James River Writers’ Show

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Yesterday evening, I went to the James River Writers’ Show! I’d been to the JRW annual conference several times, but this was my first Writing Show. Excellent fun.

There was a social first, and another one halfway through. These are great at writers’ conferences because you have a built-in conversation-starter: “What do you write?” And the variety of the answers is fascinating. I talked with a fellow who does technical writing for businesses but is trying to get into creative nonfiction, a retired librarian who’s writing a novel for a class at VCU, a man from Turkey who writes stories from “the old country” in both English and Turkish, a woman who writes sci-fi and horror, and another woman who writes alternate-world fantasy.

This month’s show had a broad enough topic to interest everyone, and I think the panel addressed it admirably. Of course, there’s only so much you can say in an hour and a half, but they addressed Creative Writing MFAs, publishing novels and short stories, writers’ conferences and retreats, and more. I especially appreciated some specifics they mentioned, like the websites NewPages and Duotrope, which let you search for fiction and poetry publications. Very useful.

I also got to say hi to Professor Robbins and meet some of the other people who run James River Writers. It’s a great group. If you’re a writer and anywhere near Richmond, you might check it out.

So . . .

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. . . I didn’t get into NC State. That makes eleven out of eleven Creative Writing MFA programs that have rejected me.

I don’t actually feel this reflects much on my writing quality, or even my quality as an applicant. Maybe that’s really egotistical of me, but there are so many other factors, especially right now, with the economy the way it is. Creative Writing MFAs are competitive at the best of times, and right now, everyone’s going back to school. Mom said she heard that schools are currently looking for people with “life experience,” and since people ARE going back to school, there are more to choose from. Besides all that, I’m an unconventional applicant: I wasn’t an English major, and I don’t write literary fiction. That’s why I sent out the initial e-mail asking all the schools whether they thought someone who writes YA fantasy would mesh well with their programs. Most of them said, “Well, we take mostly literary fiction, but any kind of writing theoretically could get in, if it was really good.” Only NC State gave me an unqualified “yes,” and they seemed to be the only one with a fantasy writer on the faculty – thus my high hopes for getting accepted there, until yesterday.

Oh well. I know my parents have thought about a number of possible Plan Bs. I haven’t thought much about it, honestly, but of course now I’ll have to. So we’ll see.

Long, Long Overdue

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But incredibly late is still better than never, right?

I’m back from England, and I have Various News.

On the Rabbit and Cougar front, my queries to agents have mostly been rejected (with the others joining the category of unanswered-long-enough-to-likely-remain-unanswered-in-perpetuity). I have thus taken my new edit of the manuscript to the next step: submission to DAW Books. This has been my theoretical fallback for years: DAW is a respectable publisher of sci-fi and fantasy and takes unsolicited, unagented manuscripts. I’d never submitted anything there before because they require that the submission be exclusive to them, and I thought that their estimated consideration time was a year (it’s actually more like three months). I didn’t want to tie up a manuscript for a year, but I have now queried Rabbit and Cougar to agencies in both the USA and the UK, so I’m okay with letting DAW have exclusive consideration while I work on other things.

I got my applications in for all eleven graduate schools . . . and have thus far been rejected by ten of them. MFAs in Creative Writing are competitive at the best of times, and the economy is sending a lot of people back to school right now. Still, I have to admit I’ve been surprised. I’m hopeful about the last school, North Carolina State.

In other sad news, possibly related to the bummer economy, the magazine Reynard’s Menagerie, which published my short story “This, That, and Th’Other,” is shutting down. The issue after mine is their last issue.

The Dogwatchers is going well, and I have plans for a rewrite of one of the short stories I did for Professor Robbins’ class. This month, I plan to attend RavenCon and also the James River Writers Writing Show.

Then Again, Bath is a Real Place

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A combination of things – among them unreliable Internet access – has prevented me from updating much recently. I’m not sure I can still in good conscience call this a “weekly” blog. But I’m back! I have sent a few agent queries out for Rabbit and Cougar, and plan to send more this week. In the meantime, I have something else to talk about.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about worldbuilding, and then the other day we went to Bath. These things are related because I find Bath to be a good visual metaphor of one thing we’d been discussing: keeping a consistent feel in the world you’ve created. Bath feels like a world of its own because of the Bath sandstone. For anyone who’s never been there, the whole city is a historical site, and virtually every building is at least paneled in sandstone of the same color. It’s as if the whole city were carved out of one big rock, or all splashed by the same (pale yellowish) paint. This is despite its having Burger Kings and Indian restaurants packed in with art galleries, modern and classical, tourist shops, the Baths once frequented by Romans and the Assembly Rooms visited by Jane Austen.

Naturally, any well-crafted fictional culture – or even any single city – is likely to have diverse populations and institutions and remnants of various historical periods. This can add richness, but the culture does need to be drawn together by common elements or risk seeming random and poorly-conceived. If, for example, a fantasy world contains characters named Aletha and Hedric and also characters named Terry and Doug, supposedly from the same place and with similar backgrounds, the world will seem inconsistent. (This is worse when half of the characters in one culture have generic old British names such as Will and half have names the author made up that are filled with Xs and cannot be pronounced without years of training and possibly a second tongue. Do not speak to me about apostrophes.)

This is a funny problem because, as often happens when fiction imitates real life, the fiction must make sense in a way that reality sometimes doesn’t. Obviously, most people do not have to be convinced that something could work in an unlikely way if they actually see it working that way. A real-life culture that seems to lack coherence is not seen as “unrealistic.” Still, that doesn’t mean you can get away with it in your worldbuilding.

So, how to do this? A lot of generic medievalesque fantasy writers do it without much difficulty simply by basing their worlds on Britain at a certain time period. There’s nothing wrong with that, assuming the story, characters, and writing are good. One of the continents in my fantasy world was created basically that way. Things can be more difficult when basing a culture on another real-life country just because it’s done less, so people are less sure how to take it. You don’t want to create a race or civilization that seems like an offensive stereotype of a real people – think of some of the criticisms of certain Star Wars aliens.

Naturally, you want to do as much creation as possible going forwards rather than backwards – that is, thinking, “What would logically proceed from this?” rather than, “How can I make this thing happen?” You can certainly work with the latter if you have one or a few important traits you want in your culture and are flexible on the rest. For example, if you want to write a fantasy plot that involves a lot of sea travel, then you must create at least one civilization that possesses ocean-going ships or other means of transport. This is not a problem. If, say, you’re also determined that this civilization lack a technology common to the rest of your world, then you have to account for why travelers and traders using their port have not introduced this technology. Things become more complicated. If you put too many demands on a civilization before you create it, you can build yourself into a corner. If, on the other hand, you simply start with what the people would have had (say, a coastal area at the mouth of a river in a warm climate, with rich soil), then you can make your culture from there in a way that makes sense. Depending on how you do it, this can mean a lot of research, but you can borrow from existent (or historic) cultures that shared similar features – your civilization might do things in a different style, but is likely to develop similar kinds of technology, practical clothing, and so on. You do have to be careful that you don’t borrow something that in reality was caused by a factor your world doesn’t have: Religion will trip you up here, because it is behind so many traditions and may not be the same as the beliefs in your world. You also have to keep in mind things that your world has and reality doesn’t that could have affected the culture’s development. If there is magic, for example, or if multiple intelligent species coexist, that should be accounted for.

If you’re not writing fantasy or science fiction, you may have an easier time because a civilization more similar to reality will have more things you can just assume. If you are writing fantasy or sci-fi, here are a few things you might consider to keep each culture you write consistent.

1. Names. This does not have to be a pitfall – it can be an opportunity. Names can be a great way to establish differences between cultures – you just want to be consistent within each culture. One way to do this is to adapt (or blatantly steal) names from different languages. It’s a silly example, but if you have characters named Marcus and Furianus who meet someone named Elizabeth, the names will draw a stark cultural line between the two groups. Obviously, a fantasy world could be a place where a civilization exists that encompasses both names, but it would be hard to do something like this well. Similarly, if you make up all of your names, try to make them sound consistent – you might want to think a little about the sounds of the languages your people speak.

2. Dress. What is the climate of this civilization like? What are common occupations? What materials and dyes are available? Do certain colors have religious or societal significance? Maybe only mages wear red, only royalty wear white, or purple is worn only in mourning. Remember also that people in different places may come up with different ways to solve the same problem due to their varying resources and beliefs.

3. Speech. If you have a character who is not speaking his/her first language, how might that affect word choice and order? Even if everyone speaks the same language well enough for it not to matter, some people may have traditions of speech – being more formal, for example. Consider also things that go along with speech: accents, hand movements, and possibly other gestures such as bowing.

4. Supernatural Elements. If your world has magic, it may not be the same kind all over. Even if it is, it may not be regarded the same way everywhere. Like technology, certain kinds of magic may be more advanced in places where they are more practical: Agricultural magic in a farming area, for example. Magical creatures, too, may be approached differently by different societies. Maybe one culture reveres dragons, another hates and fears them, and another has never heard of them.

You can add to the coherence of your fantasy civilization through many other elements – architecture, manners, traditions, beliefs – but the above are ones that seem especially likely to come up and may involve less research than some others. Not everyone wants to think about things like architecture. Consistency is important even if only one culture appears in your story, and it is sometimes easy to slip. Still, it can be very rewarding to build a culture in detail, and it may lead to more story ideas!

I’m Back!

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I return triumphant! I have finished my edit of Rabbit and Cougar. The two friends who are here with me will read it; we all recently did the same when one of said friends finished editing her first novel. Once I’ve considered their feedback, I’ll be submitting to agents. Wish me luck!

In the meantime, I’ll be working on The Dogwatchers. It’s pretty exciting to go from editing back to actual writing. I will have another piece of writing to do soon, though: My Creative Writing MFA application to North Carolina State University requires a piece of writing that critiques a work of literature. I don’t really have anything like that, so I’ll have to pick something out and write a paper on it. That should be interesting. Luckily, I have a handy-dandy English major here to help me edit.

We haven’t dallied in any dramatically inspiring castles or anything lately, but we have tramped across the countryside, which is pretty inspiring, too. Old oaks, swans, ring-necked pheasants, and some kind of deer with huge antlers . . . and we discovered recently that the train track running through Starcross carries, in addition to its modern trains, steam engines. It’s another world over here.

I’ll tell you one literary disappointment we’ve had in England, though: the libraries. We frequent two of them in Exeter, and have visited one in Newton Abbott, and are familiar with the collection of the entire Devon system via their computers. Not only are a number of policies less friendly than the ones at home – no bathrooms for patrons, charging money just to reserve a book that’s currently checked out, and charging for the videos like a movie rental store – but the selection is pretty sad. A surprising number of nonfiction books are shelved in reference for no identifiable reason, so we can’t check them out. Popular titles are likely to be checked out in perpetuity, and the library has multiple copies of almost none of them. And neither of the Exeter libraries – libraries that serve a city of one hundred thousand people – contains The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. I don’t mean that it’s checked out – I mean they don’t have it. Same for The Little Prince. Knowing that the British buy a lot of books per capita, and being familiar with the bookish stereotypes, I admit to expecting that English libraries would measure up a little better to the ones back home.

Overall, though, things are going well on the literary front. Happy holidays to everyone!

Which Contains an Atypical Recommendation

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I’ve been spectacularly remiss in updating this journal, but lo! It is not forgotten. And I assure you that I’ve been much better at keeping up with my actual editing work and applications to graduate school. (I’ve now finished and submitted seven of those. Four more to go.)

It’s commonly – and quite rightly – said that writers should be readers. Indeed, writers are often readers simply because they enjoy reading, particularly in the genres in which they write. This is a positive thing for a number of reasons: Seeing what’s already been done (and avoiding what’s been done to death), understanding genre patterns and tropes, and noting what works and what doesn’t. Naturally, it’s a good thing to read the best works of one’s genre (and the Important Works). However, I have only recently begun to truly appreciate the advantage of occasionally reading a – what you might call a less-than-stellar example of the genre.

I don’t seek out bad books on purpose. In this case, I missed a train and found myself with half an hour to wait and a library right across the street. What was I to do? I had already searched this library for the books I knew I wanted to read, and those that I’d checked out were, sadly, back at the cottage. I found another likely-looking young adult fantasy book – rave reviews compared it to Harry Potter, and it had an interesting plot summary. I started reading it and then, because I don’t like not finishing books, checked it out.

The book is by no means awful, but has some clear weaknesses, chief among them being lack of tension. (Did I just say that in Professor Robbins’ voice?) Despite being very long and having one overarching plot – children attempt fantastic journey to find magical item to defeat villain, while minions of villain pursue them – it becomes episodic because the author seems afraid to put the children in a dangerous or even mildly frightening situation for more than half a chapter before a brand-new named character swoops in to save them. Indeed, though the writing itself does not seem intended for young children, the author seems determined not to scare the audience by allowing the protagonists to be scared, and constantly reassures the reader that the protagonists are confident and unafraid. I would like to say that this unfortunate practice is tantamount to murdering the tension, but “murdering” implies tension.

But note how recognizable the problems are! It’s good sometimes to have a clear example of what not to do, especially as this shows you exactly why you don’t want to do it. (“This is your reader. This is your reader when you have no tension. Any questions?”) The weaknesses of this work bring to mind the ways that other works avoid these problems – for example, the way one likes and sympathizes with characters who act in defiance of their fear instead of being illogically unafraid. The book also drew Becky and me into conversation about episodic novels and when they do and don’t work. The novel’s faults even made it easier for me to recognize its good points: The overarching plot is clear and classic, with the potential to be a strong one, and many of the characters are original and fun or have interesting basis in mythology.

Certainly I read – and recommend – good books over mediocre ones. I do try to read books popular in my genre even when I hear scathing reviews, because I know the authors must have done something right and would like to try to identify it. (Even if I can’t, they sometimes serve as good examples of the phenomenon described above.) I guess what I’d like to say here is that reading good work is important (and fun!), but if you want to write in a genre and you happen to pick up a book from that genre that’s not as good as you had hoped, it might be worthwhile to finish it – if that’s not too painful – and try to figure out what went wrong, what went right, and how it could have been better.

Of course, as a would-be professor, I suppose this could just be me. We’ll see.

On Outlining

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I’m back!

My recent tangles with a particular writing problem have made me rethink, to some extent, my ideas about outlining. Many authors say that they don’t like outlining because it restricts their creativity, and can make the story seem flat and boring. Professor Robbins advocates what he calls “baseball writing,” wherein the writer knows how the story begins, one or two points it will reach in the middle (“bases”), and how it ends, but then just drops the character into this frame and runs with him/her. I’ve always done some outlining, but it never covered everything – it mostly follows the baseball writing principle, though sometimes I write down some bit of dialogue I know someone will have to use at that this or that juncture, or some specific description I want to use for a person or place.

Backing up to the beginning, my recent problem did not actually come from overzealous outlining as such. While editing Rabbit and Cougar, I reached a chapter that needed serious rewriting now that Cougar has a new source of motivation. The basic outcome of the chapter, in terms of where the characters travel next, needed to be the same. It made sense, as far as the characters were concerned, but I was having a heck of a time getting them to that conclusion. If some other plan had arisen organically, I might have gone with it, but the characters just sort of floundered slowly in the right direction.

I sometimes wonder how people who don’t write fiction feel about those vaguely mystical statements: “The character ran away with me,” “She said something I didn’t expect,” and so on. I used to think it sounded a little silly, but it does happen. And this is exactly where outlining comes in: With novels, at least (in short stories there’s less room), I tend to get a basic plot idea, then try to craft a character who will react in about the right way to situations. Once I drop the character into the story, though, it’s like letting go of an arrow and hoping it was well aimed. The story may have to change if your protagonist runs up against something that would have been good for the plot but simply wouldn’t work for the character.

This, I suppose, is where writers differ. Some people do long and detailed outlines. Some people, too, will change the character rather than the plot – I just finished a book on writing fantasy that included one author’s statement that she doesn’t change her plots for anything, and will adjust characters’ backstories instead to change their motivations until their actions make sense. The important thing is that something gets changed so that the pieces fit together. Again, it may sound mystical when someone says “the story was dead on the page” or “it just wasn’t working,” but I think the basic fact is that a writer senses when his or her own work has become inconsistent. Inconsistency bothers us on a deep level – thus the human problem of cognitive dissonance – and can make a writer want to stop working.

Outlines, if too detailed, can also present the problem of making the story seem finished. It’s often difficult to work on something you feel like you’ve already done. Rewriting isn’t the same, because it’s an improvement; writing from a detailed outline is an expansion, and may even seem artificial, like you’re just padding the story you’ve already written in the outline.

Happily, I got through the problem bit in Rabbit and Cougar. Some editing should get it sorted out. The story will need some more editing anyway, after the rewritten parts and the integration of new conflicts.

Four of my graduate school applications are finished and submitted! That leaves, um, only seven more . . .

Once More, With Motivation!

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A lot can be said of rewriting. By definition, it’s much more like actual writing than editing is, but it still follows the guideline of the original work to some degree. This is great, because it helps you decide which parts of the original work are worth using as guidelines. You can determine for each part of the work – each chapter, scene, conversation, or whatever – what exactly is accomplished, then decide whether that even needs to be accomplished and, if so, how best to make it happen.

In case it wasn’t abundantly obvious, I’m rewriting at the moment. It’s somewhat frustrating just because I’d been halfway through Rabbit and Cougar – and ready, in terms of line-editing, to use the first three chapters as my grad school writing sample – when I realized that oops, one of the two protagonists lacks real motivation. I’d been coming to this realization for some time, and when my friend (read: writer roommate Becky from college) read the first three chapters for me and pointed out the same problem. Not only does the lack of motivation leave poor Cougar a weaker character – less understandable and believable – but it means very low tension for the work overall. Cougar can’t be thwarted from his goal if he doesn’t have a goal. The large-scale aimlessness also doesn’t fit given that Cougar is usually a very practical character.

Rabbit and Cougar is a journey story, and Rabbit’s motivation for traveling was explained, but Cougar’s not so much. Given that Cougar starts the trip first and Rabbit joins him, it was pretty important that there be a reason to depart in the first place. I was musing aloud about possibilities when Becky half-jokingly said “He’s being chased.” We both laughed, but it gave me an idea. Over the next couple of days, I worked it into a coherent shape. Step One completed.

Step Two is the rewriting, which is more complicated than any I’ve done before, because I’m having to insert a whole new plotline. It is, I must say, great for tension. I’ve often heard it said that you should always be thinking about how to raise the odds against your protagonist(s), but that’s not the kind of thought I consciously have during first drafts. However, since this rewrite is basically the “Now With Tension!” edition, it’s a great time to think about that. Yesterday, I entirely rewrote a chapter in which astoundingly little happened before, but which now has its fair share of action and danger – probably more than any of the preceding chapters. This is what spurred the thoughts in the first paragraph of this entry: The original draft of this chapter had a lot of exposition. In my editing, I made a list of all the important things accomplished in each chapters. The new draft of the chapter accomplishes all but two of the things the old one did, and I should be able to accomplish those in the next two chapters. In fact, I expect them to come across better; both are facts that I originally established through dialogue, but will now have the opportunity to simply show.

The addition of a new plotline is not without difficulties. A few conflicts arise with the original plot, and I’ll have to address those. And then, of course, there will be Step Three: another line edit, for which I can hardly hope to have a fresh eye anytime soon. Somewhat frustrating, because I’d thought I was on my last edit now, but the work should be stronger for it.

England, Writing, and the Combination Thereof

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England, as it turns out, is excellent for getting editing done. By this I mean that the tiny and adorable town of Starcross, Devon has no wireless Internet, no library, and generally little to do, and my friends and I do not yet have jobs here. (Don’t worry – we did find a library, and have cards for it. It just isn’t in Starcross.)

My editing of Rabbit and Cougar has been going quite well, though I sometimes get bogged down in rewrites of certain scenes. I’d rather hoped to be line editing by now, and largely I am, but some scenes just need more work than that. The main thing I’ve been doing, though, is to move the word “said” (or the occasional “shouted” or similar) from after the speaking characters’ names to before them. For some reason, when I last edited this draft, I thought one had to write “Dexy said” all the time, when I really prefer “said Dexy.” I had also not yet experienced the marvelous revelation that a new speaker does not always mean having to start a new paragraph with that piece of dialogue. I was under this impression for years. It led not only to many unecessary whacks of the “return” key, but also to some lack of clarity with regards to who spoke when. This mostly had to be cleared up via extra speech tags, which I’m now able to delete. Honestly, the dialogue in this draft cleans up very nicely when I just correct the wrong assumptions I had before. 😛

The one writing-relevant experience I’ve had here so far is a visit to Totnes Castle, my first castle of this trip. It’s a Norman one, and now consists of a small, well-preserved round bailey which once held a wooden tower, all surrounded by modern reconstructions of the one-time castle walls. It was an interesting look at a sort of castle you don’t often see – more of a guard tower, really, without grandeur or living quarters. (There were living quarters inside the walls in a sort of tiny town, but no actual castle building in which people lived.) Helpful signs described how the site would have looked, including the fact that the building, like many castles, would have been whitewashed. People often overlook that, don’t they? Castles in fantasy fiction are rarely white – more commonly, they are plain stone. In a way, they resemble the ruins of castles that survive now more than the castles as they were when they were used. It’s as if people drew dinosaurs without skin because their fossils don’t have any.

Seeing the castle also made me think of one of the pitfalls of writing set in any past time period: underestimating the ability and drive of people to make lives for themselves. I don’t mean just to survive, but to make their lives comfortable and interesting. Think about cave paintings. The people who created them lived in terrible hardship and danger, but they still made an effort to created something more than just a continued existence. This is often neglected in medieval settings – in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a satire on generic fantasy, Diana Wynne Jones points out that peasants always live in “squalid huts,” being apparently unable to clean them. Obviously, some people work harder than others to improve their lives, people’s priorities differ, and some people are in such dire straits that they can do little more than survive. Still, it’s easy to look, as I did, at the rough, uneven stone floor of a ruined castle and wonder how people were ever comfortable here. Was this floor smooth and flat once, enough to walk on without tripping? More than that – it was very likely plastered. Maybe carpeted. Humans have a genius for altering our environment; a good thing for a writer to remember.

Beyond that, work continues on the grad school applications. I feel better than I ever have before about the beginning of Rabbit and Cougar, though, so I’m happy that I’ll be using that as my writing sample.

Crossing the Pond

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This entry is quite late, but in my defense, I and my two fellow travelers had to go from our homes to New York City, then to London, and are now in Exeter. Most of the writing I’ve been doing recently has been on my resume (“CV” over here), as we’re trying to find jobs for our six-month stay.

My biggest writing bonus here so far has probably been a long visit to the British Museum. Museums are fantastic sources for people who write in settings other than the here-and-now. Quite possibly, they are even better than graveyards.

Of course, one of the reasons the British Museum was great was to get a look at entirely different cultures, and just being here supplies some of that, too. Britain gives fantastic glimpses of the past, too. Towns contain random buildings that are older than the United States is as a country – not to mention the medieval walls, Roman baths, and so on. All excellent for someone who writes medieval-based fantasy.

Someone recently asked me why so many fantasy writers set their stories in medievalesque worlds. The simple answer, as far as I know, is as follows:

A. King Arthur mythos
B. Tolkien

Truly, fantasy writers tend to be fantasy readers, and a cycle has evolved in which those who will go on to write fantasy are heavily influenced by fantasy that takes place in medievalesque settings. There are advantages to writing this kind of fantasy. One of these, admittedly, seems to stem from the aforementioned cycle: Because it’s what they’re used to, it’s easy for readers to enter a world that isn’t Earth, but is like Earth five hundred to nine hundred years ago, or thereabouts. It’s easy to come up with powerful magic, because magic can be very strong just by doing things that are easily accomplished with modern technology, but cannot be done by nonmagical means in the medieval-type setting. Also, I think medieval times lend themselves to fantasy because so many people really believed in magic back then.

For me personally, it has largely to do with the toys. Assuming you’re writing human characters, people are people are people – human motivations and emotions have not fundamentally changed in the past few thousand years. Given that, why not choose a backdrop you like? I enjoy exploring the implications of a world with magic, several intelligent species, and no religions. I also like castles, horses, swords, precious metal coins, and having an excuse to call a shirt a “tunic.” 😛

That said, I do see great opportunities in terms of non-medieval fantasy. Dragons Over London was set in the modern world, and I’ll probably set things there again. At the moment, though, I have a lot to say and do with my fantasy world.