for myself and non-publically, how many words per week I write, edit, or revise, but that’s so on weeks when I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much I can see that I have, even if it did all get thrown out for some reason, so it needn’t be the exact number. If I discover I can cut a whole paragraph, I can cut it out and not worry about it. I still wrote those words that week, so they still count. I don’t need to keep them somewhere where I can paste them into a box at the end of the month so I can get credit for them. Sometimes I even — and this is not allowed if you do NaNoWriMo properly — delete whole paragraphs right after writing them! Because sometimes I see that quickly that they aren’t going to work. Those usually don’t get counted for my word count for the week, because I record that at the end of writing for the day, and since I’m only tracking it for myself, a hundred or so words loss is not a big deal.
Also, the ten thousand words a week thing is not what’s being tracked by the stickied post with the nifty graphs. That’s how many words are in the currently working file of the story for first drafts, hence why Dangers of the Past went down by 7000 today when I started over, and how far into the previous draft I’ve gotten with my revisions for subsequent drafts.
And if this got rambly or redundant, blame the car alarm that’s been going off off-and-on for the past half hour next door, and my cat for walking around mimicking it . . . or yelling at it, I’m not sure.
Five Star Reviews — Freedom, Spiced and Drunk by M.C.A. Hogarth
I read this story because it was free and I’d read another by the author that I’d liked, if not as much as this one.
The description, via Goodreads:
Kediil wants only to remain neuter and learn the secrets of herbs from its beloved Mardin… but at its second puberty, it turns female, and is forced to decide between accepting its new roles among the family… or something unspeakable. Originally published in Strange Horizons, this story made the Tiptree Award’s Secondary List and was recommended for a Nebula Award.
My review:
Don’t let the shortness of this story fool you, it’s not a light read. In these few pages, the author manages to convey, without once resorting to infodumping, a completely alien culture — one that is alien enough to not be humans with funny foreheads, but not so alien as to be completely unrelatable — and tell a poignant and touching tale.
The language used to tell this story is beautiful and entrancing; I was particularly fond of this phrase; “Each of these incidents added a stone to my spirit.”
My sole complaint is that words were translated in the narrative, but reviews of my own work have made it quite clear to me that I’m in the minority in not liking that.
This is the second story I’ve read by this author. It won’t be the last.
I’ve read a few other short stories by the author since then and have liked them all, but this is still my favorite.
The Next Big Thing Blog Meme
I found this meme that I missed out on when it was actually a thing, so I’m doing it now.
Yes, I’m bored and a bit creatively blocked today, why do you ask?
It’s just a bunch of questions and answers about a current wip or book you already have out. I’m going to do it for No More Lies since it’s the one closest to done.
I rephrased some of the questions so they didn’t aggravate my internal editor.
What is the title of your book?
No More Lies
Where did the idea for the book come from?
Copy/pasting from where I talked about this a couple of days ago:
I invented Bobby as a kid as what I’d now call an AU version of Storm Shadow, then later decided he wasn’t him; he was his apprentice. Bobby’s evolved since then, and any resemblance between Universal Nexus and GI Joe: Real American Hero is coincidence or homage now, but he’s still a ninja who used to be a bad guy. This story though . . . I woke up with the image of him under a tree and knew what he was thinking and had to write a bit to figure out what was going on. Turned out it was the day he met the love of his life.
What genre is your book?
That is a ludicrously complicated question. Is it a romance? The plot kicks off because of a love story and it is a thing that drives a lot of it. But I didn’t follow the “proper” plot arc for a romance. (Neither, I’d like to add, does any romance I’ve ever actually enjoyed.) So, according to what I’ve read, lots of romance fans would get pissy if I called it a romance. Is it space opera? Well, the setting is, but the plot has nothing to do with galaxy-shaking events or anything anywhere near that big. It certainly doesn’t have the space battles that some idiots say are required. (Firefly is not space opera, I guess . . . despite being frequently called the best space opera in ages. Go figure.) So a lot of space opera fans would be mad if I called it that. It’s a slice-of-life romance in a space opera setting.
I’m probably going to market it as romance because that’s where the money is, to be bluntly honest.
What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Uhmmm . . . damn, for the sequel, set twentyish years later, it’s easy to think of who should play Bobby. Robert Downey, Jr. would be pretty close to perfect. But he can’t really convincingly play a twenty-five year old. Chris Pratt, maybe?
For his girlfriend . . . the only requirements are blonde, nice rack . . . because Bobby’s shallow enough at the beginning that that’s a big part of what gets his attention, and able to glare someone to death.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
I have one finally! It’s a monster of a sentence because whoever came up with this “one sentence synopsis” thing clearly wrote more straight-forward books than I do, but here you go:
A spy who ran away from home years before falls in love with a woman from his home world around the same time the people he’s spying on start suspecting him, so he goes back home and has to deal with a girlfriend he’s lied to, family and friends he upset years before, and people wanting him dead, all while trying to figure out how to live a normal life.
Who is publishing your book?
Don’t know yet. I’m considering trying to get an agent because this book is good enough that I want it to get more attention than it will if self-published, but at the same time, look at what I wrote under genre. Do I send it to romance agents or science fiction ones?
How long did it take you to write the first draft?
That depends on how you look at it. The earliest surviving reference to the story is from early summer 2011, but that was a version that was supposed to be a 3000 word short story. The version that ended up being completed took exactly a year to write, almost to the day, from July 2013 to July 2014.
What other books within your genre would you compare it to?
~whimpering~ How can I answer that when I don’t know what genre it is?!
Wait! I just realized that the InCryptid books by Seanan McGuire are considered romances . . . paranormal romances, but still . . . so I’ll compare it to those, especially the first two with Verity as the narrator. Snarky first person narrator who gets in situations over their head and doesn’t listen to their parents. I have one of those too.
See, this is where I start feeling all kinds of angst over the unmarketability of this book. I can’t compare it to anything in the genre, so I can’t do the all important “If you liked x, you’ll like my book” thingy. My life would be much easier if people would just read descriptions and go “Oh, this sounds cool!” instead of always wanting to read things just like what they’ve already read. Try new things. It won’t kill you.
Anyway, pretending I’m a reader instead of the writer of this, I’d say what it reminds me the most of isn’t anything space opera or romance. It’s the immersiveness and depth of world-building of a good fantasy novel or game setting. Hmmm . . . along those lines I could maybe see comparisons to Traveller.
Oh! Firefly or the first season of Babylon 5, a space opera setting, kind of an overarching thing tying everything together, but no single plot arc or similar! Quirky characters getting into situations and dealing with them. That works.
And watching Doctor Who while writing this revision has led to some dialogue style similarities, so I guess if you like the Ninth and Tenth Doctor, you’ll like my book? (I haven’t gotten further than that yet.)
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
See above under “Where did the idea for the book come from?”
What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
The narrator is a ninja/spy/assassin/comic book geek/musician who has Wisdom as his dump stat. Who wouldn’t want to read a story about him? Aside from people who like deep thematic works and other pretentious shit like that, I mean. This book has no theme, unless “being in love is awesome” and “actions have consequences” are themes. It also doesn’t follow one of those plot arc diagram thingies, nor does it fit the Heroes’ Journey. It’s, ultimately, the tale of one year of the afore-mentioned ninja/spy/assassin/comic book geek/musician who has Wisdom as his dump stat’s life.
Oh, and if I self-publish, here’s the cover. (I am willing to take criticism from people who work in graphic design and ordinary readers, but not from people who’ve read articles on how covers should look . . . because I’ve read those articles too, and I wouldn’t buy books with covers that looked that amateur.):
Why Crown of Eldrete may never get its sequel
First, I apologize to anyone who liked the book and was anticipating the sequel, but I really think it might never happen. What might — and I have to emphasize might — happen is a rewrite telling the whole story from Lyn meeting Taliza to them kicking the combined Neo-Imperialist and Krishodi forces out of that bit of the galaxy. But given my current works-in-progress list, you’re looking at, probably, 2019 at the earliest before you’d see that. If ever. Sorry.
Now, the short reason why I may never write the sequel: There shouldn’t have needed to be a sequel. The book should’ve been longer, but I was an idiot and rushed it out instead of taking the time to make it better and complete.
The longer reason: Crown of Eldrete was, in many ways, not the book it should’ve been. It should’ve been a simple, straight-forward action-adventure. The best bits, in my opinion, are the ones that are. The time they fight a giant insect. The time they fight the robot. The discussion of the way Lyn flies. The bits, in other words, that show that I have an unabashed love for things like early Drizzt books and honest-to-Gygax dungeon crawls and Voltron and Star Wars (even the prequels.) In a lot of ways, this is the same issue I talked about in this blogpost: http://sblog.universal-nexus.com/in-defense-of-fun/ Actually, no. It’s the exact same issue. Again. Fuck me. Maybe this time I’ll learn this lesson for good.
Crown of Eldrete didn’t need the bit with Lyn’s dad being disappointed in her. (Besides, on a meta level he has no fucking right to criticize her actions in the story because he’s certainly done stupider things. The moment you charge a nine-foot-tall creature with one-foot-claws with nothing but a katana you lose the right to call anyone else reckless!) I’m not convinced completely it needed the bits with Taliza and she discussing how much they missed their significant others. Maybe if the book had been novel length, where I have more space to introduce and resolve subplots, but as it is, they end up just kind of pushed in, intruding on the adventure. (In my opinion, anyway. And I’m the one who’d have to write the sequel, so . . .)
It also suffered because I wasn’t willing to make drastic changes when I revised it. That is wholly the fault of some very bad advice I believed at the time, advice that I wouldn’t have believed if I’d taken three seconds to think about it. Oh well. Live and learn.
Another problem is probably that (I just discovered this) the first three scenes were written in June 2012, most of the rest in November of that year, about 1700 words in February, and then the last few thousand words in April 2013. It was written that broken up, and I didn’t give it serious revisions. Ugh! To put this in more perspective, the way I’ve got iBooks set up it’s 84 pages right now, not counting the endnotes. Pages 71 through 84 were written almost a year after 5 through 7 . . . the first ones that aren’t things like the copyright notice. And then I didn’t revise much. Do you know how much an author’s style can change in a year? Especially that early in their career?
Especially when she’s being an idiot and half-trying to write a story that’ll have the approval of the nebulous Them that decrees what is and isn’t good instead of one she’ll enjoy?
Now, just to show how much my style has changed since I started writing this back in 2012. Or rather, to show how I’ve always written when I wasn’t being an idiot and worrying about stupid shit and was instead just getting out of the way and letting the story be told, here’s the beginning as it was, and as it’d be if I ever rewrote it. (Really though, don’t get your hopes up for this. This isn’t like Jake’s Last Mission where I just need to expand things that were already there and add scenes that make things make more sense but where the plot is good as it it, or like “Once A Hero” where I had a good plot and characterization and everything and the flaws were mostly technical (That fixing the technical flaws by switching it to first also smoothed out some of the more awkward bits in the plot was an unexpected side effect.); this is . . . if I expanded this into a novel, I’d probably redo about half the plot. And I’ve already got plenty of things to work on without fucking about with a story that no one ever wants to pay for.)
The old version:
“You’re a guardian faeshir, aren’t you?” Lyndsey asked, seeing the expert swordsmanship of the rebel woman fighting by her side. And a Kavaliro, or at least someone who learned from one, at that, she thought, but didn’t say in case she was wrong.
“I was the junior guardian faeshir at the local temple until these bastards took it,” she paused as she sent yet another foe to meet the spirits. “Name’s Taliza Kavaliro.”
Lyndsey grinned as she dispatched two more of the Neo-Imperialists. “Lyndsey Katherine Kavaliro-Blue, at your service.” She inclined her head slightly as she said it, the closest she could come in current circumstances to her usual bow with a flourish.
Taliza’s smile broadened. “Cousins, then?”
“Probably of some sort. I’m Kalem’s great-great-granddaughter, ” Lyndsey said, stabbing a foe in the heart.
“And I’m Mina’s … Kalem’s sister,” the young faeshir said as she disemboweled the final Neo-Imperialist. “Messy. I always hate doing that.”
“The way he was coming at you, what choice did you have?” Lyndsey asked, wiping her blade carefully before sheathing it.
“True,” Taliza said sadly as she recited prayers over their fallen foes. Lyndsey stayed respectfully quiet, though she followed a different religious path herself.
The new version:
There was something familiar about the way the woman at my side was wielding her sword. I kept glancing over at her whenever I wasn’t busy with my own foes, trying to put my finger on it. It wasn’t Ruvellian fencing or kenjutsu or Aslith fencing, the three styles I’ve seen the most. As she smoothly sliced across a Neo-Imperialists mid-section, I realized where I’d seen it before. “Where’d ya learn Kavaliro Faeshir Swordart?” I asked. I knew a bit of the style myself — Grandpa wasn’t about to let a family legacy die just because none of us had been faeshir in generations, but had never seen anyone outside my immediate family use it.
The tall, slender woman answered with a bit of a smile, “I am a Kavaliro, and a faeshir.”
“Really?” I asked, almost absent-mindedly killing — or at least wounding enough that they were out of the fight, and that was good enough for me right then — two more Neos.
“Yeah. Taliza Kavaliro. Junior . . . senior,” her voice broke a bit as she corrected herself, “guardian faeshir at this world’s major temple.”
Bowing my head slightly — I was not about to do my normal, deep, flourishing bow in the middle of a fight, even one as easy as this one was proving to be — I introduced myself. “Lyndsey Katherine Kavaliro-Blue, Kalem’s great-great-granddaughter. I think. Might be another great in there.”
She disemboweled the final Neo-Imperialist swiftly with a grimace, then said, “I’m Mina’s great-great-granddaughter. His sister. So I guess we’re cousins of some kind?”
“Sounds that way,” I said, making my way to the chest they’d been trying so hard to keep us away from.
My newfound cousin took an idol out of her pocket and started whispering prayers over the dead. I stopped what I was doing and stood respectfully silent, though as far as I know my gods don’t give a damn if I pray over the people I’ve just killed or not.
And that was fun enough that this just might find it’s way onto my to-do list. Might, still, though. This bit just needed rewritten. Once I get to the part where the plot falls apart, I’d basically have to start over from scratch. So maybe I’ll just write something else from Lyn’s POV, because that’s what made it fun.
Where do you get your ideas from?
I’ve never actually been asked the question that’s the title of this post, but I know it’s inevitable that I will some day. Also, I’ve got insomnia and this is probably a better use of my time than watching Doctor Who or Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse. Yes, those are presently my favorite (still airing) shows. I’m weird, what can I say?
Anyway, when I post short stories on here, I usually give a bit of info about what inspired that particular story, if I can recall it. So I’m going to do the same thing for the works I currently have progress meters for:
No More Lies: I invented Bobby as a kid as what I’d now call an AU version of Storm Shadow, then later decided he wasn’t him; he was his apprentice. Bobby’s evolved since then, and any resemblance between Universal Nexus and GI Joe: Real American Hero is coincidence or homage now, but he’s still a ninja who used to be a bad guy. This story though . . . I woke up with the image of him under a tree and knew what he was thinking and had to write a bit to figure out what was going on. Turned out it was the day he met the love of his life.
UNTITLED NOVEL: First of all, this one isn’t actually untitled; I just really don’t like the present working title and am trying to come up with a better one. This one is a bit different than the others, since it’s not my setting, but still probably not what most people are looking for when they ask an author where they get their ideas. Anyway, I was reading the setting description and thought of a character pretty much instantly. He wanted a better ship. That implied I needed a guy with a better ship. After that, it was just a matter of figuring out how to throw them together, and I went with a pretty clichéd idea for that because it isn’t the idea so much as what you do with it that makes a story good.
Dangers of the Past: As a fun “what if” thing, Jaye and I were discussing how Bobby’s wife and kids would react if something that had been true in an earlier version of the setting were still true: he had a child he didn’t know about until they were an adult. I started writing it as, basically, fanfic of my own setting. Then I realized with a couple of tweaks, I could make it work canonically. I think a random die roll is what gave him the kid in the old version (kids, actually, back then, but I couldn’t make that work.)
Jake’s Last Mission Expanded: Jake is another character I created the original version of as a kid. He’s changed too. A lot. His last name isn’t Skywalker any more, for starters. (I was seven or eight, okay?!) And he somehow transformed from an Army colonel to supreme commander of a space fleet. I never intended to write him as the protagonist in anything, then one day I suddenly thought of the first few paragraphs of the story. I got stuck about two pages in for like a year, then suddenly realized if I deleted the last sentence I had a plot. So I did that and finished the novelette in a week or two. The expansion was an idea I’d been kicking around for a while, then one day while sarcastically rewriting the first bit to match some of the most common criticisms (to entertain myself and vent after yet another bad review), I realized that while 99% of the criticisms were things I was going to continue to ignore (I am not going to quit using made up words in a motherfucking space opera!), the ones that said it should be longer were right. The story was too compressed for what I was trying to do in it.
Quinn’s Nephew: This, which needs a better title since my readers don’t know who Quinn is I just realized, since I’ve taken the story with him as the narrator off my priority list for the time being, started life as a pitch for another setting, but in the process of writing it, I realized I’d in a recent rpg session created a character that was perfect for the plot I had in mind. I first tried copying him in that other setting, but I finally decided he worked better exactly as he was.
Hmm . . . that’s interesting: I don’t talk much about the plots when I talk about where I get ideas from. I talk about the characters and the inciting incident, but not the plot itself. I think this is because I don’t really think about plot much as I write. I have a starting point, the main character (who’s usually the narrator because I’m presently finding first person so much easier to work in than third), and usually some idea what the ending will be like, but everything between the first scene and the last scene? I have no way of telling you where I get those ideas from because generally I’m just typing things as fast as I can so I can find out how the characters get from the start to the end without getting themselves killed. Sometimes I have very brief notes on the next few scenes, but they’re really brief, not really “ideas”. They’re mostly things like “Bobby says really stupid thing”, “bad guys attack”, and “epilogue, 20 years later”. Those are mostly so I don’t forget to include cool and/or important bits that I’ve already thought of, because I can usually only write linearly, but sometimes I think of little snippets from later bits (or have them from prior attempts at stories), and, well, if I didn’t have things like “epilogue” on there, I might forget I’d written one and put it in a separate document.
And I certainly can’t say where I get any themes you might see from, because I don’t put them in there deliberately.
Really, Louis L’Amour said it best . . . oh, this isn’t the quote I was looking for, but it’s even better, I think:
I start with a character and a situation, but I don’t know what’s going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me. — Louis L’Amour
I’m the same. Hell, I thought No More Lies was going to be a 3000 word short story! It was supposed to just about Bobby and Karen meeting, but that wasn’t a story on it’s own, so I kept adding to it. It ended up being a chronicle of his life from the moment he met her until their wedding. (It’s a romance; that’s not a spoiler.) For me, a good part of the fun of writing is finding out what’s going to happen next. Yeah, I’m one of those authors who needs an end to work towards pretty early on, but that’s a focus thing. If I don’t give myself that, I end up wandering all over the damned place, chasing every new shiny idea. With an end point, I can go “Yeah, that is cool, and it is happening at the same time as this story, but it should be a stand alone thing, not part of this.” That doesn’t interfere with my fun, it just stops me from getting frustrated to tears while editing.
I suppose people could also mean “Where did you get ideas like Sweytz’s government, Ruvellian culture, a ninja/spy/assassin who is also a comic book geek, etc.?” and that sort of question I certainly can’t give very good answers to, because, well, let’s look at the ninja/spy/assassin/comic book geek: ninja, because Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow are two of the coolest motherfucking characters ever; spy, because spies are cool; assassin, because . . . fucked if I can remember now; comic book geek because . . . I think I had him say something kind of geeky once accidentally and suddenly decided it’d be cool if he, despite being such a fucking badass, was One of Us. (And if anybody finds that too unrealistic . . . I was once told that military dudes don’t play rpgs and read comic books because they don’t need the vicarious thrills from them, for instance . . . read the bio of fantasy author Myke Cole: http://mykecole.com/about. Now give him the badassness upgrade necessary to be a space opera protagonist.) Anyway, look at what I said: “I think”. I don’t know for sure. Fuck, maybe I’ll find an old note somewhere that’ll say something like “Bobby hates comic books” and somehow I misremembered it as him loving them (this sort of thing happens to me a lot. In my defense, some characters were hardly even mentioned in anything for years, so I can get details mixed up.)
Ruvellian culture? Cormyrean nobles from Forgotten Realms and pirates are influences, but beyond that, I’m making it up as I go.
Sweytz’s government? Okay, that one I could actually answer, but I really don’t feel like discussing political theory pretty much ever . . . partially because it’s a topic where I have a hard time finding the line between “defending my position” and “browbeating the other guy until he sees things my way.” I could, if I ever took it into my head to do so, probably reach Heinleinian levels of preaching political views in my fiction, okay? As I’d rather focus on fun stuff, I don’t do that. I just ask that readers accept the society works the way it works and then get on with enjoying whatever shit my characters have gotten themselves into this time.
Really, I’ve never understood “Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s not a question I’d ever think to ask an author. I can see asking “Where did you get the idea for SPECIFIC THINGY?”, but not ideas in general. Ideas just kind of happen, you know? I mean, if I wanted to get deep about it, they probably come from the synthesis of everything that we’ve read, felt, experienced, etc., but I doubt that’s what the asker really wants to hear.
Anyway, where do you get your ideas from? 🙂
Related articles
Rambling about No More Lies, characterization, and mostly illustrating why I shouldn’t have caffeine in the evening
“The key with characters is to be honest. If a character’s actions are believable, then that character will work.” — Russell T. Davies
A couple of days ago, I was rereading the bit of No More Lies I’d revised that day and suddenly recalled some writing advice from somewhere — one of those bits that just seeps in when you do daft things like lurk on writing forums full of people who’ve never been published and, in far too many cases, never even finished a short story, yet feel like they are experts in the One True Way of how to write. The advice in question pretty much said that in each scene a character should undergo some sort of emotional change. Just one, mind you. This advice made me worry that I’d just done something horribly wrong because in the scene I’d just revised Bobby went from furious, to scared, back to furious, and then back to scared. It was a heart-wrenching scene, one of, I humbly say, the best bits I’ve ever written. But according to the advice I’d read, it was wrong.
I decided the advice was what was wrong. I’d done what was true to Bobby. I suppose if I was the kind of author who carefully crafted her stories with flowcharts and notecards and storyboards and all that kind of shit, I could’ve planned the scene so that both things that made him mad were in the same spot and it was some sort of arc thingy. But it’s not the kind of story that really works for that. No More Lies, as I’ve said before, is an unholy combination of a romantic comedy, action-adventure, and quarter-life crisis story. It doesn’t have nice, neat points where it breaks into acts or anything like that. Hell, one of the biggest problems I’m having revising it is deciding where to put the fucking chapter breaks (the first draft didn’t have chapters, but I decided it needed them while revising.)! Bobby’s life has suddenly become utter chaos, and that’s reflected in the way he reacts to things. He’s, though he’d kick the ass of anyone who said this to him, emotionally fragile at the point I was revising. It wouldn’t make sense to have him smoothly transitioning from angry to scared or vice versa. It makes sense for him to be ping ponging between the two. That’s who and where he is at that moment.
And as this has already gone somewhere totally different than I meant for it to and than I thought it would, I’m going to talk about No More Lies for a bit. Because I feel like it and it’s my blog, so nyah!
I’d love to find an agent for it and get it traditionally published because, right now — I know this will change randomly because it’s how these things work — I’m convinced it’s utterly brilliant and wonderful. But I also know that I probably will end up self-publishing it. Why? Because it’s an unholy combination of a romantic comedy, action-adventure, and quarter-life crisis story. Because it’s a romance with a first person narrator who’s male. Because it’s a romance with a first person narrator who’s an egotistical prick who needs a slap upside the head sometimes. (He does receive a few, at least.) Because it being in a space opera setting barely affects the plot at all. Because it doesn’t follow the romance formula. There are all kinds of things going against it. Hell, those are all reasons it might never sell a copy to anybody but my mother . . . who I really think would buy it and tell me it was brilliant if I wrote “C spot runn. He runz real gud.” That’s okay, though. Every writer needs somebody like that in their life.
But you know what? I don’t care. I had fun writing it, I’m having fun revising it . . . well, as much fun as revising can ever be; people who say that’s the fun part of writing are utterly mad. I have fun reading it. I know, for some reason, I’m not supposed to enjoy reading my own work. I’m supposed to only see the flaws. And I do see those, hence this revision and the planned next draft. But the flaws (mostly) are in the craft side of writing. The flaws (mostly) aren’t in the art side.
I enjoy it because Bobby’s a fun character. Yeah, he’s an asshole; yeah, a lot of the drama in the story could’ve been avoided if he’d just gone to a psychiatrist because dude’s got issues; yeah, sometimes I realize I have things in common with him — not traits you ever want to realize you have in common with a character, alas — and feel sorry for everyone who has to put up with me. But he’s fun, nonetheless. He’s quirky. He’s . . . he’s a comic book geek/ninja/spy/assassin/musician . . . but not competent enough at any of those to reach Mary Sue levels. He’s good, but he’s not great. He’s too lazy to ever be great at anything. And, well, comic book geek is in there. This is not a trait traditionally associated with your superspy archetype.
I enjoy No More Lies for many of the same reasons I enjoy several of my favorite books. It’s, if you get right down to it, not really a romance. It’s only a science fiction novel by definitions that revolve around setting instead of plot. It’s almost an action-adventure, but there is far too much down time between fight scenes for it to really be one. It’s, ultimately, the story of a bit over one year in a guy’s life and everything that happens in it. I like that kind of story. I don’t like things that fit in neat boxes. Oh, yeah, sure, now we can put Little Women and Anne of Green Gables — judging by the number of times I’ve read both, these are the best contenders for “my most favorite book” — in the wonderful catch-all category of “Classics.” But what if they were new books coming out today? I’ve seen them both called romances, and the movie versions of Little Women — at least the two I’m most familiar with — certainly are. (I haven’t seen the Anne of Green Gables miniseries in about twenty years, so I can’t talk about it. I just remember I thought it left out some of the best parts of the book.) But the books? They aren’t romances. They, though they’re both frequently called this, aren’t coming-of-age stories. They’re stories of a hunk of some people’s lives and what happens in them.
If they were set in modern society, they’d be just plain ordinary fiction. But if you put them on another planet or some place with magic — and didn’t change the text except as necessary to support the new settings — what would we call them? They’re not science fiction or fantasy, many would argue, because the plots aren’t the sort we associate with those genres. (And, really, could some influential sf/f author please do a post or something on how there are so many more sf/f plots than the fucking Heroes’ Journey! I swear three-quarters of the self-published stuff out there is a variation of it, and two-thirds of the advice on how to structure a plot is really “how to write a by-the-numbers Heroes’ Journey story”! It’s driving me mad!)
And I totally forgot where I was going with that. I’m really not sure this post makes much sense at all, but I’m going to post it anyway. Maybe somewhere in there I said something that’s interesting or insightful or something.
This was supposed to be a post related to this post by Sam Sykes. http://www.samsykes.com/2015/09/unshaken-not-unstirred/
Mostly though, I think I just illustrated that I shouldn’t have had that second glass of Pepsi with dinner.
Five Star Reviews — The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
I discovered this book in possibly the weirdest way I’ve yet discovered a book. I’d been watching The Guild . . . which, by the way, is far more entertaining when you’re not losing whole days of productivity to an MMO yourself . . . and, well, there’s only six seasons of it. The dog was asleep somewhere where if I stood up, he was going to wake up and if he woke up right then, after not having a long enough nap, he was going to be a pain in the ass all day. So I looked over to see what youtube recommended for me. Usually this results in aural trauma, but this time it recommended Tabletop, specifically the Lords of Waterdeep episode. Well, my birthday was soonish and I’d considered asking for the game, so I watched it and was highly amused by Patrick Rothfuss. So I found his blog. The most recent post at the time was something about Worldbuilders. I read a bit more, trying to understand what he was talking about, and discovered two things: 1) I was already following his reviews on Goodreads because he was the guy who’d written a review of his own book that wasn’t out yet that someone had pointed me at a few months before, and 2) he was a good person as well as an amusing and talented author. So I decided I had to buy his book.
And then I discovered I’d downloaded a sample of it four years before and never read it. In my defense, judging from where it was in iBooks, I’d downloaded it the day I got the iPad and, after sampling several fantasy books that, to put it bluntly, sucked, I decided to move on to a different genre. Apparently I never made my way back to it.
The description, via Goodreads:
The riveting first-person narrative of a young man who grows to be the most notorious magician his world has ever seen. From his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime- ridden city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that transports readers into the body and mind of a wizard. It is a high-action novel written with a poet’s hand, a powerful coming-of-age story of a magically gifted young man, told through his eyes: to read this book is to be the hero.
My review:
This was an incredibly good book.
The characters had diverse personalities that were well-portrayed and some of them had surprising depths to them. Those last few pages showed a side of one that was rather unexpected. Kvothe is incredibly competent at several things, but it’s shown to be the result of hard work and an incredible memory, so he’s no Mary Sue.
Kvothe’s story is one of the most real feeling bits of fiction I’ve ever read. Nothing, save one thing I’ll get to in a minute, felt like it was happening just to serve the plot. Everything had realistic consequences.
Drama, humor, romance, action . . . the story had it all and it was all perfectly balanced. There were too many excellent bits for me to choose my favorite, though the part with the draccus was unlike anything else I’d ever read. I also loved the way an interlude showed the contrast between the true story of Kvothe and the stories people told about him.
There were some absolutely gorgeously written passages, like this one:
“Inside the Waystone, the light fell across Chronicler’s face and touched a beginning there, a blank page waiting the first words of a story. The light flowed across the bar, scattered a thousand tiny rainbow beginnings from the colored bottles, and climbed the wall toward the sword, as if searching for one final beginning.”
I kept having to look words up, which I quite like as I feel too many authors try too hard to keep their language simplistic these days.
The dialogue was excellent, with this line being a particular favorite of mine: “Small deeds for small men,’ I always say. I imagine the trouble is in finding the job small enough for men such as yourselves.”
And the setting . . . I’ve read other things that attempted a “magic based on science” approach, but this is the first one that made sense, like the author understood both magic and science. But that wasn’t what made it so great. No, it was the little touches, like there being different ways to kiss a lady’s hand in different cultures, and why the draccus’ scales were made of what they were that showed Rothfuss had really put a lot of thought into his world-building.
This is a story about stories, and about heroes and what they’re really like, and about love, and, well, it’s the story of one person’s life, or at least that bit of it he can tell in one night. And it hints at that life having had major ramifications for the rest of the world.
My only complaints were that a couple of times it seemed like Kvothe was losing money just to serve the plot and that there was a bit more redundancy than I liked, though I’m pretty sure that was deliberate so it would seem more like a story being told.
And there were more typos than I find excusable in a traditionally published book, but that’s the publisher’s fault, not the author’s, so I’m not holding that against him.
In short, this was one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read, and I can’t wait to read the sequel.
Apparently I can wait to read the sequel, because I haven’t yet, but I’m sure I’ll get book two read before book three is out, anyway. This book was amazing. I can’t praise it enough. Just talking about it is making me want to re-read it, but since I’m already reading twelve books, maybe I should wait a bit.
Progress Meters, or Why Shannon Has No Life
Free for August!
(They were free on Smashwords in July, but I’m an idiot and forgot to post about it. Thank you, people who discovered them anyway. Tell your friends how awesome they are! Review them! Buy print copies! Other statements I’m supposed to make here but can’t recall because my brain is melting in the heat!)
Smashwords link: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ShannonHaddock
iBooks link: https://itunes.apple.com/artist/shannon-haddock/id603756872
Drivethrufiction link: http://www.drivethrufiction.com/browse.php?author=Shannon%20Haddock (For some reason I always forget to change it back here, so if you’re reading this post long after August, go ahead and check there. You might be lucky.)
Kobo links: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/jake-s-last-mission
https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-crown-of-eldrete
https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/once-a-hero-always-a-hero (I have no idea why Kobo thinks this is a romance. I’ve triple checked; I don’t have romance selected.)
I can’t make the books free at Amazon or Nook because they don’t give authors this option. Sorry. I think Kindle format is also available from Drivethrufiction. If not and that’s the format you want, email me and I’ll see what I can do.
Book reviews should resume in a week or so; other content around the same time. We’re moving to Massachusetts in less than a week. (Yes, we know it’ll be really cold in the winter. Yes, we know there will be a lot of snow. Yes, I am sick of hearing the same comments; however did you guess?)
EDIT: Crown of Eldrete price matched to free on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DPD88N0