In a previous article, Developing the science fiction reading skillset, I talked about an article written by Jo Walton over at Tor.com. The article was on SF reading protocols and how science fiction readers develop a skillset to read science fiction.

In the same article Jo also covered the opposite of this. The mindset (or skillset if you like) that literary readers bring to their reading. The expectation that if it’s written it must have some form of metaphor associated with it.

Calder, my writing partner, is part-way through a writing course. Last year she completed a subject called Myths and Symbols. One thing her lecturer kept telling the class was that ‘all stories have hidden symbolism’. I disagreed with this because I know that when I write—and I think Calder would probably say the same about her writing—I am definitely not trying for symbols. I am telling a story, and it’s not usually a story fraught with symbolism, it’s a story about a person or persons and what happens to them. But … according to the lecturer symbology is always there, even if you the author don’t know that you are writing it in.

While I agree that themes do creep into some stories—and sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes it’s subconscious—I do not, consciously or sub-consciously, lace my stories with the type of symbolism the lecturer was talking about. If my main character wears a red dress it does not mean she is a slut or a sinful woman, which is one of the commonly accepted symbologies associated with a red dress. Nor does it automatically mean she that she is strong and fiery, another commonly accepted symbol. If I say, in my book that she liked the colour, or that she wore it because her (now-deceased) husband said it suited her then that’s why she’s wearing it.

Jo has some good points to make about how literary readers expect a story to have symbolism and metaphors; that they go looking for them, even when they are not there.

Over at Tor.com Jo Walton has an interesting article on SF reading protocols and how regular readers of science fiction know how to read without getting hung up on the detail that’s not important. She uses the example of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and how you don’t need to know what a tachyon drive is to enjoy the novel, you just need to know that it allows you to travel faster than light and what impact that has for the story.

One of the things that I find when non-SF readers read any of our stories is that they always want more detail. They always want to know more backstory.

I used to think that maybe we do jump into a story too quickly sometimes. In Not So Simple After All (aka Potion), for example, we start the story when our adventurers start their journey together, not when they first meet their prospective boss. We had quite a few people say they would like to see how the characters are offered the job and how they decide to take the work. We tried to write earlier chapters showing Blade bored and unhappy at his school for fighters and River coming to the school to offer him the job, but it was boring and didn’t add anything to the story except that the reader had to read at least two more chapters before they got into the story proper. So we cut them again.

I think now that what these people—many of them non-regular SFF readers—really wanted was for us to make a world that they understood at the start, rather than have that world unfold for them as they read.

I have always been a reader who is happy to learn things as the book goes on. Myself, I call it a willing suspension of disbelief. Provided the author is telling a good tale and has empathetic characters I’m happy to go along with his/her story and let the facts settle in throughout the story. I don’t need to understand everything straight away.

Jo Walton calls this the SF reading skillset.

This is the second in a (very) occasional series of common writing mistakes made by unpublished writers. (Note, I am not a published writer, but I do write, and I do read.)

This is one I know I am guilty of myself and I’ve read quite a few published novels that do exactly the same thing. Especially first novels. It’s the rushed ending.

It goes like this. You’re reading a novel. You love the characters, you’re caught up in the storyline, you’re really enjoying the book. Then you get around 80% through and suddenly the whole thing goes off the rails. The end whizzes up on you so fast that you’re left going, “Huh? How did they get from there to here?”, and sometimes, “I don’t get what just happened here?”

Then, instead of going back to the author and being able to say, “This was a great story, I’d read anything you wrote,” you have to spend two days trying to work out what went wrong, and how.

We’ve analysed our own writing and for us it comes down to two things:

• We just want to finish the book. We’re so close, and we’ve been working on it for so long and we can see that we’re nearly there so we just go and go and go. And when we’re done we’re finished. We don’t go back and edit because we’re drained. And we’re finished. There’s no more to do. We don’t want to touch it until the next draft. Besides, we have other ideas percolating and we want to do them now.
• As we write we re-write. When you starting writing for the day you re-read what you wrote the day before (usually) and fix any problems. We also regularly go back over the whole story, re-reading, fixing things. Thus the first part of the book gets a lot more rewrites than the second.

  (Logically this means that the first part of the book should be better than the anything else, but usually it isn’t. My theory as to why not is because it takes time to get onto a roll. When’re you’re around 20-30,000 words into the book you’re into the story and into the habit of writing, so the writing from there on flows much better.)

There’s an easy way to fix this. Drafts. Drafts 2 and 3 (for us) are where we attempt to fix up that hurried ending, where we expand it and explain what we knew in our minds but forgot to tell the reader first time round because we were in such a hurry. But it takes time and distance for us to even admit that the ending doesn’t work. If we wrote our next drafts immediately after we wrote the first one I’m not sure we would see that as clearly.

I’m juggling so many unfinished manuscripts at the moment I’m starting to wonder how I going to do it. Guess which one suffers. Barrain of course, because it’s more in the line of a blogging hobby than serious writing.

I have:

• Shared Memories—science fiction, 120,000 words, now into it’s third draft. There’s lots of feedback and notes from Calder’s last read but it’s up to me to do the next major revision. The opening is still weak and the end needs considerable work but I’d say we’re 80% there.

  The writing style on this is a little different to our other stories. On a recent re-read I noticed a lot more commas, and sentences that I would normally either split or join with an and. I haven’t quite decided whether it works or whether the story just needs a really good line edit.All through the second draft I’ve been trying to write a query for it but it’s just hopeless. Everything I write is just icky.

• Mathi’s Story—fantasy. This is my NaNoWriMo novel and I’m really pleased at how this has come along, particularly given that I was writing fast (for me) on a story that didn’t get a lot of editing. It’s still only 55,000 words (I have written around 2,000 words since November). I think this story will end up around 80,000 words.

  I don’t know what happens in the main storyline yet, but I know my subconscious is working on it. Every couple of days another little piece of the puzzle drops into place. The subplots just wrote themselves.This is the first novel where I’m happy with the start. I think, when I have finished, the start will be almost exactly as I wrote it, sans a few line edits.

• One Man’s Treasure—science fiction, 80,000 words. The first draft is completed, and Calder has done a first read-through. I was up to adding feedback to her edits when NaNoWriMo got in the way.

  I haven’t read this one for a couple of months now, so I can’t say how much work draft two will take, and I can’t even recall how much work it will be to fix. There are the usual problems for our writing—the start needs fixing, and the last quarter of the book needs work, but otherwise it’s okay, I think.

• Barrain—fantasy. And, of course, there’s Barrain. The story that started this blog and the story that keeps getting pushed to one side when all the other writing interferes.

  We’re up to 41,000 words on Barrain. Even though the version we posted on the website is 5,000 words less the next draft I’d like to post is the full draft 3, completed (around 80,000 words, I think) although that looks like being a while away yet. When we’re done with draft 3 I imagine that for this story it will be the equivalent of a draft 1 for any other story we have written.

As I said, lots to juggle, lots to do. In all, though, 2009 was a productive year for me, and for the writing team of Calder and me, and I’m looking forward to having a couple of stories we can attempt to market by mid-2010.

Fight scenes are not my thing.

I’m a conversation writer. I can do repartee with the best of them, and Calder puts emotion and actions around it. So when our characters talk it’s a reasonable mix of talking versus description (we think anyway). Get them into a fight, however, and it’s a different story. We’re both hopeless at that.

Late last year we put Potion up on Authonomy*. Or rather, I convinced Calder that she should put it up and do all the work promoting it and monitoring other people’s stories, which she did under our planned pen-name, Rowan Dai.

We got some excellent feedback which helped us improve the story a lot. One particular criticism that came up again and again was that the fight scene didn’t work. The thing was, we knew that we had glossed over it, but until so many people pointed out the same thing we—I won’t say we couldn’t see it as a major problem, because we knew it was—but we ignored it, and sort of hoped it would go away.

As all writers know, bad writing doesn’t go away. You have to fix it. We worked at it, and worked at it, and worked at it.

It took a lot of work just to get from:

“Hieyah,” Van Wallah yelled, and he charged the elf.

Blade jumped across, grabbed Van Wallah’s vest.

Van Wallah tried to wriggle free. Couldn’t. “Get him, men,” he ordered, and while Tegan watched, horrified, his men converged on Alun.

River charged forward to save him, but two of Van Wallah’s men jumped River.

Blade clubbed Van Wallah with the hilt of his sword. Tegan heard the crack. The bandit went down. Blade then grabbed a stool and bounded into the fight. Summer was close behind.

Katarina hesitated, looking around for somewhere to put her wine. Finally she handed it to Tegan and joined the fight. Tegan put the wine on the window ledge and started gathering a spell.

Her friend had turned into an impressive fighter. Showy too, not like Blade and Alun, who dispatched two men each while Katarina fought hers. River and Summer fought one each as well, but not as easily. Tegan’s holding spell kept another four on the edge until a blast of hatred distorted the spell and they converged on the elf.

She rebuilt the spell and Blade picked them off one by one.

A quick fight. Less than two minutes …

Potion (Not So Simple After All) by Rowan Dai Draft 3

to:

“Hieyah,” Van Wallah yelled, and he charged the elf.

Blade jumped across, grabbed Van Wallah’s vest.

Van Wallah tried to wriggle free. Couldn’t. “Get him, men,” he ordered, and while Tegan watched, horrified, his men converged on Alun.

River charged forward to save him, but two of Van Wallah’s men jumped River.

Blade clubbed Van Wallah with the hilt of his sword. Tegan heard the crack. The bandit went down. Blade then grabbed a stool and bounded into the fight. Summer was close behind.

Alun scrambled out from under the huddle of Van Wallah’s men and jumped at the two men attacking River. He dragged them off, raised a fist to one, who went down. Another fist.

Another man down.

The huddle of men suddenly realised Alun was no longer there. They turned to find him.

Katarina hesitated, looking around for somewhere to put her wine. Finally she handed it to Tegan and joined the fight. Tegan put the wine on the window ledge.

Her friend had turned into an impressive fighter. Showy too.

What spell could she use? If she was alone and was attacked she would use fire or fear, but if she used them here they would work against her own side. Maybe a holding spell, but it would have to work on individuals. She started forming the words.

Katarina used her long legs as weapons. She fought dirty too. Tegan winced at one kick.

One of Van Wallah’s men pulled out a sword.

Tegan didn’t think. It was instinctive to call the weapon to her. All the other swords came too and Tegan dived under the bench as they rattled down where she had been sitting.
The man whose sword it was lunged for it. Tegan gabbled a quick holding spell. He froze mid-lunge.

Blade clubbed another man with his stool. The man went down. Beside another Tegan hadn’t seen fall. Blade clubbed another. The stool broke. He tossed the stool away and followed through with his fists.

Tegan crawled out from under the bench, started composing her spell again.

Another two men were down over where Alun was fighting.

Blade hit another hard enough to push him back. Tegan’s holding spell caught him.

“Behind you,” Tegan said, as another man attacked him from behind. She’d lost track of the others.

Blade dropped low, and pulled the attacker over his shoulders. The man went crashing into the pile of swords.

One man was down near Katarina, who was fighting another. River and Summer fought one each as well, but not as easily. Tegan’s holding spell kept another four on the edge until a blast of hatred distorted the spell and they converged on the elf.

Tegan pulled the spell back into place and Blade finished them off two-by-two, by cracking their heads together.

A quick fight. Less than two minutes …

Potion (Not So Simple After All) by Rowan Dai, Draft 5

Obviously, we still have a long way to go to fix up our fight scene. But after we changed even this much we noticed one thing. In the critiques that followed, no-one commented that the fight scene needed fixing.

 

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*I have seen a lot of writers ask about the value of Authonomy and lots of different answers from “It’s a sales job” to “absolutely brilliant” to “absolutely useless”. I’m definitely in the camp that says don’t expect to get published through it, but if you use it properly and work at it then it’s a great critique group. It helps not just with improving your own novel but also with seeing mistakes other people make. Analysing other writers’ work can really help you pinpoint the same mistakes in your own.  

Well, we did it. NaNoWriMo.

50,000 words (in Calder’s case, 60,000) of two novels that have some promise.

Both of us did it easier than we expected.  It was mostly a case of bums-on-seats and don’t talk to anyone until we had finished our allocated words. Due to other commitments on the first weekend we both got behind.  Calder took a little over a week to catch up, and I took most of the month but, even so, it wasn’t too hard. If we were writing full-time we figure we could both manage 50,000 words a month on a first draft without any stress.

This is the first time we have ever done any real writing together that wasn’t on the same manuscript. Our writing styles turn out to be quite similar in that neither of us do much planning, we let the story take us where we want to go and let our subconscious work on it when we’re not at the keyboard. (Although I have to say my consciousness was not as sub as Calder’s. I did envision scenarios more rather than just let the whole story percolate the way she did.)

Calder turned out to be a much faster writer than me, which surprised both of us.  I don’t know why, but we both expected me to be the one to waltz through the process with ease. It physically takes me longer to write the same amount of words.

I got one story out of it which I like a lot, although it’s nowhere near finished at 50,000 words. Calder got a story which she’s busy revising now, plus she also got an idea for a second story (which I love) which she’s writing in between polishing bits of her NaNo novel.

All up, it’s been fun and tremendously productive.

It’s a long-standing joke that Fantasy writers make up names for characters. If you look on the internet you can find a dozen fantasy name generators. Nowadays almost every how-to on writing fantasy nowadays warns you not to do this, and books like Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide To Fantasyland poke fun at the names people create.

A weird array of names in your story is generally the sign of an amateur.

Because of this, I have always been very conscious of naming my characters. Early in the piece I, too, made my names up. Then I realised that it was a ‘bad thing’ and started using names from nature. Like River, and Blade. (In some people’s eyes this is another ‘very bad thing’, but when it’s done properly I love it. Robin Hobb does it well with Dutiful and Swift and Web and all the others.) Even so, you can really only use this method in a small number of books—unless you’re writing a series, that is.

One thing I have always done is trawled the baby name books. I love them.

For a time there I tried to theme my names. In one story it would be Celtic names, so I’d choose Rhiannon and Grainne, say. In the next I’d use Scandinavian names, Axel and Britta.

No matter how I chose my names, I tried to keep within what I would call the current accepted practise for naming fantasy characters

• If you do make up names, make sure they’re pronounceable
• Don’t have too many weird and way-out names in the same book
• Don’t have too many names that sound similar
• Don’t give all your main protagonists names that start with the same letter
• Don’t mix your language of origin. For example, if you choose Greek-based names then all your characters should have Greek-based names.

It’s this last point I have some issues with.

Recently I’ve had a bit of an epiphany with names.

• The last couple of books have been science fiction and in these I tried to make the names modern, not too way out, but still a little science-fictiony. I have thought a lot about how names might change over four of five hundred years.Names go in cycles. According to Behind the Name the top five boys names in the US today are Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua and Daniel. The top five girls names are Emma, Isabella, Emily, Madison and Ava. In the 1950s it was James, Michael, Robert, John and David, and Mary, Linda, Patricia, Susan and Deborah.
   
  I know that when I went to school a name like Emily or Jacob was considered old-fashioned. We felt sorry for the poor kids saddled with such ‘old’ names. Recently I was speaking to a younger man (late teens or early twenties) and he was trying to guess my name and my sister’s name, just based on the initials. His first guesses were wide of the mark. “You’re a generation out,” I said. “Go back a generation before.” Interestingly enough, he then got both names on first try.So if I was choosing a name for a science fiction character I should probably think of old-fashioned names first and make a modernised take on that, rather than choosing a name that is currently trendy.
   
• I look at the phone list at work sometimes and I would love to use some of those names for my characters. Yet if I did—whether it be for science fiction or fantasy—many readers and critics would think it a hodgepodge of names. We’ve got English names, we’ve got Russian names, we’ve got Indian names, we’ve got Asian names. All mixed together in one glorious mix of people. Sangeeta sits next to Simon who sits next to Yu who sits close to Evgenyia.
   
• Choosing names based on a particular language or civilisation makes sense, but only up to a point. It makes for a cohesive story world, yes, but it also binds you into a pre-defined place in fantasy. Your readers expect it too. If I see names like Grainne and Rhiannon and Caitlin and Bree I am expecting a world based around Irish/Celtic myth. If I see Demi and Leonidas I’m expecting a world based on Greek mythology.
   
  Maybe that works for you. For me, I don’t want people to come to my fantasy with expectations of what it’s about. I don’t want people to come to my stories already knowing the background. I want them to find a whole new world that they haven’t seen before.

So I have decided. It’s back to just picking names I like, no matter what the name’s origins. If the name sounds interesting and fits my character, I’m going to use it. And if I end up with a phone list of names from all eras and all parts of the world, I’ll be happy, even if it does make me look like a rank amateur.

 

November is nearly here and that means NaNoWriMo.

Write a novel in a month. 50,000 words. It’s a big job.

For the last few years work deadlines have stopped me entering NaNoWriMo. November for my company is always a busy month as major projects go live then, trying to get them out the door before everything slows down for the summer break. We spend long hours at work, working weekends and late into the night if necessary.

This year August, September and October have been hectic, but November looks to be quietening down. I may be able to fit in a novel.

I’m going to try, anyway.

Calder’s going to do it too. She also starts a new job in November.

I suspect we’ll both be highly stressed and hardly have time to talk about our other works in progress, including Barrain, which is coming along fine, although this draft will not be finished before November.

And to all you other Wrimos out there—may the words come swiftly, may the plot unfold without effort and may your writing time be plentiful. Chookas.

I have writers’ block with Barrain right now. I’ve gone through the first 35,000 words and done a major tidy up of what’s there (until the next draft). Now I’m onto new work, and I am procrastinating. I can’t seem to get started.

My solution.

Skip the next 10-20,000 words and leave them for Calder. That’s one of the beauties of writing with a partner.

I don’t normally leave such a big chunk of writing for her when I’m writing the first draft (or in this case the third). She’s a macro and micro-type person, fixing overall problems (plot holes, continuity) or otherwise getting right down to paragraphs and words. But I am stuck, and I need to move forward.

Who knows, we may find that we didn’t need those words anyway.

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p.s. Where to put the apostrophe in writers’ block elicited good discussion in this writing household, and we’re still not sure. 

So it’s back to Barrain after a long time away.

37,000 words so far and this is what we call draft 3, although by our usual standards it’s more like an earlier draft.

The first thing to do is read what we have so far. I wince at the start—our starts are always bad—and read on, fixing up typos and cleaning up as I go.

One thing that strikes me reading on is how like One Man’s Treasure it is. (One Man’s Treasure is the workshop novel I have just finished a draft of.) The main character promises to find another character’s killer (or presumed killer).

In Barrain it’s:

I will get your killer, Mathers silently promised Caid. You saved my life once, it’s the least I can do for yours.

While in One Man’s Treasure it’s:

I will find who did this and …

Hmmm. Problems already. I’ll leave that for the moment and let it percolate. It may fix itself as the story goes on. Right now I have other things to fix.

Like birdwatching. The whole kick-off point for this story is dated. No-one uses ‘bird-watching’ any more to talk about guys looking at women. And even the birders don’t do bird-watching any more. They go birding. We may have to re-write the start. It’s a pity, because I’m quite attached to the start. (A sure sign we should ditch it.) Even Calder’s okay with the bit where we introduce Scott.

I can see a huge plot hole already. Why didn’t Kraa send Taliah in to save Caid? I know where the story is going, and I know that Kraa wants Caid, not just the crystal. A dead Caid would set Kraa’s plans back 20 years. But he just sits there and watches Franz and Jacob try to kill him.

Not only that, I’m only up to chapter four and there are typos and omitted words everywhere.

Chapter five is one big info dump.

Many of the secondary characters are stereotypes (as are some of the main characters). And so on.

It’s lovely to be able to see just how bad the writing is and what needs to be fixed. The time away has given me good distance. Unfortunately, the story is only half written. If we were up to a genuine third or fourth draft here it would be perfect, because we can see the flaws so clearly.

Up to chapter 11 now. I’m reading faster and noticing less errors. I should either stop and come back to it at another time, or the story is genuinely getting better. I can’t tell which, so I stop reading for the day.