Are elves really past it? Are they just stereotypes now? Cardboard cut-outs with no personality that no-one bothers to make human any more? (If I can call elves human, that is.)

Sherwood Smith, over at Oached Pish, posted an article on the Glamor of Elves.

Tolkien’s Elves were fairly benign, but the elves in many of the derivative fantasies that followed on don’t look all that different from what we could imagine finding in a world a thousand years after a Nazi victory: the horrors at the start are long forgotten, but now there is a master race. Unfair?

Unfair . . . or kinda boring? Does anyone else feel their heart sinking when Elves show up in a story? Especially elves with glowing eyes? Or is the current crop of urban fantasy with the super-pretty, utterly amoral elves still got appeal outside of YA? 
Bittercon: The Glamor of Elves, Sherwood Smith (sartorias), 16 February 2008.

A lot of us still like elves, and I’m one of them, although we all agree that there are a lot of stereotypes. One of the posted replies (by Anna Wing) stated:

… Tolkien’s Eldar are fascinating because they allow all sorts of interesting cod-anthropological speculation about what a society of indefinitely longaeval people would actually be like. Bearing in mind that Tolkien himself said that his elves were the artistic and scientific aspects of human beings taken a bit further…

She got me thinking about elves in the context of my own aging. I am what they politely call ‘middle-aged’ now, and the upper limit of middle age seems to be increasing roughly in line with my own age. I know I have changed since my youth, and I don’t want to go back there, even though it had lots of advantages. So if we take how I have changed over time and extrapolate it further, might that be a valid basis for an elf?

So how have I changed?

I don’t do things on impulse any more

In my early twenties, and even into my thirties I would pack up and go without a moment’s thought. Think about taking off for the weekend, no sooner thought than done. I changed jobs and homes on whim. And as for holidays, nothing was ever planned. We got got in the car and drove.

I don’t do that any more. Everything is considered before I do it.

What does this mean for the elves? They’ll take ages to decide to do something.

I am more financially secure

I still have a mortgage but as the years go by the debt burden becomes less and less. I look forward to the day when I will be debt-free. I am also making money from investments. Eventually I expect that I won’t have to work to pay the bills at all, and if I don’t want to work I won’t have to, but I can if I want some companionship, or to stretch my mind.

For the elves: They won’t have any debts. They will have an assured income. They will have shelter, presumably a home of some sort.

I’m not climbing the corporate ladder and I don’t live for work

I choose work now that interests me, not on how it will improve my chances of promotion. If I don’t like it, I look for another job.

Work is only part of my life, and not the most important. I have family, I have my writing, I have other things to do. Sure, I work hard while I’m at work, but it’s not my whole life any more. I’m through with these places that ask you to work until midnight every night and all weekend.

For the elves: They will only choose work they enjoy, and a lot of that will be creative or stretch the mind.

I am way, way less ’self’ conscious

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Bookends, LLC Jessica Faust talks about writing what you know in the context of writing in the genre you know.

As Jessica says, she

“… regularly receive(s) submissions from authors who tell me sheepishly that in a different time in life they were reading such-and-such genre and thought that they could easily write that genre.”
Writing What You Know, Jessica Faust

She later goes on to talk about attending a writing conference where everyone seemed to be working on their memoirs, even though few of them read memoirs.   

I’m no saint. Back in my early 20s. I decided to write a romance. After all, how hard was it? Anyone could write romance, and I had all my mother’s old Mills and Boons I had devoured as a teenager.

Like most people, I stopped about five chapters in.

It has been a lot of years and hundreds of thousands of words since that first abortive romance. Most of those words have been science fiction, fantasy or mystery—the genres I read for pleasure.

Having finished (although still not published) a number of novels now, I cannot imagine even trying to write something I wouldn’t read myself. It takes a long time to write a novel, and there are a lot of rewrites involved. To spend that much time working on something I didn’t even like is mind-boggling. I doubt I could do it.

Writing is supposed to be enjoyable, not torture.

Do you ever find yourself taking on the mannerisms and habits of characters in the novel you are currently reading?

Yesterday I found myself biting the side of my thumbnail. It’s not something I normally do. I admit, I occasionally bite off a bit of broken nail if there is no emery board or scissors handy, but that’s as far as it goes—and never on the side of my thumb, where the flesh meets the nail. Bite too hard there and you break the flesh, ending up with a very sore nail.

Most habits are sub-conscious. You don’t know it’s a habit until someone else points it out (and then you don’t believe them anyway). But I noticed this one and couldn’t work out when it had started.

Later that day I picked up the novel I was part-way through reading. A few paragraphs into the chapter the protagonist’s friend starts biting his nail, on the side, at the base of this thumb. And then I noticed I was biting the nail at the side of of my thumb too.

Mystery solved.

I have finished the book now, so hopefully this is one habit I won’t keep up. (Except, as I write this, guess what I was doing.)

I’m a bit of a chameleon that way. While I read a book I will often take on characteristics mentioned in the story.

Although I do remember one point-of-view character doing a lot of shoulder rolling—I was quite flexible after reading that book—most of the time the characteristics I pick up are those of secondary characters, rather than the main character’s. After all, the protagonist doesn’t think, “Oh, I’m biting my nails again. I’d better stop it.” Or not in the books I read, anyway.  It’s more like, “I wish she would stop biting the side of her nail like that,” or “She’s biting the side of her nail again. What’s got her so worried?”

Another thing I notice is that I don’t take bad guy habits—unless I like the bad guy, of course. I usually take the habits of the protagonist’s friends, often the people I like best in the story.

I don’t know whether I retain the habits after I finish the book, although they definitely linger for a week or two, depending on how strong an impression the character made on me.

I’ll have to check and see whether I am still biting the side of my nail in another month.

My writing partner, Calder, and I both have different writing styles.

I would characterise her style as humorous, light and somewhat distant. She’s an easy read, and puts more description and more emotion into her stories. I am a little heavier—but still by no means heavy—with lots of dialogue but not much extraneous description. What description I do include is mostly about what the point-of-view character sees and feels. There is definitely less emotion.

Obviously, combining these styles gives us the best of both.

Added to this, neither of us is heavy on internal monologues. We both use the same type of language, simpler rather than dense. When we write we simply let the words flow and what comes out at the end needs editing to make it work.

Although we have written together for so long, we both have different things that need fixing in our first drafts. If I had to pick one thing for each of us I would say the for Calder it’s cliches. Her writing is full of them. For me it’s unlikeable characters.

Calder starts with good characters but her first drafts include a lot of unnecessary phrases. To use a really bad, made-up example, she would write something like, “And then they were gone, like puffs of dust on the wind,” when all she needs to say is, “And then they were gone.” Editing these is easy.

My problems are not so easy to fix. Often, when I do the first drafts, my characters are miserable, self-centred and downright unlikeable. Definitely not someone you would want to spend an entire book with.

Maybe it’s a reflection of my own personality. I hope not. The characters are generally wimps, and spend the whole book feeling sorry for themselves.

The thing is, I can’t see how bad they are until someone else points it out. Even then, it takes a lot of convincing and two or three more drafts before we have something we both like.

The end result depends on whether it’s something we are writing together or something that we are writing on our own. If it’s our own, we restrict our edits and comments to necessary changes (or what we think is necessary, at least). If we are writing a piece together, ideas come into the mix too, and we inject our own ideas into the other person’s writing. Once we do that we end up with a style that is neither one nor the other, but is generally something we are both happy with.

My little pep-talk of the other day seems to have done me some good. I’m getting back into Barrain, slowly, but steadily.

At present I am I am going back, rewriting earlier bits so that I can continue with the story in its new form. One of the reasons I got stuck is because we didn’t know why. We didn’t know why Kraa was after Caid, we didn’t know why Caid was so important, we didn’t know how Scott was going to get back home, or even why Kraa would be chasing him once he got there. Now we do.

Calder and I talk about the novel, but this work is mine. She can’t do much until I have finished the draft.

You may think it strange that we don’t know important things like this well into the third draft of the story, but that’s how it works for us. And we’re not alone. After all, if it took M. Night Shyamalan five drafts in Sixth Sense to realise his protagonist was dead, and another five to tidy it up we’re up there with some of the best.

People who outline cannot imagine how we work. “All that extra rewriting you have to do.” But it works for us. It’s a bit like carving a piece of wood. You start off with a nice looking piece of timber (the idea), and you have a rough idea of what the end result will look like, but then you come to a knot, and have to carve around that, so your design changes, and then you see that with the changes you have made because of that knot then the design can be made better by changing it, and because you have made those changes you can see other changes, and so on. Until finally, you have your finished carving (novel) and it’s nothing like the original log of wood, or even what you first imagined it would be.