And believe me, there’s nothing more important than a satisfying climax (and nothing more unsatisfying than the lack thereof). Whether your POV character is victorious or dies horribly, there’s gotta be a payoff. And it’s gotta be good.
So on top of your cunning imagination, do your homework. If you’re inflicting damage, get the damage right. (Forensic pathology freaks will call you on it if you don’t, and they now number in the trillions.) If you’re utilizing traditional methods of destruction (guns, cars, bombs, bare knuckles, etc.), make sure you know how they actually work in violent practice.
When using monsters, of course, you have a little more leeway; but the more otherworldly your mythical creature is, the more it behooves you to ground its impact in the grittiest, most believable earthly terms.
I tend to open all my books with galvanizing action as a readerly incentive to keep on going. There’s something to be said for starting out with a bang, with a punch line that punches ’em right in the heart. Or face. Or soul. Or wherever I’m aiming.
But whether you’re that kind of roughhousing writer or not, these skills can always come in handy. (For the record, I treat just about everything—including dialogue—like action. It keeps the prose sharp and punchy, and therefore fun to write and read.)
EXERCISE
Construct a fight scene between two characters you know well. You can take two to three pages of buildup, just to get everything clear between them before the violence starts. (They can be friends, enemies, predators or prey, human or otherwise. Those dynamics are up to you.)
For the next two to three pages, write nothing but action. From the moment it starts, it does not stop until one or both of them is down.
Zero in on power words you feel in your gut. This is not the time to get cute or poetic, unless the poetry has real muscle and teeth. I recommend you alternate between short, staccato word bursts and flowing stream-of-violent-consciousness. In an exercise like this, it’s all about rhythm, impact, and momentum.
Bottom line, action is character. What we do in the clinch is what exposes us in motion. How brave. How competent. How terrified. How unprepared.
Whoever we are in that moment stands revealed.
Extra Bonus Tip: If you’re not a fighter yourself, make friends with some cool, smart people who are, and grill them on their strategic experience. If possible, get them to act your fight scene out for you, to demonstrate the flaws, and illustrate the more accurate realities.
Observe them closely. Ask questions. Take notes.
You’ll be glad you did.
And finally: Don’t forget to kiss ass! There is no substitute for genuine excitement. If you aren’t completely riveted, no one else will be either.
Now go have fun with your stupendous action scene!
PRACTICING YOUR CRAFT
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”
—ISAAC ASIMOV
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
What You Don’t Need
RAMSEY CAMPBELL is acknowledged in the Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer.” He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including Grand Master of the 1999 World Horror Convention. His novels include The Face That Must Die, Midnight Sun, The Darkest Part of the Woods, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, The Seven Days of Cain, and Ghosts Know. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, and Just Behind You.
I’m celebrating fifty years in print, which I hope means I’ve learned a few things worth knowing in that time (always compose at least the first sentence before sitting down to write; never be without a notebook or some other means of recording ideas as they suggest themselves; remember that however unsatisfactory your work may seem while being written, you can always rewrite . . .).
I write horror fiction, but I think some of what I’m going to say applies in a wider sense to writing generally. It’s more than just an exercise for me, though it’s simple enough: identifying an element I depend on and discovering what happens if I do without it. Here’s how it has worked for me:
I first saw publication by imitating H. P. Lovecraft, as other writers have (Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch, for instance). There’s no shame in learning your craft by imitation—great painters and composers did—but I’m afraid I chose the easiest things about Lovecraft to mimic, not least his prose at its most empurpled (whereas a great deal of his best work is sober and controlled). Before I’d finished writing a book in his tradition, however, I decided to write one tale in a style as unlike his as possible, using only neutral language—no evocative words and very few adjectives—and narrated mostly through dialogue, with only essential actions described. I have to say the tale (“The Will of Stanley Brooke”) betrays my youthfulness; at sixteen I hadn’t learned to observe people, and the characters sound like strays from an old country-house mystery. Sometimes you need to wait until you’re capable of doing your material justice.
At seventeen I read Lolita and fell in love with Nabokov’s savoring of language. He’s still an influence, but back then my style began to grow excessively baroque. Eventually, to counteract this I stripped it down again, applying much the same method that produced “The Will of Stanley Brooke.” The result (“The Stocking”) allowed me to concentrate on the interaction between the characters and clarified the prose. Let me suggest that the more stylistic modes you have at your disposal, the more eloquent your work may be. I find the naïve voice of a child narrator can convey unease very powerfully—a sense of the unsaid or misinterpreted. The greatest example in the genre is Arthur Machen’s The White People—seek it out and judge for yourself.
Most of my tales have a strong—I hope vivid—visual component; very often the words bring the sights alive for me. It did no harm for me to jettison it in a couple of cases: “Hearing Is Believing,” in which an uncanny invasion takes place purely on an aural level, and another story (forgive me if I don’t identify it to those who haven’t read it) where various images lead the reader to assume they’re being seen by the protagonist when that isn’t the case. Perhaps that’s more of a narrative conjuring trick (like, for another instance, a detective story told by the culprit) but some of those are worth attempting at least as a test of skill.
I ought to acknowledge that doing without isn’t always productive. Since the eighties I’ve refrained from plotting novels in advance; I prefer to let them grow organically in the writing once I’ve amassed enough material. The technique certainly paid off in a novella, Needing Ghosts, where I could hardly wait to go up to my desk every dawn to find out what I would write next. At the turn of the century however, I decided to find out what would happen if I worked out a plot before starting a novel. The result was the ramshackle Pact of the Fathers, quite possibly the worst constructed of my novels. Thank heaven (as always) for a good editor: Melissa Singer at Tor sent me an email several thousand words long that pointed out all the flaws. I put nearly all her advice into the rewrite and improved it in other ways of my own.
One piece of received wisdom is that horror fiction can’t succeed without sympathetic characters. I don’t agree, not least because I’d rather show the characters as clearly as I can without attempting to sell them to the reader. Admittedly most of my tales are based in character, but over the decades I’ve tested this tendency in various ways. “The Previous Tenant” leaves its central couple unnamed, and several stories I wrote in the mid-seventies address the protagonist directly in the second person (an echo of the confrontational narration of some of the old horror comics). A more recent story, “A Street Was Chosen,” takes the exercise I’m recommending in this little essay as far as it will go. Written as a scientific report in the passive voice, this account of an unspecified experiment reduces its human subjects to names and numbers.
Can it work as horror fic
tion? Yes, to judge by the reactions of the audiences who have heard me read it. They’ve laughed at the black jokes but become visibly involved with the fates of the characters, even though in conventional terms there aren’t any. Perhaps this proves a further point: Your attempts to do without an element should be made with suitable material—tales where the diminished technique is expressive.
And now this old man has droned on long enough.
EXERCISE
See what you can identify in your own work that you can lose for the duration of a tale. Might it be the influence of other writers, even possibly this one? Alternatively, if you’ve developed a strong voice of your own, might you try adopting a different one where it may be more eloquent? Or could you experiment with doing without sparseness of style if that’s already characteristic of your prose? There’s nothing wrong with taking risks in your work—they can make you more of a writer. Good luck! Just never do without writing!
DAVID BRIN
A Long and Lonely Road
DAVID BRIN is a New York Times best-selling author as well as a scientist and inventor. With books translated into twenty-five languages, he has won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and other awards. A film directed by Kevin Costner was based on his novel The Postman. Brin is also known for his Uplift series (Random House). His new novel from Tor Books is Existence.
Writing is about half skills that you can learn. The remaining fifty percent—as in all the arts—can only arise from something ineffable called talent. For example, it helps to have an ear for human dialogue. Or to perceive the quirky variations in human personality and to empathize with other types of people—including both victims and villains—well enough to portray their thoughts and motives. Sure, hard work and practice can compensate somewhat for areas of deficient talent, as in any realm of human endeavor. But only up to a point.
In other words, no matter how dedicated you are, success at writing may not be in the cards. Talents are gifts that we in this generation cannot yet manipulate or artificially expand. So don’t beat yourself up if you discover that part lacking. Keep searching till you find your gift.
All right then. Let’s assume you do have at least the minimum mix of talent, ambition, and will. Let me now offer a few tidbits of advice—pragmatic steps that might improve your chances of success, in speculative fiction or any other realm of writing.
1. The first ten pages of any work are crucial. They are what busy editors see when they rip open your envelope or click on your submission file—snatched irritably from a huge pile that came in that morning. Editors must decide in minutes, perhaps moments, whether you deserve closer attention than all the other aspiring authors in the day’s slush pile. If your first few pages sing out professionalism and skill—grabbing the reader with a vivid story right away—the editor may get excited. Even if the next chapter disappoints, she’ll at least write you a nice note.
Alas, she won’t even read those first ten pages if the one on top isn’t great! And that means the first paragraph has to be better still. And the opening line must be the best of all.
2. Don’t put a plot summary at the beginning. Plunge right into the story! Hook ’em with your characters. Then follow chapter one with a good outline.
3. There are at least a dozen elements needed in a good novel, from characterization and plot to ideas and empathy, to snappy dialogue and rapid scene setting, all the way to riveting action . . . and so on. I’ve seen writers who were great at half of these things, but horrid at the rest. Editors call these writers “tragic.” Sometimes they mutter about wishing to construct a Frankenstein author out of bits and pieces of several who just missed the cut because they had one or two glaring deficits.
Only rarely will an editor tell you about these lacks or faults. It’s up to you to find them. You can only do this by workshopping.
4. The only real difference between speculative or science fiction and all other genres is this: In addition to all the traits you need for good fiction in any other genre, you must also be able to supply two more: the same dedication to plot consistency and payoff that you get in murder mysteries . . . plus one more. Dedication to a sense of wonder toward some possible way the world might change. Some way that things might be different than the way they are. Hence, sci-fi is intrinsically harder than any other type of storytelling. Or, at least, it is harder to do really well.
5. Have you workshopped your creative efforts? Find a group of bright neo-writers who are at about your level of accomplishment and learn from the tough give-and-take that arises. Local workshops can be hard to find, but try asking at a bookstore that caters to the local writing crowd; they might start a list. Or take the creative writing course at your local community college. Teachers of such courses often know only a little. But there you will at least get to meet other local writers. If you “click” with a few, you can exchange numbers and form your own workshop after class ends.
Another advantage of taking a course—the weekly assignment. Say it’s ten pages. That weekly quota may provide an extra impetus, the discipline you need to keep producing. Ten pages a week for ten weeks? That’s a hundred pages, partner. Think about that. And of course, nowadays you can join a workshop online! Critters.org and Fanfiction.com are two highly rated sites.
While I recommend taking lots of writing classes, I do not advise being a creative writing major in school. That educational specialization offers no correlation with success or sales. A minor in writing is fine, but you’re better off studying some subject that has to do with civilization and the world. Moreover, by gaining experience in some worthy profession you’ll actually have something worth writing about.
6. Avoid over-using flowery language. Especially adjectives! This is a common snare for young writers who fool themselves into thinking that more is better, or that obscurity is proof of intelligence.
I used to tell my students they should justify every adjective they put in their works. Write spare descriptions, erring in favor of tight, terse prose, especially in a first draft. Your aim is to tell a story that people can’t put down! Later, when you’ve earned the right, you can add a few adjectival descriptions, like sprinkles on a cake. Make each one a deliberate professional choice, not a crutch.
7. Here’s a tough one. Learn control over point of view, or POV. This is one of the hardest aspects of writing to teach or to grasp. Some students never get it at all.
Through which set of eyes does the reader view the story? Is your POV omniscient? (The reader knows everything, including stuff the main character doesn’t.) Does the POV ride your character’s shoulder? (The reader sees what the character sees, but doesn’t share the character’s inner thoughts.)
Or is it somewhere in between? In most modern stories we tend to ride inside the character’s head, sharing his/her knowledge and surface thoughts, without either delving too deeply or learning things that the protagonist doesn’t know.
Decide which it will be. Then stick with your choice. Oh, and it’s generally best to limit point of view to one character at a time. Choose one person to be the POV character of each chapter—or the entire book. Establish point of view clearly and use it to assume things the character takes for granted, instead of telling and explaining things. The great master at this art was science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein. Whatever you think of his novels after chapter one, there is something magical about the first few pages, in which the reader becomes familiar with many strange things and situations by taking them for granted, the way a real character would.
8. Think people! As Kingsley Amis said:
“These cardboard spacemen aren’t enough
Nor alien monsters sketched in rough
Character’s the essential stuff.”
9. A final piece of advice: Beware the dangers of ego. For some, this manifests as a frantic need to see one’s self as great. Oh, it’s fine to believe in yourself. It takes some impudent ga
ll to claim that other people ought to pay to read your scribblings. By all means, stoke yourself enough to believe that.
But if you listen too much to the voice saying, Be great, BE GREAT! it’ll just get in your way. Worse, it can raise expectations that will turn any moderate degree of success into something bitter. I’ve seen this happen, too many times. A pity, when any success at all should bring you joy.
Others have the opposite problem . . . egos that too readily let themselves be quashed by all the fire-snorting fellows stomping around. These people tend (understandably) to keep their creativity more private. That makes it hard for them to seek critical feedback, the grist for self-improvement. At either extreme, ego can be more curse than blessing.
But if you keep it under control, you’ll be able to say, “I have some talents that I can develop. If I apply myself, I should be able to write stories that others may want to read! So give me a little room now. I’m closing the door and sitting down to write. I’ve earned this time, so don’t anyone bother me for an hour!”
Whatever you do, keep writing. Put passion into it! Make worlds.
EXERCISE
When puzzled over how to do something—dialogue for example—retype a favorite conversation that was written by a writer you admire. The same can hold for other elements of style, like setting, characterization, or that pesky point of view. Find a truly great example and tap it out on the keyboard, letter by letter.
Don’t shortcut by simply rereading the scene. You will notice far more by retyping than by looking. This is because a skilled writer is performing a “magical incantation”—using words to create feelings and sensations and impressions in the reader’s mind. If you simply reread a passage, especially one written by an expert, the incantation will take effect! You’ll feel, know, empathize, cry . . . and you will not pay close attention to how the author did it.
Now Write! Page 28