Writing about Reading about Writing

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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.

On Throwing Characters Under the Wheels of Plot

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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.

Slightly Off-Topic

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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.

Sad News

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Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series, just passed away at age seventy-one.

The Redwall series was a big deal to me as a kid and teenager. It was the first set of books I liked so much that I was willing to throw down my money (which was pretty scarce before I got old enough to babysit) for any one of them without having read it first. Even now, I own most of the series, my copies in various states of well-loved scruffiness.

Most of my copies are the paperbacks – small, fat books, quite distinctive to my eye. I can still pick out a Redwall book from a distance. Which is not to say that they’re interchangeable to me. Far from it.

Among the fuzzy-edged paperbacks on my shelf of Redwall books stands my copy of Mossflower, the first book I ever bought in hardcover. I was extremely proud of it. A hardcover book cost a lot of weeks of allowance!

Then there’s Mattimeo, a favorite of mine, which I was always bringing to school, only to hit one of those points where I had to stuff it into my backpack to continue reading at home because I knew I was coming up on one of the parts where I always cried.

Once I did get old enough to babysit, Pearls of Lutra was, for some reason, my go-to book for when I’d be staying past a kid’s bedtime and needed something to do until the parents came home. I also made myself a t-shirt quoting the poem at the beginning of the book. And I wore it. In public.

With Salamandastron, I formed a connection between the book and, of all things, Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal. I don’t normally snack on cereal, reserving it for breakfast, but I would eat these sugar bombs in the middle of the afternoon while reading Salamandastron. (I have one particularly golden memory of sitting at our kitchen table at maybe 2:00, a time when ordinarily I’d have no reason to be sitting at the kitchen table, and eating Peanut Butter Puffs while reading Salamandastron, taking a pause to think that wow, life was good.) After awhile, either of the two would make me crave the other. Even now, a glimpse of that badger on the cover takes me back to the taste of a sucrosey excuse for a cereal that I haven’t had in at least ten years.

My parents used Redwall books to bribe me to break my hair-twirling habit. (Didn’t stick long-term, but I made it work long enough to get the books.)

I learned new words from the Redwall series. “Stygian” was one I was proud of. Also “desultory.” And in eighth grade, when my Latin I teacher told our class jokingly that we were getting so good that soon we’d “know the Latin for right and left!”, I surprised both of us by guessing the words based on a reference a Redwall book. (And that’s not even getting into everything I learned about siege warfare.)

I loaned my copies out to friends in high school, got my brother and his friends reading them, and gasped over a friend’s sister’s copy that was *fans self* signed by the author.

In the winter of 2008-2009, living in England with friends, I hit up the library for the newest Redwall books – the only two I didn’t have – and read them.

Which is all just to say that, you know, books make a difference to people.

Thanks for all the good times, Mr. Jacques. You’ll be missed.

Unexpected Development!

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Well, I’m still not actually participating in NaNoWriMo, largely because this development came a few days late and it is HARD to catch up on word count, but I was broadsided a few days ago by the need to work on a new project. This project combines a storyline I’d been tossing around for a year or so and a format I’m excited about.

I’ve kept a journal since 1996, and have often doodled in it to record what something looked like, or illustrate a sarcastic point, or show how I imagine something. I also once wrote a story in my sketchbook, with words and pictures together. These were always fun, but I didn’t take them seriously, and assumed no one else would, either.

Enter The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

When I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I filed away the interesting knowledge that hey, people besides me actually like this format. And I love it. I’ve seen these called “semi-graphic novels.” As with graphic novels, one key point is that the pictures are not just illustrations – they’re involved with the text. In these diary-style books, the conceit that the first-person protagonist actually drew the pictures is a powerful way to strengthen the connection between character and reader: “I’m not just going to tell you about this, I’m going to show you.”

(Also, pictures are fun.)

So I was happy to see that this kind of project was actually, you know, publishable, but I didn’t think much more about it until a few days ago, when that plot I’d been playing with tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Um, I could do that,” shortly followed by, “YOU WILL WRITE ME NOW.”

So that’s what I’m working on at the moment. It is more fun than should really be legal.

In closing, another fun thing combining books and comic-style graphics.

Happy Birthday, DWJ!

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Diana Wynne Jones is seventy-six today! Huzzah!

In honor of the occasion, and because at any rate People Should Know, I thought I’d point out that there is a YA Fantasy Showdown going on. DWJ is the only author who had two characters in the first round; they’re on the second round now, and one character (see my LJ icon) is still in the running. Go Howl!

I’m also pretty pleased with how most of the other fights are going, though – despite my love for Hermione – Christopher Chant should totally have won there.+ It is, as some have said, a bit of a popularity contest.

Of the first round of sixteen matches, only two were between characters of whose books I had read both. The other one – Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games) versus Tally Youngblood (Uglies) – brought to mind an interesting point about how most books work.

*Mild spoilers of the Uglies trilogy*

I like Katniss as a character more than I like Tally, and, while I rather enjoyed the Uglies trilogy, I like The Hunger Games much more. Thus, I wanted to vote for Katniss.

On the other hand, the match specified that it was using the Tally of Specials (the last book of the trilogy) – a Tally who has been genetically modified with reinforced bones and muscles, ludicrously enhanced senses, and a body full of self-repair nanos. She’s basically Wolverine. And Katniss is a sixteen-year-old with a bow.

I was torn. But then I asked myself: what do protagonists – especially YA protagonists – do? Do they wipe the floor with far weaker teenaged opponents? Or do they beat seemingly insurmountable odds?

The person who wrote the battle between the two may have had similar thoughts, because Katniss won the “possible outcome” battle. She also won my vote and, eventually, that round’s fight.

Of course, there’s a lot of interesting stuff to be said about crossover battles and what has to be true in whose world.

+Unless possibly Hermione found out beforehand about his weakness to silver. But that would involve, you know, research. What are the odds of that?

Booktalk Flier!

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As I think I’ve mentioned before, I will be heading home this weekend to do a booktalk on Saturday the 10th at the Open House of the new library. This is most exciting. And what do exciting things get? FLIERS.

(Well, okay, not all exciting things have fliers. They should. Although I suppose it could end up being an issue with paper waste.)

So, I did a drawing today which is on the fliers. Woo!

(Click to make it bigger, though still not as big as it is on the Flier to End All Fliers.)

This is totally what I look like in my head. Although, strictly speaking, my eyes are not larger than than the lenses of my glasses.

The books shown are two of the ones I’ll be booktalking. Who can guess which they are? (If you know me, then I suspect the one on the right won’t be hard.)

I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but I made the actual flier in Word. The handout I’ll have at the booktalk, which contains more pictures (though they aren’t drawings) was also made in Word. I still love my Mac with a True Love That Will Never Die, but am beginning to be a bit disenchanted with AppleWorks. Strange, because graphics programs are the very reason my family has Macs – my artist parents have always used them, and they just sort of carried over into family use. But I tried making the handout in AppleWorks first, and it was not happy times.

On the other hand, I still like AppleWorks for writing, despite the fact that my Information Tools class has shown me some neat stuff Word can do for which I can’t seem to find a good parallel in AppleWorks. The main thing is that I appreciate how, unlike some Microsoft composition programs I could (re)mention, AppleWorks does not constantly try to autoformat everything. It doesn’t assume it knows better than I do. Theoretically, I should be able to turn off this aspect of Word, but I think this may be a myth. I’ve never been able to find a way to turn off the autoformat stuff in Word. I imagine that if I did find one, the program would resist. “I wouldn’t do that, Dave.”