Tag Archives: writing advice

April 18, 2015 by

I Rock at the Shock: Sex and Storytelling

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Sex—passionate, hot. I know this because it’s burned me before. I’ve been in many a passionate, heated debate about it over the years. Sex and storytelling—do they belong together? Well let’s dive in; I haven’t been burned by the subject in a good two weeks. I’m overdue.

This recent debate was with an indie author who has been teaching me a lot about indie publishing…primarily respect and greater understanding. This writer was talking about a sex scene she intended to put into a book. I made the mistake of saying, “Be sure it belongs in the story.” Oh my, that did it!

Now, I will confess that I got something of a reputation in my writer’s groups over the years past as a prude. I often attacked sex scenes vehemently. What they didn’t know is that I love a good sex scene. Make it dark and problematic, and I love it all the more. But writers’ groups are often a mix of talent of beginning, intermediate, and, if you’re lucky, advanced writers come together to experiment and learn. For me, this translated into most manuscript sex scenes I saw were not good. The reason they weren’t good was because they were put in for the wrong reason. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a writer defend a sex scene by saying, “but sex sells!”

Good writing and storytelling sell better. So good sex in books needs to be good storytelling as well. The reason I like dark and problematic sex scenes is all tied up in the word problematic. Problems generate story. Generally, the manuscript sex scenes I saw didn’t.

Another argument I’ve heard from many writers is  “but it’s my story.” True, it is your story, and I’ve heard this defense in one form or another for years. I may have even said it early on. Today I answer that with this retort: yes, but it’s my money and my time you want from me and all of your potential readers. Stories that you write for yourself and without consideration for a reader are what I call high-risk manuscripts. These manuscripts run the risk of being more therapy than story. Once upon a time, we had a gal  join our writer’s group and waltz in proclaiming proudly that she had a 10,000 page manuscript. Someone in the group piped up, “you mean 10,000 words, right?” Nope. She didn’t. The group actually groaned (and not the good fun kind of groan). She was something of a traumatized individual, and she was quite obviously to me (though not to herself) working her issues out in her stories.

First, let me say, that’s great. If you can save on counseling sessions by writing 10,000 pages, go forth and do—but, don’t torture me with it. Therapy is not the same thing as viable commercial storytelling. You have an obligation as a writer who joins a writers group or gives your manuscript to a friend or sends one in to a publisher to consider the reader.

You remember the reader, yes? The person you want to come up with money to pay for your story? Once you decide to pass on your story, it is no longer yours. If you are a writer, you’ve heard people say that, but think about it for a moment. A story in a reader’s hands is not yours. Your book has not been shrink-wrapped with a free copy of the author included in every sale. What I mean by this is that you do not get to dictate a relationship for your reader to your work. You can only cajole a reader’s cooperation and enjoyment of your book through your skill. Once it passes on, the reader makes the rules for relating to your book. And you have a lot competing with your book when it is open in your reader’s hands in this hectic world.

Back to the sex (because well, we always want to come back to that, right?). The next argument raised in the discussion was realism: “Sex is part of everyone’s life in some fashion or another. Why can’t characters just have sex? You wouldn’t throw out a bar scene just because it was a bar scene.” She almost got me on this one because it is two different points.

First, sex thrown in for real life’s sake: if it furthers your character development, promotes plot, or establishes a point in your story, then do so. Maybe a middle aged housewife is having her regular Friday night sex and just doesn’t feel it anymore. That ennui is now part of where the story is going. Then average ordinary everyday sex is appropriate.

Second, for a moment, I thought maybe she was right about the bar, maybe I’m just hard on sex scenes…then I realized, what am I saying? Am I going soft in the head? Of course I’d be down on a bar scene that didn’t further the goals or address the needs of a story. In fact, I’d just dealt with exactly that question in my own writing. I had a tavern across the street from an inn where my protagonist was hiding, then the antagonist gets close but is drawn off to the tavern at the last minute. As one of the my writer’s group so succinctly put it: “Squirrel!”

So I axed that tavern and used the tavern I’d already mentioned in the inn, and when the antagonist goes into it, he is getting closer to the protagonist, not farther. I had an extra unneeded bar in my story, and I axed it. Although I’m focusing on the sex question here,  this advice is true for any scene or element. They all have to pull their weight in your story.

But she was right about one thing, I probably pay more attention to sex scenes, but I have a reason. Sex is actually a very powerful tool in the writer’s toolbox. It resonates in some way with us all. It annoys me and throws me out of the story to see sex turned into something light and unimportant when in fact, it should be a story driver. Sex. Money. Power—these three things drive the world. Scandals in the real world always revolve around one or more of these three issues. So sex is one of your big guns.

So what do you do? Do you never write a sex scene? Of course not. Here is a bell weather test to try. Ask yourself then a trusted reader this question: How would the story change without the sex scene? If you don’t have a good clear strong story-driven answer, then maybe it doesn’t belong. And if you do have a clear reason, set it up right. Take your time. Remember that tool in your writer’s toolbox called foreshadowing. Don’t bring that big gun out (in either figurative sense) until the time is right, until you’ve covered a good deal of story real estate with groundwork and building sexual tension. Make me want the culmination, the consummation of reader and story, for a long time. Make me want it as much as or maybe even more than the characters do. Foreplay, my dear writers, it’s as important in writing about sex as it is in sex itself.

Title is from a W. H. Auden poem. Picture is available at AliExpress.

 

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March 25, 2015 by

The Truth is Stranger…

By Ralph Kern

I had the privilege of meeting Ralph when Tickety Boo Press hired me to edit his already Amazon bestselling book, Endeavour, for a rerelease. He was a pleasure to work with and to read, and if you have the opportunity to do either, I suggest you take it!

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Endeavor has been compared to A.C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End & is currently on three Amazon Top-100 lists.

That the truth is stranger than fiction is an old adage, a cliché even, yet one I have found to hold water. In my ‘day’ job, I’m a police sergeant. I run a team of fifteen officers and have been doing the job for the best part of ten years. Whenever I meet new people, they generally ask some version of “What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen?”

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Very early on in my career, having ruined several friends’ and families’ meals in restaurants with an honest answer to that question, I realized that what they’re actually asking is “What’s the most PG13 grossest thing you’ve ever seen?” or even better, I just give them some amusing anecdote involving the dubious, and sometimes downright perplexing, behavior of people on the lower end of the social spectrum. As for the weird stuff—well sometimes I struggle to believe my own memory about what I’ve seen people get up to, let alone having to listen to someone else tell a story about it. Basically, people don’t want the truth…they want a sanitized version of events.

This brings me neatly onto the thrust of this post. Several years ago, I started writing. No particular reason for it other than a New Year’s resolution. I had a story idea and basically thought “why not?” So I started laying down my novel, Endeavour, which is a sci-fi piece bearing no relation to my career.

While that was ticking away though, I decided to try my hand at a number of short stories, partly to get my skills and drills up to scratch and partly because, as many writers undoubtedly find, a change is as good as a rest sometimes; writing shorts can be a constructive break from tapping away on your main work.

One of these short stories involved a pair of cops driving to a job. Now, to add a bit of context, I’m a member of an online SF/F community where critiques can be posted, and I thought I’d put up some sections for feedback. I hadn’t told anyone I was a police officer.

Anyway, back to my two cops. They get their next job over the radio, so one of them pulls out his phone (when the screen lights up, it shows a picture of his family) and puts in the address, bemoaning the fact that he only has a little power left.  With that, they start driving to it. Ahh, perfect opportunity to do a bit of character building! I thought. So while on route, they begin talking about a bit of personal stuff. All in all, that short passage summed up how we really go to jobs.

Controller: “Sierra XYZ, Control, burglary in progress at so and so address.”

Me: “Code five, give me the info on the address.”

Control: “It’s a so and so shop with several previous reports.”

One of us enters the address into the phone to nav it while the other activates the blues and two tones, and we set off.   Then we undoubtedly catch up on gossip.

Me: So, Bob. How’d that hot date go?

Cue a probably sordid tale with a variety of anatomically unlikely scenarios involved.

The critiquers slaughtered me! “Police would have sat-navs fitted into their cars,” they cried. “They would never be so unprofessional as to talk about personal matters on their way to a burglary,” they bemoaned.

Well, unfortunately, Her Majesty hasn’t seen fit to equip our cars with sat-navs, leaving us with trusty google maps. The other day, I held an in-depth conversation about what I had for dinner the previous night on the way to deal with an axe-wielding maniac. Why? Because when it’s your tenth job of the day you tend to get a bit bored with growling at each other in the melodramatic fashion that’s shown on TV.

Another person was asking for “reasons a mother would leave a baby.” An emotive subject, perhaps.  The standard response from many people was “a mother would never leave her child, maternal instincts, etc., etc. I made one brief attempts to relay some of the reasons I’d come across at work—the malicious, the nasty, or the just plain old very bad parenting. Needless to say, it’s not a discussion I’ll get involved in again any time soon.

I learned very quickly that the truth about jobs like the police (a role that by its very nature, tends to make for some entertaining tales) is that people are not really interested in the truth. They want the media version: Cops don’t talk to each other, they growl and bicker. Blue-light runs are exciting car chases, not the calm collected and most of all safe journey that they actually are. When people are shot, bullets leave neat little holes. When they’re in a car crash, the victim’s insides are where they should be—inside. No one soils themselves when they die. Fights are neat kung-fuesque-type affairs, not rolling around on the ground in the dirt and worse. And so on and so forth.

Is that my limitation as a writer—that I can’t write the truth convincingly? Maybe, but then it seems like I share the same failings as ninety-five percent of police fiction writers in that regards. You know what? I think that this holds true across the spectrum of jobs that people seem to like writing about, and more importantly, like reading about.  People often just want to hear that a knight is a paragon of honor and virtue. Not that he’s been in his armor for the last three months and smells like a hobos underpants. Astronauts never swear. (Geek moment, Pete Conrad, one of the men who walked on the moon, was borderline Tourette’s!) Secret agents never suffer from impotence and so on.

The moral of this post is, even with the best will in the world, sometimes you have to make things generally readable and relatable to a wider audience for them to enjoy it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes the truth is too strange for fiction.

Endeavor, book one of the Sleeping Gods series, has been compared to A.C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and is currently on three Amazon Top 100 Lists: 

  • Top Time Travel
  • Top Hard Science Fiction
  • Top Space Exploration

An updated version of Endeavor will be released by Tickety Boo Press and available in spring of 1015 on Amazon.   

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February 22, 2015 by

The Way Forward is Sometimes the Way Back: Escaping the Labyrinth

The wind is a cat:
Angry, it hisses through the trees.
Soft, it brushes against the house
Like a friendly cat rubs against one’s knees.

The wind is a cat:
Wandering, it meanders about
Vicious, its claws rake the shingles
Like a cat’s nails scratch the carpeted floor.

The wind is a cat:
Chill, it bites with tiny, sharp teeth
Gentle, it softly tickles one’s skin
Like a cat’s whiskers may tickle bare feet.

~Carolyn Bond

Wind is a cat2

I liked this poem when I read it in eleventh grade. It fired up my imagination, so since I was on the high school lit magazine, I volunteered to do the artwork for it.  Back then, as now, I had the perfect personality for editing and line art: I was an uptight perfectionist.

Deadlines were approaching so I stayed after school. I was working in the art room with a true artist, which even then I knew I was not.  I was an illustrator, but James, he was the real thing.  As I drew my stylized picture of a cat, I screwed up…something I did a lot with my illustration.  After muttering a few mild curses, I was only sixteen after all, I asked James to pass me the whiteout.  This was for repro on a Xerox machine.  The whiteout wouldn’t register.  James picked up the little bottle, but instead of handing it to me, he put it in his pocket.

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“But I made a mistake, I need it!” I protested.

“No, you don’t,” he told me.  “It’s not a mistake, it’s an opportunity. Embrace it.  Turn it into part of your picture.”

I was not at all happy about that, but the deadline was looming.  I altered my plan and did just what he said; I incorporated it into the drawing.  I did it well enough, that I cannot tell you today where that mistake was.  It is no longer a mistake, it is art.

It was a lesson I picked up readily for my artwork and used as I minored in art in college.  But I wasn’t clever enough to apply it more broadly to my other art—writing. Not until I met Teresa Edgerton.

We used to take long walks and talk about the craft of writing.  At one point, I became stuck in my writing.  I could not find may way out of the labyrinth of plot I’d constructed for my characters.  She told me something similar to what James had told me:  Look back at your work.  What is there that you can use for your needs now?  As with James, I had my doubts, but I also had nothing to lose.  So I combed over my story and found just what she had said I would.  The seeds of something I’d not even known I’d planted were now grown enough for me to use to climb out of my maze.

The advice from James and Teresa is likely the best piece of advice I’ve ever received about my artistic endeavours.  I’ve used it over and over again.  I’ll share some examples.

First an introduction to a few characters from In a Mortal Shadow:  Falion is our hero trying to rescue the damsel in distress, Venae, a magic-wielding character.  Karill is his nemesis in hot pursuit.

My first example is about using using location you have already set up. Karill has nearly caught up with Falion at an inn.  Just as he’s about to go in, the tavern across the way has a loud disturbance. Karill goes to investigate that instead.  It was a distraction, both in plot, but worse, for the reader.  I think one of my writer’s group folk summed it up best in this comment at the point where Karill goes clambering off to the tavern over yonder: “Squirrel!”

She was so right.  I had to fix it.  I realized that the inn also had a tavern, which I’d mentioned already.  So this time, Karill goes to the innkeepress, who is in her tavern, and is distracted there long enough for our hero to get away.  The change may seem inconsequential, but the result was major. Instead of being clearly a red herring that took Karill away from Falion, this tavern visit takes him closer.  Falion nearly runs into him.  Tension is built where as before, it was dissipated…perhaps even comically so.

In this second example, I looked to what I had already established as part of a character’s talents to recycle that talent in a new way to perform a new action. Falion and Venae need to flee the city of Cete Kellen.  Originally, I made up new magic for her to walk through walls.  It never sat right with me.  It hadn’t tested well with beta readers, either.  So here I was, stuck in a city on lockdown, and I had no idea how to get out—until I remembered a magic skill I had used earlier.  Falion, through a curse, is immune to magic directed against him.  But magic can be used around him. For instance, if you were to stop the air moving about his hand perfectly, he would not be able to move it any more than he might if his hand were encased in stone.  If she can do that, then she can stop the air from moving under his feet, and he can stand on it.  Falion escapes the city by walking off the city wall.

In my third example, I found an existing character ready to take up a new role. Sharp started out a walk-on character.  I needed someone to guide Falion and Venae across the border. I was about to create a new character when I heard Teresa’s and James’s voices in my head. I looked around, and there he was, sitting in the corner, whittling away on a stick and whistling, waiting for me to discover what, apparently, he already knew.  He wasn’t some wandering merchant after all, he was much more.  Merchant was just his cover.  Good cover—it worked on me for years!

So when you are stuck.  Take time to review your work keeping your problem foremost in your mind.  Get a friend or beta reader to go over it if you can.  New perspectives can widen your view of your own work. You two can talk it through, stir up the story, which has been too staid in your mind. See what seeds are growing back where you dropped them two chapters ago, or five, or ten.  Not only can it get you out of the Labrinth right now, but it makes your story look richer and more put together.  Those incidental seeds you cast out have suddenly turn into foreshadowing. Now don’t you look clever!   And all you had to do was remember:

Sometimes the way forward is the way back.

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February 14, 2015 by

And Lo! And There Shall Come…An Ending!

By Rosemary Edghill

NY Times bestselling author, Rosemary Edghill shares her knowledge and her wit in one of her “Dear Author” commentaries.  I’m been a fan of her “Dear Author” posts on Facebook and feel very lucky to share the laughter and insight this one brought me.

Screen shot 2015-02-15 at 10.05.32 AMThis is the story of Childeric, called The Shatterer, Last Emperor of the Eidolon Empire. He swashbuckled through a swordly and sorcerous universe…in four novels written by A. E. Phillips during the fantasy revival of the late 1960s. This is the story of Arcadia Stanton McCauley, who spent a couple of summers being A. E. Phillips and got on with her life…until her life was over. Only it wasn’t. Not quite. Because Cady McCauley died one night on an LA freeway. But she woke up in the Eidolon Empire….

Available on Amazon

Dear Author:

You and I should talk.  I know you’ve been sending stories in to that online magazine regularly—sometimes five or six a month!—and I’ve been rejecting them (with a form letter, not even a personalized reply), just as regularly.  But you keep trying, no matter how many rejections you get.  I think that’s great.

I just wish you’d learn how to write.

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Oh, don’t get me wrong: your grammar’s fine, your spelling’s good, and your sentence structure is usually adequate.  But you see, the magazine only buys STORIES, and you aren’t sending me stories.  You’re sending me ideas—some could only be handled properly (by “properly” I mean: “in a way that does not make me want to gouge my eyes out and run screaming through the streets of Poughkeepsie”) at novel length.  Some are clichés (and you don’t know that because you have very little exposure to the last hundred years of written science fiction and fantasy) that you haven’t found a fresh spin on.  (And do not get me started on your endless thirst to do grim’n’gritty remixes of Disney cartoons: recursive much?)  The worst of the lot—the stuff that makes me beweep deaf heaven and turn to drink—are the ones that have a wonderful set-up, an exciting idea, a great set of characters…

And stop.  In the middle.  Without a resolution.

Dear Author, I know your mentors and moral exemplars said that you get points for showing up, that half of life is showing up, and so on.  NEWS FLASH: THEY LIED.  You get ZIP for showing up (as with all of these half-baked “flash fictions”).  You get the brass cupcake for SEEING IT THROUGH.  Another lie the mentors tell?  “Leave something to your reader’s imagination.”  No, no, no, no, NO!  Especially when what you, with a fey and elfin delicacy, want to leave to your reader’s imagination is the ENDING.  (Yes, dear Author, I am capslocking in a paroxysm of anguish.  I like you, I really do.  And I want you to stop shooting yourself in the foot.)  Trust me, readers have plenty of imagination.  They’ll find something to do with it when they read your story.  But they aren’t signing on for a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience, and when I review your submission, neither am I.

I know you watch a lot of television.  (So do I: stop trying to slip re-written Supernatural fanfic past me, because filing the serial numbers off your fanfic is a whole ‘nother rant.)  Television is a five-act structure in 42 minutes: Freytag’s Pyramid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure).  Five-act structure is long-form structure: if you model your narrative on the storytelling structure you see on television (or in the movies) you are going to be writing a novel.  That’s fine, but don’t send it to me: the magazine publishes short stories.  And a short story has a three act structure.

Dear Author, you rarely send me the second act, let alone the third.  I’m starting to suspect you have no idea what happens in the third act.  You need to figure that out before you submit your story, and it needs to be on the page.

Take, as an illustrative example of the thing done right, C. L. Moore’s masterwork, “Vintage Season”.  In Act One (the set-up), we establish that the time is now, the place is here, the narrator is Oliver Wilson, and some very odd people are renting Oliver’s house.  (Dear Author, you may think Act One is for “Setting The Scene”.  Nope, sorry.  You get a paragraph—at most—to do that, and it’s PART of Act One.)

In Act Two (the reveal), we discover two things: 1. The odd people are Time Tourists.  2. The Time Tourists visit the most perfect seasons in Earth’s history, after which they leave.  And this is where (in your own stories, dear Author) you usually stop.  Protip: this is not (yet) a (finished) story.  This is a set-up for a finale that you do not deliver.  Because in Act Three (the blow-off) of “Vintage Season” we find out that the perfect seasons—the vintage seasons of the title—come just before terrible disasters, which the Time Tourists are aware of and do nothing to prevent.

If you’ve managed to get an equivalent part of Act Three into your story, bravo! dear Author.  But your story still isn’t over.  (This is where I send you the form letter saying your story “lacks sufficient closure”, BTW.)  Because here’s the rest of Act Three:  Oliver, in possession of all this information, writes it down in a document meant to serve as a warning to others: the Time Tourists are easily recognizable, and their presence is a warning of disaster.  Unfortunately, his message is destroyed (along with Oliver) in the very disaster to which the vintage season was the prelude.

And that, boys and girls, is how you end a story.  Something happens.  We find out what it is.  We then see its consequences.  And seeing what your set-up resolves as is really important to the reader.  Does the princess marry the goatherd?  Does the spy complete his mission?  Do the aliens destroy Earth?  Don’t leave us in suspense!  “So what happened then?” is the eternal cry of every audience ever.  And we would like to know.  Really we would.  All of us.  You can come up with the prettiest and most amazing situation ever limned in English prose, and it is just going to lie there like a dead flounder unless you do something with it.  By the conclusion of your work, its reader should be able to answer the following questions: 1. Who is the protagonist?  2. What do they accomplish?  3. Why do they do it?  4. What are the consequences of their actions?

Dear Author, if, based solely on the information you provide in the text, that would be impossible for the reader, do another draft.  Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.  No matter what Meatloaf may say, two out of three is bad.

Rosemary Edghill is the keeper of the Eddystone Light, corny as Kansas in August, normal as blueberry pie, and only a paper moon.  She was found floating down the Amazon in a hatbox, and, because criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, she became a creature of the night (black, terrible).  She began her professional career working as a time-traveling vampire killer and has never looked back.  She’s also a New York Times Bestselling Writer and hangs out on Facebook a lot. Her webpage is: http://www.rosemaryedghill.com/ and there is not now nor ever was an E in the middle of her last name.

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February 1, 2015 by

The Writer’s Toolbox

I was adrift, alone.  After college, my life had somehow turned into a blur of wake, work, eat, and sleep.  Sometimes I wondered if I might be stuck in the movie Groundhog Day.  I hadn’t yet found the community that I have often written of as so important.  Even though I was working editorial for Addison Wesley/Benjamin Cummings, I had no connection to the fiction-writing community—not for fantasy and SF where my heart lay.  I didn’t even know a genre community existed.

My favorite place to break the parade of endless days was a little hole-in-the wall mom-and-pop SF/F bookstore on El Camino in Palo Alto.  I used to drop in and talk to the owner.  It gave me a tenuous but much treasured connection into the genre world.  One day, the subject of writers groups came up.  Turned out, she knew a customer…  I was so excited to have hope of getting involved in anything writing. It had been years since I’d had that at college.  In those pre-Internet days, I left her my phone number and prayed that her customer would use it.

She did.

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That call was one of those moments that your life changes, and you don’t even know it. She not only brought me into a writers group that boasted professional  genre writers (oh, the thrill of it!), she introduced me to my first SF/F con.  The seed of friendship sprouted fast and rooted deep.  We spent hours talking about writing, the mechanics of it, the people, the cons, the books.  She talked most about her Clarion West experience and one of the instructors that changed her life, Algis Budrys.  She was always on the look out to hone her skills or discover new ones to, as she put it, put in her writer’s toolbox.  Algis and Clarion evidently put some pretty nice tools in there.

Looking back, I now see that moment was the linchpin in my genre life. Without her I wouldn’t have met the friends who fill my life and make up my community almost entirely.  Had she not chosen to dial the phone number of a young woman loitering in bookstore and bugging the hapless proprietor, I would not be posting this here today.

Her name was Tina, and she opened her heart, her world, and her toolbox to me. I am sad to say, she only graced my life a few short years before she died, but I’ve never forgotten.  So today, I honor her by opening up my toolbox to you.  I have a lot I want to share after 35 years of editing and writing, so in Tina’s honor, I have put together this series, The Writer’s Toolbox. In each of these blogs, I will take out one tool and share it with you.  I will tell you why I like this tool and how I use it.  Maybe you will be able to find a use for it, too, and tuck it into your writer’s toolbox.

Here’s to you,Tina.

Next in The Writer’s Toolbox: There’s Got to Be a Better Way

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