Self-Publishing Blog: C.S. Lakin

Link: Self-Publishing Blog: C.S. Lakin

Live Write Thrive is a thrice-weekly blog focused on self-publishing, cinematic technique in novelcraft, and the mechanics of writing. Very nice template, too. Maybe I should steal it...

Yes, novelcraft is a perfectly cromulent word. I used it, didn't I?

What do you think makes for better conditions for coming up with story elements - regular life (working, going to school, dealing with a variety of people you may or may not get along with), or isolation (i.e. not working full time so you can concentrate on writing; limiting your interactions with people, etc.)? Isolation and focus keeps out the distractions, but there may not be any inspiration coming in. Dealing with work, people, etc. presents some challenges and forces you to think.

First of all, sorry it took me a week to answer this. Hopefully the only post I’ve done lately is enough explanation.

The question brings a few things to mind. For one thing, I really, really wish I had started writing when I was working full-time, but not because it could have helped me come up with ideas. When you’re working intensively on a—let’s say, normal work project, you’re in problem-solving mode. At any moment you might have to come up with a creative idea to solve a problem that can’t wait for a customer who won’t wait. It’s like exercise, in that the work that tires you out also strengthens you to do more. When I started writing full-time about a year ago, I found it hard to get into that problem-solving, idea-generating “zone.” It took months and various self-trickery to find some semblance of it, and it comes and goes. So if I could go back and write part-time while working full-time, I definitely would.

But with regard to the specific question, which I’ll summarize as “do interactions with people generate story ideas better than solitary focus,” I will say that I think it depends on two things: you, and the type of story you’re writing. Let’s look at these one at a time, starting with the latter.

Reality TV became popular because someone decided that the drama in life, or at least in the lives of some people, was sufficient to hold an audience’s interest. Apparently a lot of people agreed, and the genre proliferated. I actually have a theory that the petty dramatic incidents people watch on TV these days tend to make them look for and create more conflict in their own lives. So, life imitating “art” which is imitating life. Whether or not this is true, if you were writing a story in, say, the realistic fiction genre, or teen romance, about ordinary people suffering and triumphing in ordinary situations, then I would say the answer is definitely yes: you’ll get ideas from life. In any case, there’s no reason not to carry around a notebook or learn where the voice recorder app is on your phone, to take notes about funny or otherwise interesting incidents that happen to or around you.

If you’re writing fantasy or sci-fi, real life doesn’t have nearly as much to offer. The kinds of action you find in those sorts of stories, such as chopping off arms or saving the kingdom for the ten-year-old princess, or finding some ancient artifact with the ability to rob humans of free will for metaphorical purposes, just doesn’t benefit as much from the specifics of real-life incidents. Some genres are on the border, like paranormal romance or magical realism. And obviously there’s a place for realism in any story, so if you’re not worried about anachronism, even the way that some couple you overhear in a cafe words their real-life dialogue may be useful.

Of course politics are politics, and you might conceivably be able to translate some middle manager’s grand scheme for sabotaging his rival and getting the promotion to head of the marketing campaign for paper towels, into an epic plot involving the fate of kingdoms (or planets). But I think in those sorts of cases you’d be better off reading history (not that I do, much).

With regard to the question of who you are, and why that matters, consider two people, an introvert and an extrovert. The introvert might overhear conversations at the office/restaurant/this very Starbucks I’m sitting in now, and get some ideas for specific conflict or some other aspect of a scene. But he’s more likely to be wearing headphones and tuning the others out, like I’m doing now in this very Starbucks. The extrovert, on the other hand, would probably know all the regulars, their kids’ names, the problems they’re having with their S.O.’s, and be as likely to go up and talk to them as overhear them. If you have the extrovert skill set, I’m guessing you’ll probably be good at mining gems out of conversations, whether you’re involved in them or not.

Of course, if you’re an extrovert, you probably have a suitcase full of stories in your head already and don’t need to hear them again to be able to synthesize new variations of them, which of course is what fiction is. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations…though, strangely, there’s nothing new under the sun. That sounds like a digression, but think about it. You’re a person like the rest; you’ve lived through thousands of life incidents; do you really need the specifics of the one at the next table? Of course, once in a while you do come across a gem, and clearly many such finds have found their way into books and screenplays throughout the centuries.

If you want to know how I come up with ideas, I’ll tell you. I was terrified about this issue when I first committed to starting the project. I wandered around for a month or more thinking of plot machinations and character motivations and trying to plan it all out so I wouldn’t fail in the writing phase. Maybe that works for some people, but it didn’t for me. I mean, I came up with characters and some scenes I wanted to write, but it was slow and discouraging.

One day I said, “this sucks,” and just started writing. After a couple of weeks of getting used to it, what I found was that ideas just flowed right out. And that became the primary reason for rule #1, which I’ve often talked about in this blog. Write Every Day. Just do it.

If you want to write about things that happened at work, great. If you don’t, you don’t have to. But don’t wait until you’re retired to write, because you’ll be wasting that juice you get from having to get up and fight the fight.

That’s what I think.

Self-Publishing Blog: Henry Mosquera

Link: Self-Publishing Blog: Henry Mosquera

Author Henry Mosquera's blog on RedRoom.com is a reliable fountain of writers' tips on a more or less weekly basis.

Priorities (or, Don't Hose It)

I haven’t been able to do much on the blog for the last week or so because I’ve actually been making decent progress on my 2nd draft. Got plenty of good resource links ready to post, but I want to be sure to balance those with enough original content.

I’ve got drafts of some decent article-style posts, and a question to answer in detail, so hopefully I can finish a couple of those over the next few evenings.

The moral of the story, I guess, is that when the river is flowing along…don’t hose it. Or in it. However that works.

Authorship Week at e-novelist.com

Link: Authorship Week at e-novelist.com

Next week is Authorship Week over at e-novelist.com. They'll be using popular social networking applications to host several virtual parties, each centered around a specific theme. The schedule is as follows:

• January 21
  "Pinspire Me!" Pinterest Party
  1pm to 7pm
   
• January 22
  "Breaking Your Writing Barriers" Twitter Party
  6pm to 7pm
   
• January 23
  "Authorship Marketing" Linkedin+ Party
  1pm to 7pm
  
  An evening with David Zelder7:30pm to 9:30pm
  (Note: this is a real event taking place in Derbyshire, United Kingdom.)
   
• January 24
  "Generating Ideas" Facebook Party
  1pm to 7pm

Describing Emotions in Fiction

Guest Post by Wil Forbis

In 1994, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio published Descartes' Error --- Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. The book was a conversational rumination on neuroscience; at its core was Damasio's assertion that human emotion is a sensory experience. It is felt in the skin and viscera, transmitted along the nerves that travel through the body and observed in various components of the brain. This might not sound like a revelation but Damasio was essentially discarding the belief --- held throughout much of human history --- that emotions are felt in some ethereal way by a nonmaterial human essence (what might be called a soul). Damasio's position is at odds with most religious thought and many romantic notions (including Descartes' famous dictum that the mind and body were separate) which have pervaded literature and philosophy for the past 200-300 years.

A reasonable question at this point is, "What does this have to do with novel writing?" After all, this is a blog dedicated to the art of creating fiction, not understanding the physiological processes that comprise human emotion. This is true enough, but describing emotion is a big part of fiction writing. Characters have emotional states, and often quite a bit of conflict is driven by these states. Ideally, an author doesn't want to just describe the emotional state of a character, he or she wants the reader to feel (at least in some small way) these emotions. And readers want to vicariously experience what a character experiences. That's part of the thrill of reading a book.

One way a writer can clarify a character's emotional state is to just lay it out. "Jan became angry." And that gets the job done well enough (provided the reader understands what anger is, and some will understand it better than others.) But I suggest that by providing some description of the physiological changes that occur when a character is experiencing a certain emotion, an author can write text that helps the reader really "feel" the emotion.

Now, am I saying that every time an author describes a character experiencing an emotion he or she should offer up a litany of physiological changes of the body, written in technical, medical jargon? Of course not. But some delicate application of these ideas, combined with good writing sense, can create more exciting prose.

The question then arises, "how does one become familiar with the physiological changes that are part of emotion?" The long answer involves a lot of reading; there are numerous books and online articles that get into this topic. Certainly Descartes' Error is a good, albeit dense, read on the subject. A little more approachable is The Emotional Brain by Jospeh LeDoux. For a look at one of the staple emotions of suspense writing, fear, I strongly recommend Fear Itself by Rush W. Dozier.

But there's a short answer as well. After all, we're all human beings (I presume) --- shouldn't we be able to observe our own emotional states? At times, it's harder than you think, because certain emotional states include changes that can impede observation (by affecting our speed of thought for example.) Nonetheless, by simply paying attention to your own body when you are experiencing emotions, you can come up with a lot of descriptive ammunition for writing. But what to pay attention to? Here are some suggestions.

• The Face
  Obviously, we often wear our emotions on our face. Merely describing a character's sense of their own expression can provide detail about their emotion. ("John felt his jaw clench in anger," "Upon hearing the good news, Tom felt his face relax," etc.) But we also experience emotion in our face in other ways. Embarrassment and anger often cause blood to rush to our heads, making us appear red-faced and feel a warmth on our skin (e.g. "hotheaded.") And let's not forget the appropriately named tension headache.
  
  
• The Viscera
  Gastrointestinal issues in the abdominal organs are well known indicators of stress, tension and repulsion. ("Upon seeing the ghostly visage of her dead mother-in-law, Jan felt sick to her stomach.") Few words can better convey simmering anxiety than some descriptive prose describing a character's churning or tight guts.
  
  Moving upward in the body we find a few more organs that can be indicative of person's emotional state. Some individuals will feel their lungs tighten during stress, even to such a degree that they pass out from lack of oxygen. (I recall being locked in a car trunk as a teenager --- on a dare --- and struggling for air.) And the heart is the organ most famously imbued in literature with an emotional character. In times of calm it beats with a steady relaxed beat. In times of stress it pounds on the walls of the chest with a frantic, arrhythmic cadence.
  
  
• The Muscles
  Tense muscles are almost synonymous with a tense emotional state. But I find that muscles can pass on information about other emotions as well. When I'm startled, I can feel a cascade of "tinglies" run down my chest or back muscles. When melancholy or anxious, I often find that muscles in my torso and arms have a dull ache to them, almost like the onset of a flu. On the flipside, extreme excitement can activate a body's fight or flight reaction, pumping muscles full of pain killing endorphins.
  
  
• The Brain
  The brain, of course, doesn't feel anything literally; it has no sensory nerves. But the speed of your mental processing is a component of emotional state. When tired, uninspired or even just comfortable, our thinking seems slow or dulled. When stressed or excited, our brain sharpens and we become aware of the details of our surroundings. (Of course, too much stress can lead to a sense of "detail overload" and an inability to focus.) Nailing down a character's mental and cognitive state on the page can do a lot to place a reader in the moment.

Keep in mind that what they person isn't feeling is also a good indicator of their emotional state. Noting that a character hanging by a thread over a pool of man-eating alligators hasn't even broken a sweat tells the reader quite a bit about that person's disposition.

None of this is inventing the wheel, of course. Descriptions of the physiological aspects of emotion have been around since fiction began. But I advocate greater awareness and study of these sensory changes, in the belief that doing so will lead to better, more immersive and more realistic writing.

Writers' Resources: AgentQuery Connect

Link: Writers' Resources: AgentQuery Connect

Described as the Online Social Networking Community for the Publishing Industry, this forum/blog is a resource center for writers looking for agents. Self-publishing stars and conservative contenders often find themselves looking for representation when considering the move to mainstream or blended distribution for their work. Evidently connected with the well-known agent search site www.AgentQuery.com, though I’m not at a stage where I’m researching this area in detail.

Self-Publishing Blog: Jane Friedman

Link: Self-Publishing Blog: Jane Friedman

Writing, reading, and publishing in the digital age is a long-running and sometimes highly personal blog that has evolved into a fairly technical running resource for later-stage writers. A reliable source of tips on publishing yourself and getting yourself published in general, with additional focus on promotion.

Living in the Past (or, the Benefits of Past Tense)

Last time I talked about the benefits of writing in present tense, as I’ve observed them in my own reading. Now I’d like to go into some of the down sides, which translate into benefits for past tense.

In my opinion, present tense is suitable for some types of stories much more than others. Personally I think it works best for action-oriented genre fiction like thrillers, urban fantasy, some mystery, and some sci-fi. When used in certain other genres, or certain examples of those listed above, it carries a cost that may be too high. For example:

• Historical fiction. If your primary goal is to put the reader into the action, present tense can work, but it’s pretty likely to result in undue anachronism. People speak differently in each era, and that means they think differently as well. If any genre is more suitable for past tense narration, this is the one, I would think.
• Epic fantasy or sci-fi. I’ve noticed that books like The Lord of the Rings and Dune have a sort of weight to them, as if the events being described were fateful and of great significance. Present tense clearly detracts from this by focusing more on the narrative perspective and less on the import of the events. I just don’t think Aragorn’s or Paul Atreides’ heroic actions would feel as weighty and pivotal if they were written in present tense, though they might carry a little more excitement for modern-minded readers.

There are other down sides to present tense. I can’t list any particular book(s) I’ve seen these problems in, because the author would have no choice but to write around them, but from the perspective of a writer making the decision of which tense to write in, they’re clearly considerations:

• “Little did he know…” is right out. Dustin Hoffman in Stranger than Fiction pointed out the major implications of this construct. Of course, “little did he know” also carries a second issue, suggesting an omniscient narrator, which is a separate topic I brought up recently in another blog entry. But even diluted versions are unavailable in present tense: e.g., “It was only years later that she would realize the man her mother introduced as ‘Uncle Frank’ wasn’t an uncle at all.”
• Present tense makes it much more problematic to temporally rearrange chapters, a la Pulp Fiction or Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. Jumping around in time is awkward to begin with, and the troubles this technique brings are compounded by the sense that in present tense writing, like in life, there’s the sense that events happening now are becoming the past before our eyes. With past tense, it’s less of an issue because everything past is past—it’s only a matter of degree.
• Perhaps the most subtle issue with present tense derives from its primary power. This one is tricky, and maybe I’m imagining it, but bear with me. In my own experiments, I’ve come to believe that present tense can be so effective at bringing the reader into the action that it can serve to pave over mediocre writing. Early on in my own project, I wrote a first draft-level chapter in past tense, then let it sit for a few months. At that time I picked it up and translated it to present tense. The difference in the feel was remarkable. Here was a piece of writing that I knew was not even remotely tuned, and missing quite a bit of texture, and with far from perfect pacing. Reading it in present tense, these flaws were far less noticeable to me—and I knew where the issues were, or some of them at least. This experience was almost enough to convince me that if I do want my book to end up in present tense, I should write it in past tense, tune the hell out of it, and then undertake the painful translation to present tense.

In my own situation, I’ve got a whole first draft in past tense. I chose past tense because I view the genre of the book as epic fantasy, or more accurately, epic urban fantasy. On the other hand, the book contains quite a bit of physical action, and I really like present tense for that.

It’s a tough dilemma, and I don’t have the answer for my own project yet. I guess I’ll write the second draft in past tense and decide then whether to translate it to present tense. If I were writing a shorter form novel like, say, more typical episodic urban fantasy like the Cincinnati Hollows or Dresden Files series, I would very likely choose present tense. But as things stand for my current project…it’s still very much up in the air.

In the Moment (or, the Benefits to Present Tense)

One of the last decisions I need to make, regarding the second draft I’m about to begin, has to do with tense. Not tension, though there’s plenty of that. In this case, tense is a noun, not an adjective, and I need to choose one.

More and more books seem to be written in present tense these days. I read 3-4 books a week, and while past tense still seems to be more common, books written in present are no longer a tiny minority. I don’t think this will ever become a stylistic mandate, like omniscient narration gave way to non-omniscient viewpoint. But I think it’s been used often enough that we can make some observations about its effects.

So what’s the difference? Let’s compare some examples.

George walked over to the body. He drew a pencil from his pocket and used it to pry the mouth open. Without any warning whatsoever, an alien larva leaped out and bored its way into his brain. He was dead in seconds.

versus

George walks over to the body. He draws a pencil from his pocket and uses it to pry the mouth open. He sees motion there, behind the tongue. There’s no warning, no time even to flinch. It’s already in the air. He catches a glimpse of the creature as it dives at his face. The pain was indescribable, but mercifully brief.

There are other stylistic differences between these two examples, and that’s part of the point - something happening right now is more of an experience, whereas something that happened in the past is, fundamentally, a retelling of a little piece of history.

I’ve observed a handful of benefits to present tense as a storytelling form:

• It puts the reader right into the action. There’s a sense that these events are happening now. It’s almost too easy to make action exciting…and I’ll talk about the flip side later.
• There’s a sense that every event is a surprise. As in real life, the future is unknown. In past tense form, it’s never quite clear how long ago these events happened, and whether they are in any relevant to the present.
• When combined with first-person perspective, past tense generally promises the survival of the protagonist. Present tense makes no such guarantee. Some books and movies have famously exploited this assumption by violating it, e.g. American Beauty, but it always seems awkward to me. The suggestion that the protagonist will survive—and by extension, win the conflict/succeed in the quest—brings subtle but far-reaching consequences to the story and reading experience. I find it very hard to fear for a protagonist when I know, deep down and with conviction, that not only is she going to win, she’s already won. Because this is the future, and we’re already there.

These are pretty compelling reasons to consider present tense. But there are downsides as well, and I’ll go into them next.