Author Paul S. Kemp follows a simple rule: “I always weave threads into my current novel with an eye toward expanding them in a later book, should the opportunity arise. These are tangential notes/characters—just little plot seeds—about which/whom I’ve got ideas for expanding the story.”
Regardless of whether or not your story demands a sequel, Lou Anders further cautions against resting too long before starting on the next project. “You really risk your career when you take more than a year between books now, at least before you are established, and in this media-centric world of near-infinity choice, where many publishers (Pyr included) are experimenting with publishing books in a series in consecutive months, waiting more than a year for book two is going to cost you eyeballs. Because plenty of shiny objects are going to intrude between now and then. Finish the book, type ‘The end,’ and then open a new file and start the next one right away!”
And be ready to change direction on a dime if your editor asks for something new.
CHAPTER 8
LEARN HOW TO WRITE
I promised I wouldn’t spend too much time on the nuts and bolts of writing—grammar, punctuation, usage, that kind of stuff—but would keep my eye on the real purpose of this book, advice for the aspiring science fiction and fantasy author. Watch my blog (http://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com) for more dos and don’ts on the craft of writing. Like just about everyone who’s ever taken seriously the idea of writing for a living, you’ll have to wade through multiple sources for the best advice on the craft. But the stakes are high. According to author John Betancourt, “Aspiring authors not only have to write well, but they have to write better than their competitors—in this case, authors who are currently publishing. So the bar is raised with every generation.”
Even then, as bestselling author Paul S. Kemp says, “No one masters writing. It cannot be done. But if you thoughtfully analyze your own work, read widely (especially outside of genre), take what you can of value from accomplished authors, you’ll improve. And that’s all you can ever do.”
There might be thousands of books on the craft of writing, and many of them are good. I’ll recommend a few specifically on my blog from time to time, but look on your own. Flip through books, scan tables of contents, and consider feedback you’ve received from others. For instance, if you’ve been told that your writing is “passive,” or you have a tendency to use comma splices, look up those terms in particular and learn what you’re doing, study how to do it differently, and experiment with ways to improve your writing.
SOME LITERARY TERMS
As you look through advice on writing, you’re probably going to come across the following terms.
Voice
Every author, every novel, should sound unique. What makes your novel different from mine, and mine different from Terry Brooks’s, and Terry’s different from Lord Dunsany’s—and so on—is an ethereal concept we call “voice.” This is the turn of phrase, the rhythm of writing, the presentation of ideas that makes your writing entirely your own. No one can teach that. You can’t even teach it to yourself. It just happens, and the more you try to force it the more obviously forced, the less natural, it will become, and your writing will suffer.
Place
Without a well-considered sense of place your characters are wandering through a gray void, talking to each other like characters in a cheap one-act off-Broadway play. No offense to cheap one-act off-Broadway plays—they have a brilliance all their own—but you’re writing a novel (or a short story) and so have an unlimited “budget” for set design or location shooting. Your story can take place anywhere. Fantasy should take place in fantastic surroundings and science fiction should be set in a richly realized future—surroundings that become characters in themselves.
J. M. McDermott, critically acclaimed author of the novel Last Dragon, feels that “a sense of place is more than just where a table is standing, or whether the walls are blue or orange. Sense of place is really about a sense of meaning felt about the place. That can come from the physical reality of the space. Even better is when the sense of place comes from the meaning that the space has for the characters.”
None of this means you should spend tortuous page after page dutifully recording the measurements of every room, listing the materials used in its construction, reporting the temperature in both Fahrenheit and Centigrade, and so on. It means that your characters have to have a place to live in that’s at least as alive as they are.
“A sense of place is much harder to convey if there is no touchstone from our own world,” says Terry Brooks. “If the place is imaginary, the writer has to work much harder to permit the reader to connect. Use all five senses to draw the reader in. Find something unusual for the important places, something the reader will easily remember. Use place to set mood. Remember that place in a fantasy story is always a character.”
As you write, include as many of the five senses as possible:
Sight. If your characters walk into a room, what does the room look like? This could include all sorts of detail: “The walls were the color of summer leaves” (a fancy way of saying green) “and the floor was tiled in exquisitely veined marble mined from the Frostbite Crags by Hillgrumble miners of the Floorington Clan ….” Ask yourself: What is this room and why is the scene taking place there? Maybe it’s the emperor’s throne room. Is the emperor an ostentatious man? If so, the room is probably really big and richly decorated. Is the emperor a no-nonsense former general, so the room is Spartan and austere? Maybe both: “The emperor, a no-nonsense former general, seemed out of place in the richly decorated, cavernous throne room built by his ostentatious predecessor.”
Think about what the place is used for and what significance it has to the scene as well as the characters. Know who lives or works there, and design accordingly. Remember, it can look however you want it to look, from a simple drawing room sparsely furnished in Amish hardwoods to a room bigger than any room in the real world, in which millions of people have gathered to hang on the emperor’s every word.
Smell. What would a room filled with millions of people smell like? “Despite the seemingly endless throngs of petitioners, drawn from all corners of the empire, the room smelled of jingle flowers, the empress’s favorite, perfectly balanced, never overpowering, just enough to remind every living soul there of the presence of their queen.” So now the smell tells us something about the people who exist in that place, and not just that they’re all sweaty.
Feel. Rooms aren’t necessarily rough or smooth, but they can be cold or hot, right? And maybe the walls are rough. Why would that matter? “When the emperor pushed the disobedient courtier against the wall, the razorlike stucco cut into the back of his head deeply enough that he felt hot blood trickle down the back of his neck.” This tells us that the emperor is not to be messed with, and the room carries that vibe as well.
Sound. “The roar of millions of voices was deafening, but when the trumpets blared to announce the prince’s arrival, a hush descended over the gathering as though a heavy curtain had been drawn around those assembled.” Places don’t necessarily have a sound, but the people and things inside them do. How does sound echo in that space? If the scene is taking place outside, are there crickets? Something like crickets but an animal or strange chirping plant of your own creation? What does that sound tell the reader about the place? Those trumpets interrupting millions of conversations could mean that the people are afraid of the prince. Or does it mean they love the prince and can’t wait to hear what he has to say?
Taste. This one is hard. Rooms don’t usually have a taste, but could the air have one? Is there a smell so thick—either pleasant or unpleasant—that the characters can actually taste it? Is the room full of water—saltwater or stagnant, or perfumed? You may have to skip this one, and let four of the five senses convey a sense of place, but don’t pass without thinking about it first!
Point of View
Some authors tell me they write in “th
ird person omniscient,” which they take to mean that the unseen, unnamed narrator somehow knows something the characters don’t. To my mind there is no difference between “third person omniscient” and “third person lazy.” In any one scene, choose one character and get into his or her (or its!) head and stay there until you decide you need to switch to someone else’s head. If it makes sense to end the chapter there, do so. Otherwise, a scene break is fine. But limit those point-of-view (POV) shifts so you aren’t stopping your readers every few paragraphs.
“I don’t like shifting POV unless there is a clear break in scene and setting and even time,” Terry Brooks told me. “I like chapters to mostly stick with one character and one POV. It isn’t that you can’t manage to juggle multiple POVs. It’s more that sticking with one lends the chapter consistency and cohesion. Too much jumping around tends to break down the reader’s connection with the characters.”
PRACTICE MAKES BETTER
In a famous joke, a guy asks a bellhop in New York City how to get to Carnegie Hall. The bellhop answers, “Practice, practice, practice.” Write a lot, keep thinking about what you’re doing, take it seriously, and you’ll get better.
But even with all that practice there’s as much to the art and craft of writing that can’t be learned as there is that can. “Great writing has a certain magical energy that elevates it above the mundane,” says literary agent Ethan Ellenberg. “It’s very hard to be good if you don’t have that.”
Practice can make you a better writer, but in the final analysis it comes down to talent, a gift, whatever you call it. In the immortal words of Gypsy’s Mama Rose, “Either you got it, or you ain’t.”
TO SUM UP
Storytelling is hard, but it means everything. You can learn some basics, but mostly it comes from within, refined with practice.
Though a log line—the twenty-five word description of your novel—can feel contrived, it can be useful in keeping your eye on the heart of your story. Consider starting the log line with the words “What if?”
Look for inspiration in myth and legend, current events, history, your own life, or the work of other authors, but look behind the news clipping for the fundamental conflict or question beneath it. Even the most broadly realized sword and sorcery adventure novel should have something to say. Some of your hardest work will come from balancing truth and fiction, style and substance. Start thinking about those five universal truths, and come up with at least five more of your own.
Plot is all about the point at which the villain’s plans and the hero’s plans collide, and both find new trajectories. The geometry, like the nature and identities of the hero and villain, is entirely up to you.
Choose the length of your story with care. In the current publishing climate, I recommend a stand-alone novel with series potential over anything written to be part of a trilogy or longer series—but do yourself a favor and sprinkle in plot hooks for future stories. You never know.
Study the craft of writing, and keep writing until you find your voice. To establish a sense of place, think carefully about the “whys” of the place: Why is it there? Why is it the setting for this scene? Then tell us only what we need to know to give the action context, appealing to as many of the five senses as possible.
And one scene, one POV, every single time.
* * *
STEP TWO | CHARACTERS
“All great stories, whatever the genre, begin with great characters.”
—LOU ANDERS
Fiction has always been, continues to be, and always will be about someone doing something. In the last section we talked about ideas and plots, which is essentially what the character is doing. I put it in that order, but you don’t have to. You can—maybe even should—start with an idea for a character then think about what you want him or her (or it!) to do, and why.
In this section I’ll continue to use the words hero and villain, but with the same caveat as before: the villain doesn’t have to be what video game writer Jess Lebow calls “a mustache-twirling, cape-wearing hooligan who runs around trying to tie women to the train tracks.” The villain could be a blizzard, a meteor, or someone who thinks he’s a hero. And the hero can be someone who’d rather not go on an adventure at all, like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. The hero can even start out as the villain, like Vin Diesel as Riddick in the movie Pitch Black. And, of course, both hero and villain can be either gender, and like Bilbo, doesn’t even have to be human. Likewise, play with what it means to be a hero or a villain, and challenge your readers to think about how your characters fit into those categories.
J. M. McDermott hopes “to get to a point, in fantasy fiction, where there is neither a hero nor a villain. I hope we get to the point where there are just people, doing the best they can with what they have, and building or destroying the world around them and the people around them as part of the things that make those characters who they are.”
CHAPTER 9
ASK, AND ANSWER, QUESTIONS
What makes a character “compelling”? Start by making him (or her, or it—assume for the rest of the book that I don’t believe any sort of character has to be either gender, or human, even if all I say is “he” or “him”) as fully realized a person as you can muster. Don’t just start writing, spend some time thinking. Jot down notes, but don’t be afraid to scratch them out and replace them with better ideas. Not all of your notes will make it into the book, but the more you know about your characters—villain and hero alike—the more life those characters will have on the page.
Don’t even name your characters yet. We’ll talk later about language and naming conventions, which you should consider before you settle on names, so for now in your notes, use placeholders like HERO, VILLAIN, LOVE INTEREST, FOIL, WISE MAN, and so on.
Author J. M. McDermott finds inspiration for characters from people he knows in real life. “To me, art is a celebration of being human among humans, and a way to make sense of the whole, messy affair. I often quietly steal my friends and close relations for stories—though you’d likely never know if I didn’t tell you. For instance ‘Fest Fasen’ [a character in his critically acclaimed first novel Last Dragon] was loosely based on my friend Ben Fasenfest. Ben was definitely not anything like the character Fest Fasen in age or action or goals, but Ben was a way to start thinking about the character. Starting with that core of someone I felt like I knew gave me the Claymation skeleton upon which I could pile exceptionally thick layers of clay.”
Here are the six questions anyone should start with when first thinking about a character. These questions aren’t unlike the basic approach that journalists take when they sit down to write a story.
1. Who is the character? Consider the possibilities. He’s the second son of a noble family who’s forced into the priesthood of a faith he doesn’t believe in. Or She’s an alien disguised as a human woman who fears she may be the last of her species to survive the Black Hole Wars.
2. Where did he come from? Keeping with the previous examples: He’s the second son of a noble family from the fringes of the empire who’s forced into the priesthood of a faith he doesn’t believe in, because his creepy uncle is a high priest. So now we know this is a small-town boy with family connections he’s not happy about. She’s an alien disguised as a human woman, a stranger from a distant planet, wandering lost in a human moon settlement, who fears she may be the last of her species to survive the Black Hole Wars.
The answer to this question doesn’t have to be geographical. Where does he come from—spiritually? Maybe he comes from a fringe political group.
3. What is he doing? This is the A of his A-B line before he intersects with the villain (if he’s a hero) or with the hero (if he’s a villain). He’s the second son of a noble family from the fringes of the empire who’s forced into the priesthood of a faith he doesn’t believe in, because his creepy uncle is a high priest. He plans to escape the church, but may have to bring down both his uncle and his father to do it. Now he has
a plan, which already conflicts with someone else’s plans.
She’s an alien disguised as a human woman, a stranger from a distant planet, wandering lost in a human moon settlement, who fears she may be the last of her species to survive the Black Hole Wars. But the computer implanted in her brain provides the genetic coding to repopulate her homeworld. She’s come to the moon to find a rare element that will guarantee the success of the mass cloning, an element the moon colony was built to protect. That sounds like a difficult mission, which is good. Easily accomplished missions rarely make for interesting stories.
4. Why is he doing it? “Why not?” or “If he doesn’t, there’s no story” are never good enough answers. If that’s all you can come up with, then for goodness sake, don’t start writing. One of the clearest signs of an inexperienced author is a weak eye toward character motivation. Why a character does anything is critical. Spend days on this one alone. Try to debunk a character’s motivations. Keep thinking, keep asking questions, until you can’t think of anything else to ask. And that’s not when you’re done, it’s when you start.
The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 4