Over on Nathan Bransford’s blog he posed the question do you own your characters or do your characters own you? He says:

I … find it curious to hear authors so completely in thrall to their worlds and characters, and I start wondering, “Wait a second, who’s in charge here?”

Nathan Bransford - Do You Own Your Characters or Do Your Characters Own You?

The comments on Nathan’s blog could be divided into two camps. One camp is authors who seem to write their story based around plot, while the other (larger) camp writes character-based stories. Plot-based authors definitely control what their characters do and keep them on track if they stray. Character-based authors give their characters some degree of control.

As many of the commenters to the post said, if a character refuses to follow the storyline it is often a sign that something is wrong with the story.

I am very much a character-based person myself. Story always come second to character, particularly in the first draft. My characters do and say things I could never have envisaged when I start of the story.

It’s nice to know that so many people out there work the same way.

Earlier this month one of the agents at the Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency posted a thoughtful insight into the future of young adult novels.

Have you noticed … that the books propping up the industry (Twilight, Harry Potter, etc.) are YA crossovers? Not only do young readers read them, but adults do as well. Editors are now desperate to find … books they can market initially as YA that will attract the adult audience. Given that the last five years have brought about a trend toward more mature YA with older protagonists, what does that say?

Good-bye YA? by Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency

The author goes on to say that young adult literature hasn’t been around all that long. I would agree with that. I was born on the tail-end of the Baby Boomers and when I was a child the age group for children’s books went up to 9-14 and then you moved straight on to adult books.

According to the lecturer in children’s writing at Calder’s writing classes, young adult books now go up to around 26 years of age.

Calder says I often write young adult novels.  Roland in Shared Memories, for example, is 19 years of age. Tanner in Mathi’s Story—the novel I am currently working on—is 16.   The writing style is suited to young people as well.  Our writing ends up with a reading grade of 6 or 7.

And yet … the other protagonists in both Shared Memories and Mathi’s Story are older.  Kym, the other point-of-view character in Shared Memories, is the head of the local army. Jee Lim and Yashua, in Mathi’s Story, are both adults.

People have also commented on how suitable Not So Simple After All is for its young adult audience.  The point-of-view characters in Potion are a retired mercenary and a renowned sorcerer. Do they fit the young adult demographic?

All of these stories were written for an adult audience, not for a young adult audience.

Many would agree that young adults themselves find tagging a book as ‘young adult’ an automatic turn-off, and that if they know a book is a young adult novel they will not read it. I From my own experience I have found that the main group who purchase young adult books are my own peers—either for themselves to read, or as gifts for young adults.

If editors are seeking more and more crossover books that appeal to adults as well as young adults, then the logical conclusion is that the young adult novel is doomed, because if there is no dividing line then surely the novel is just a novel and, by default, an adult novel anyway.

I don’t think the young adult novel is doomed, but I do wonder if the trend is publishing is swinging back the other way.

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.

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.  

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.

In the first instance, we try to sell our novels to the American market.

Why would we do this when the Australian market for fantasy is so good at the moment?

The Australian market is extremely difficult to break into. I’m not saying it’s impossible—we’re still trying—but it’s a very small market. Once you have pitched to the small number of agents who accept submissions, and to the even smaller number of publishers who do, you have nothing left.

The US and UK markets are bigger. We chose the US market.

As Australian writers though, just how much should we change our work to suit the American market?

I’m not talking tone here, but the little things that are different between countries that may make an American reader go, ‘Huh?’. Or the spelling, or even the size of the paper we submit on.

In Barrain Melissa goes around to the boot of the car to get the backpack Scott takes on the hike with him.

If we pitch this story to US agents and publishers, should we make this a trunk?

What about spelling. Australian spelling favours English spelling rather than American. Colour rather than colour, grey rather than gray, and so on. Or as jeeagle-ga, one poster on the google answers site puts it, “gray is a color, grey is a colour”.

I also tend to favour ‘ise’ endings, rather than ‘ize’.

Even that paper size is a question. If I am trying to sell to a US market, how much do I damage my chances by using A4 paper?

I don’t know.

I don’t know how much difference any of these things make to trying to make a sale.

We don’t bother worrying about these things when we write. Before we submit something to the US market we run it through a US spell checker, but that’s about all we do.

If I found out that the paper size really harmed our chances, I might order in some letter size paper, but haven’t done so to date.

As for words like ‘trunk’. I’d probably leave them for the agent or editor to tell us to change before we touched them.

A fellow writing-workshop member introduced me to the Mary-Sue test.

A true Mary Sue is a surrogate for the author. But not just any surrogate… oh, no, far from it. MS is not merely a stand-in for the author. Instead, she is the embodiment of all that is true, good, and holy. She immediately wins the respect and affection of all the canonical characters, and, if the story is a romance, the undying love of whoever the writer has a crush on. She is brilliant. She is beautiful. Her hair is never out of place, even when she has a flowing mass of (fill in the blank) locks. Her career, interests, and personal beliefs are eerily similar to the author’s own. She always holds the key to the mystery. She knows how to work the computer. The slavering, vicious guard dogs curl up at her feet and gaze up affectionately. If she dies, she does so bravely and for the sake of others. In various science fiction fandoms, she occasionally saves the universe while she’s at it.
Eshva, Whatever Happened to Mary Sue, based on a definition by The Divine Adoratrice [whose link was broken when I tried to look up the original]

There’s a good entry on Mary-Sue’s in Wikipedia, and they even point you to some of the tests you can take to see whether your character is a Mary-Sue or not. My favourite is the Ponyland Express test.

One of the things about a Mary Sue is that no-one likes them.

I find it fascinating that a character the author loves so much is so intensely disliked by everyone else, particularly when these characters are based on the author him/herself.

Mary-Sues originated in fan fiction. Most of the reason no-one likes them is because they’re too perfect, and they take over the story to the detriment of other characters. Not a good thing when a fan goes in to read fiction about their favourite characters and this perfect (in every way) stranger takes over the story.

I took the Mary Sue test. My character was not a Mary-Sue, but I was warned that I had to care a little more for my character.