Writing about Reading about Writing

Posted on by chaoticgood3 Comments on Writing about Reading about Writing

Post title is more than usually symmetrical on a word level. Nice.

I’m currently enjoying Donald Maass’ The Fire in Fiction. Might actually do some of the writing exercises in it, as they seem fun.

Interestingly, most are actually editing exercises, e.g. “Choose a section of your manuscript in which two characters are conversing for roughly a page and rewrite it so that one character’s responses are entirely nonverbal. Now rewrite it as a shouting match. Now rewrite it with no dialogue tags or actions interspersed. Now rewrite it so that one character is in love with the other, who doesn’t reciprocate. Now rewrite it with one character drunk and the other one trying to get to sleep.” Etc. (Do not interpret the quotation marks there to mean that I’m actually quoting the book.) (Also, if anyone has a scene in which all of these actually apply, I’d love to read it.)

It strikes me that I have read a lot of books on writing. A lot. Plus many issues of Writer’s Digest. Many of my lessons in writing have come, of course, from actual books (and movies, and TV Tropes – note how I’m not linking to it and stealing your whole evening! You’re welcome). Still, I do love some books about writing. After a certain point, a lot of their advice gets repetitive. Sometimes, though, you run across a shiny new take on writing advice, and that’s always fun. So here are my favorites on the subject:

  • The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy: Volume One by Tom Dullemond and Darin Park
  • The Fantasy Writer’s Companion by Tee Morris and Valerie Griswold-Ford
  • How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them: A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman

This selection may or may not be slightly skewed toward my area of writing interest. But hey, having a narrower approach can make a book’s tips stand out in a sea of, “Instead of telling, try showing!” and, “Practice moderation in adverbs.”

Anyone got any to recommend? And, unrelatedly, anyone else really enjoy Thor? Good times.

Linguistical Nerdery

Posted on by chaoticgood2 Comments on Linguistical Nerdery

You know what word or phrase needs to exist? A phrase that indicates that two people have just taken each other’s hands. (Besides that one, which isn’t awful, but isn’t great, either.)

Things I know of that are kind of close:

  • “They held hands.” Technically correct, but doesn’t capture the fact that they just now started holding hands.
  • “She took his hand.” Puts the initiative on one person instead of both. This is the difference between, “They kissed,” and “She kissed him.”
  • “They grabbed hands.” Very close, meaning-wise, but makes it sound like Teacher has just said to find a partner and these two are grossed out by everyone in the room.
  • “They clasped hands.” I find this phrase to sound both overwrought and slightly confusing.

You can go the route of pretending their hands are independent creatures with their own wills. People sometimes like to push agency right down to the phalangeal level with statements like, “Their fingers twined together.” This particular phrase also suggests the apparently-common conception of fingers as twine-able, or entwine-able, which to me just sounds very painful, as if the next step might be the fingers tying themselves in a knot.

You can say of two people, “They hugged,” or “They kissed,” and you can say, “They shook hands.” Each of these shows an action that has just been taken by two people. “They held hands” isn’t a perfect parallel to these, obviously, as hand-holding is likely to last longer than, say, hugging. But as far as I know, the phrase I actually want here does not currently exist in English.

The upside of all this, of course, is the opportunity to be creative. I don’t want to knock that. If I weren’t excited about saying things that weren’t commonly said already, I’d be a pretty sad sort of writer. Still, I know I’m not the only one who hits a particular sentence and says, “Curse you, English! You have words for EVERYTHING ELSE!”

And That’s Not Even Getting Into “Inception” Territory

Posted on by chaoticgood7 Comments on And That’s Not Even Getting Into “Inception” Territory

. . . mostly because I still haven’t seen Inception. Yeah, yeah, I will. Sometime. But! I’ve been thinking about the role of dreams in fiction.

This is mostly because I’m now reading The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan. I enjoyed his Percy Jackson books, and The Red Pyramid, and I like this one so far. While I’ve found the three series pleasantly distinct in many ways, they all feature vivid dreams in which characters see events that are really happening as they take place. Gods and other beings use dreams to contact people. In The Red Pyramid, people’s souls/spirits/essences/floaty dream selves actually travel to where the events are unfolding, sometimes even being glimpsed by others on the scene. Since all the major characters of these books have supernatural backgrounds, this is taken in stride, and all dreams are taken seriously. As of yet, no one has suggested that hey, maybe this time, it was just a random sequence of subconscious brain blips. And Mr. Riordan has a field day being able to describe stuff that’s happening to other characters halfway around the world without having to switch POV characters.

This made me think of dreams in other books I’ve read. The fact that dreams are actually a pretty bizarre phenomenon when you think about it, are familiar to most people, have a rich tradition of symbolism and mythos, and are still not terribly well-understood, allows authors to use them all kinds of ways.

(Which phrase should alert you that you are about to encounter A LIST! Huzzah for lists!)

What’s that? You want a list of some ways authors use dreams, as remembered offhand by me? Well, if you insist. You guys and your wacky list obsessions!

  • Not at all. This does not necessarily mean that characters do not dream, although it could. (That guy in ALIEN who never dreams? Spoilers – HE’S A ROBOT!)
  • “That night, she dreamed of chasing her brother through a hedge maze full of wolves.” May be described in more detail, but generally just intended to show you the current state of the character’s psyche. May, alternately, skip telling you that it is a dream and launch directly into, “She stood in a dark, oddly rustling corridor. Hedges? Where was she? And what was that howling noise?” Depending on how it’s done and how critical a reader you are, you may catch onto the “dream” aspect of this little interval immediately, or may be confused until our heroine wakes up – probably in a cold sweat – at which point you will be annoyed. Probably. If you’re me.
  • Message delivery in service of specific entities with that capability (e.g. the spirit of Martin the Warrior in the Redwall books), or one with whom the dreamer is connected (e.g. Harry and Voldemort; also common with love interests and with twin siblings).
  • Message delivery in service of the character’s subconscious. These messages will be, understandably, more internal than those of the previous category.
  • Prophesy. This is an interesting one, because characters often wonder whether their dreams could be prophetic or otherwise meaningful, whether they actually are or not.
  • Spirit travel. I haven’t seen this often, but hey, it’s one to add to the list. And Harry Potter sorta kinda does this, sorta.
  • “It was all a dream!” This is like the second wolf-hedge maze example above, only it encompasses the whole story. Thankfully, this is becoming less and less common as I systematically hunt down every person who does it.

Am I missing any, guys? Do you include dreams in your stories? In what way?

On Throwing Characters Under the Wheels of Plot

Posted on by chaoticgood3 Comments on On Throwing Characters Under the Wheels of Plot

Usually, I prefer character-centered books to plot-centered ones. I like it best when both elements are strong – as in, say, The Hunger Games – but if I had to choose (and, you know, sometimes you do), I’d generally go with characters.

Although.

Reading the *sniffle* last-ever Redwall book, The Sable Quean, followed immediately with Treasure Island, has made me think about another kind of focus I like: strategy. While strategy and character are not mutually exclusive, focusing on tactics does tend to scale back the psychological impact of, say, character death. Or at least villainous character death.

Reaction Stages of a POV Character who Kills Someone by Necessity in a Character-driven Story:

  1. Horror: “OH GODS WHAT HAVE I DONE?”
  2. Shock: *Huddles, glassy-eyed, in a corner*
  3. Rationalization: “It was them or me and/or my friends!”
  4. PTSD: *Has nightmares*
  5. Lifelong consequences: *Is never the same*

Reaction Stages of a POV Character who Kills Someone by Necessity in a Strategy-driven Story:

  1. Triumph: “Good shot, me!”
  2. Mathematics: “Now they only have X pirates left to our Y good guys, giving us Z odds!” (Seriously, read Treasure Island. Jim devotes a lot of mental energy to keeping track of the Pirates-to-Heroes ratio.)

There are definitely places in between these extremes. See again The Hunger Games, wherein Katniss is far from heartless, yet reacts the deaths of almost two dozen semi-innocent to completely-innocent kids and teenagers, with few exceptions, much the way Jim reacts to the deaths of pirates. (Notably absent is the “triumph” stage.)

Some of my teenagerhood love of the Redwall books came from the fascinating, if rather cold-blooded, tactical portrayals of violence. Expendable baddies allowed me to learn about siege warfare! They also served as a concrete way of determining whether progress was being made in the plot: Bad guys are obstacles. Take a few out, and you’re that much closer to happily ever after! Go team!

Some fiction avoids the ethical squirminess of this stance by making the bad guys into something it’s okay to destroy, like droids. Maybe they’re just sort of okay to destroy, like murderous pirates. Either way, the story steps in front of any psychological implications of the violence with a grin and a, “Nothing to see here!” And, despite my usual character-centric tastes, I sympathize: I don’t want to follow up the exciting, but ultimately doomed, battering-ram attack on Redwall with the funerals of two hundred rats and weasels, plus lamenting on how they never really had a chance for a better life.

One could probably make a scale of how much books fall into this category, perhaps defined by how introspective and empathetic their POV characters (or narrators) are.

Sad News

Posted on by chaoticgood12 Comments on Sad News

Diana Wynne Jones has just died. I wish I could find a better article, but it’s early yet, and I don’t see much news about it yet. I heard from what I’m pretty sure is the listserv they mention – the DWJ listserv out of England. A friend of hers sent out the news.

Diana Wynne Jones has been my favorite author since I was eight, when Howl’s Moving Castle became my favorite book. (It still is.) In the summer of 2007, I had the extreme good fortune to meet DWJ. I’ve never been so excited to meet someone in my life. She surpassed all of my expectations, mostly in being so very kind.

How that came to pass, taken from my enthusiastically rambling personal LJ entries of the time

A Fantastic Quiz

Posted on by chaoticgood2 Comments on A Fantastic Quiz

For my Popular Materials class, a partner and I presented on the fantasy genre. To kick off our presentation, I handed out a quiz I’d written – not to be collected or graded, which might have gotten me assassinated, but to show classmates that they already knew more about fantasy than they might have thought.

(About certain kinds of fantasy, anyway.)

The quiz was so popular with my classmates that I thought I’d post it here.

No, the eagles won’t take the ring for you.

The Real Elements of Style

Posted on by chaoticgood4 Comments on The Real Elements of Style

These are actually elements of content, but that wouldn’t be a snappy title alluding to a well-known book. So sue me.

Recently, I was reading a book in which it rained a lot. And I realized something: I really like it when it rains in books.

I wondered if perhaps this was weird. I could rationalize it, certainly. Rain, especially accompanied by darkness, thunderclouds, and/or cold, is atmospheric in a way that I like. It narrows the scope of the world, drawing a curtain over everything outside a character’s immediate surroundings. The search for shelter can bring people together or push them into places they wouldn’t ordinarily go. It also lends itself to body-centered writing, bringing us closer to a character’s experience by showing how this affects her physically (generally, in the direction of “cold and wet”).

My use of the word “rationalize” doesn’t mean that these things aren’t true or that they don’t contribute to my appreciation for fictional precipitation. Still, these factors don’t seem to touch the satisfaction I feel when it starts raining in my reading, whether the characters are indoors or out. This had me thinking about things and situations to which I have not-immediately-logical-warm fuzzies, or an equally illogical growly feeling. I thought about potential explanations of these reactions, but again, I think they only partly cover it.

Note: these are not things that it inherently makes sense to like or dislike, given my taste. For example, I’m pleased when magic and swords show up, because I like high fantasy; I’m annoyed when a story’s few female characters are ineffectual, because I’m a feminist. These things aren’t like that.

  • Beaches – I like ’em. Not sure why, although they do make nice battle backdrops. I especially like settings on beaches, because they allow characters to spend time on the beach with less immediate risk that they may get on a boat.
  • Boats – This is possibly my weirdest reading hang-up. I like boats in real life. I like sailing or paddling on the water. But when fictional characters get on a seabound vessel, I make a frowny face. I’m pretty sure this is because I perceive maritime scenes as often being written the same way. Authors use the same terms to describe the sea, and the same things happen when characters are at sea. “Oh, here comes the obligatory storm-at-sea scene.” Supporting this theory are the facts that I don’t mind boats that are large enough to basically be floating towns in which the action takes place disconnected from the whole “boat” aspect, nor do I mind when characters hop in a canoe to go downriver a bit.
  • Cities – This is sort of the opposite of boats. In real life, cities terrify me. In fiction, they fascinate me. Also, they have an excellent chance of being home to plot.
  • Cooking – Okay, guys, I love when authors get into details over food. I for serious do. But even more than that, I love when they get into cooking. Especially when the food is of a kind, or prepared in a way, with which I’m unfamiliar. This fits neatly with my appreciation for fantasy in which the author has thought out how everyday life – including food – works in the fantasy world.
  • Cowboys – I don’t like ’em. Seems strange, given that I like action, adventure, and horses. The fact that I dislike guns may have something to do with this. I also credit that bodice-ripping Western I picked up as a bright-eyed twelve-year-old, expecting horses and excitement, only to put it down when our cowboy protagonist is given a present of two girls who may or may not be underage, with whom he undertakes a graphic drunken threesome sex scene containing acts that I’d not been aware were physically possible. This is the first book I definitively remember putting aside for good without finishing it. Also, there were NO HORSES.
  • Forests – What can I say? I like me some trees.
  • Guns – Don’t like ’em, but I can make exceptions depending on the genre I’m reading.
  • Travel Scenes in Books that Aren’t Actually About Journeys – I prefer that these be skimmed over. Otherwise, there had better be some killer character interaction, because otherwise let me tell you what will happen: there will be a lot of scenery, and then our POV character will start indulging in flashbacks and/or reminiscing. Do you know why that is? BECAUSE S/HE IS BORED. AND SO AM I.
  • Mansions – I am a huge sucker for scenes in which characters, alone or in small groups, explore big, rambling houses. Or castles, or even ruins. Especially if there may be magic involved. Especially if it’s creepy.
  • Parties – The natural habitat of interesting characters and plot advancement. I’m always excited when the characters decide to go to a party. Bonus: in fantasy, there are likely to be cool magical decorations.
  • What the Bad Guys are Up To – Assuming the transitions aren’t awkward and the villains aren’t cardboard, and especially when there’s discord in the antagonists’ camp, I love to see what’s going on with them. I think this is partly because villains have so many more options for dealing with disagreements among themselves than do good guys. Even if their goals and personalities are anathema, White Hats are expected to more or less make nice. Bad guys are much more flexible. I’m sure there’s some level of wish fulfillment in reading about the, “I don’t like him, therefore I will have him poisoned,” thought process. Plus, having life-and-death struggles within their side as well as between them and their opponents means a lot of tension and excitement. (Good guys, in theory, hold up their end of the story’s tension based on the fact that you care more about them and want them to succeed.)

None of which is to say that I can’t feel differently about these things depending on how they’re done, of course.

I’m sure most everyone has instant satisfaction/annoyance triggers like these. One blogger I read mentioned she won’t read a book that prominently features fairies. Can you think of any that you have?

Slightly Off-Topic

Posted on by chaoticgood1 Comment on Slightly Off-Topic

This isn’t super-new, but I’m still mulling over this article on the casting call for The Hunger Games movie. The article’s focus is a little scattered, but I do think it makes some good points.

From her physical description – dark hair, olive skin, gray eyes – I’d assumed that Katniss was of an ethnic type that doesn’t exactly match any of the ones currently existing, but I’d pictured her as looking vaguely Latina. After reading the article and thinking about it, though, I could also picture her as a brunette white girl, as she seems to appear in the promotional materials for the novel. Peeta is obviously white – with blond hair and blue eyes and sans albinism, there aren’t really other options. Rue and Thresh are, I think, the only characters whose descriptions make it very clear that they’re people of color (“dark brown skin and eyes”).

I’m anxious about the casting of this movie. Well, I’m anxious about the movie, period, though in an excited, hopeful way. (I am curious, too, about whether the violence will translate well to the screen without being overly horrifying. I mean, there’s disturbing stuff in the books, but nothing so bad that I couldn’t keep reading. Not sure how well I’d react to actually seeing the same scenes.)

But I am going to be MAD if they cast white actors to play Rue and/or Thresh, and I’m also going to be very ticked if Katniss is blonde.

I don’t mean to seem like I’m looking for reasons to be upset. I very much want this movie to be awesome. I will be going to it as soon as it comes out, probably in some sort of costume. (My “Cinna told me to wear this shirt” shirt is a bit worse for the wear, literally, at this point.) So I am . . . cautiously optimistic. Come on, Lionsgate peeps. Do the right thing.

2:30 a.m. Delirium

Posted on by chaoticgood2 Comments on 2:30 a.m. Delirium

JUST FINISHED THE ROUGH DRAFT OF THE BOOK OF FOXES!

(Why does this always happen in the small hours of the morning?)

This is just the draft of the writing. The illustrations, on which I’ve been working slowly but steadily, are only done up to Chapter Five, and some of them will have to be redone because I’ve changed my approach to doing them – not my style for the characters, but my medium (slightly).

BUT! Very exciting! Huzzah huzzah!