Tag Archives: writing

November 11, 2015 by

Pride of the Writer

By Brian Buhl

I’d been absent from the SF/F community for many years, and I’d decided it was time to reengage.  So I volunteered for the writer’s workshop at Westercon. I was quite pleasantly surprised by one particularly engaging story about a haunted car and a repro man.  Not only was the concept intriguing to me, but the writing was crisp and professional.  I’ve been a fan of Brian Buhl’s writing ever since and hope that some day soon, more than just workshop participants will get to enjoy his stories. 

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Pride, envy, avarice – these are the sparks have set on fire
the hearts of all men. 
~Dante Alighieri~

Writers are their own worst enemy.  They wield distraction as a weapon, striking down their creativity with mighty blows.  These distractions are often external, such as video games, social media, and cat videos.  Honestly, who can resist images of adorable kittens, when the Internet is practically made of them?

Of course, not all distractions are external.  From the primordial fluid of our imaginations crawl monsters and demons.  These hideous creatures attempt to wrest the pen from our hands and shred our work in wicked fangs and claws.  One of these monsters goes by the name of Fear.  I’ve described him before, and how he tries to keep me from finishing my work by filling my mind with uncertainty and doubt.

Today, let us examine his cousin, Pride.  For purposes of this discussion, I may refer to pride by other names, such as audacity or avarice.  These are not the same thing as pride, but as distractions, they are borne from the same place.

Pride works against writers differently than fear.  Fear tears the world down around the writer, making every step uncertain.  Pride, on the other hand, blinds the writer, closing off options the writer might otherwise consider.

Imagine receiving unfavorable feedback from a writing group or editor.  Imagine yourself saying something like, “But it’s my story!  They just don’t get it!” That’s pride, my friend.  That’s your ego inflated to the point that it is obscuring your vision, concealing the merit of the critique from your more critical mind.

I struggle to suppress reactions like this from time to time.  We’ve all been there.  We pour ourselves into our stories, breathing life into characters and living with them for weeks and months.  We sow ourselves into our stories, so when our stories are “attacked,” it feels like the attack is personal.  When someone reaches out to try to improve our work, pride refracts the message and distorts it, turning it into “your story isn’t good enough, and by extension, neither are you.”

Over time I’ve learned that this type of pride is like a bruise.  If I walk away from the critique for a little while, the swelling goes down, and I’m able to see clearly again.

Fear and pride differ in another very important way.  As a monster, fear is a giant spider that catches you in sticky webs.  It ties you up, bites, and fills your veins with poison.  Pride, on the other hand, is a powerful wolf.  You have to respect them both.  But where fear seeks to destroy you at every turn, pride can be tamed.  Pride can be your ally.

Consider what it is sell a story.  You are stating with a loud, clear voice that the product of your imagination, the words you’ve sewn together to form a unique whole, is worth time and money.  You’re saying that other people should close YouTube and the world of cat videos long enough to focus on your story.  What audacity!  What arrogance!

Fear wants to tell you that your work isn’t good enough, but pride comes to your defense.  Of course your story is good enough!  You wrote it.  Instead of calling this pride, we call it self-confidence.  Instead of blinding us to what we should see, it shields us from lies designed to tear us down.

Even when we’re not crafting our stories, pride prowls alongside the writer, always ready to cause trouble.  Consider George Lucas.  Watch documentaries early and late in his career.  In the early documentaries, while his star was still ascending, he can be seen consulting with his actors and crew, looking directly at them.  Compare that to later footage after he’d reached the peak of his success.  Watch his body language, and watch the faces of the people around him.  Young Lucas looks like he’s more engaged with the people making a film with him.  Elder Lucas appears to be surrounded by people that are wary and uncomfortable, and he doesn’t seem to notice.  That is pride, filling the creator with visions of his greatness to the point that he can no longer see what’s going on around him.

To be fair, those documentaries only show us what the camera sees.  We can’t really know with certainty what ran through George Lucas’s mind, at either point in the famous director’s career.  But the tale of pride leading a creator astray is not a new one, and it makes a lot of sense in this case.

Fame and monetary success are not requirements for pride.  Pride is present as soon as the writer declares themselves as someone with more than just a writing hobby.  It becomes part of our identity in the same way we sow ourselves into our stories.

For example, an easy way to get my dander up is to call me a “young writer.” I’ve been writing for more than 25 years, with more than one completed novel sitting in a drawer.  My pride straightens my spine and inflates my lungs with air, ready to bellow loud and strong that I’m experienced, and how dare anyone insinuate otherwise.

The reality is that I am still a young writer, and it’s not an insult.  I’m slowly and methodically improving my craft, learning how to improve.  Pride may want me to strut and preen, but that won’t clean up my unsold stories.  Pride isn’t going to make me more creative.

But pride can help me put my work in front of other people, because pride overshadows fear.

And with that said, I must thank my friend Jennifer for inviting me to guest on her blog.  It is the sort of gesture that feeds pride and keeps it healthy.  For to tame pride and make it work with you instead of against you, pride must be kept on a short leash and given the nourishment of praise.

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Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels. ~Charles Caleb Colton~

Brian is a full-time programmer living in Northern California. He plays alto saxophone in the River City Concert Band. He’s been married about twenty years and has two children. He writes science fiction and fantasy often at his local coffee shop. He’s been writing off and on for more than 25 years. His blog is mostly about writing, and his journey to changing from a guy with a writing hobby to a professional author.

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August 5, 2015 by

Conning your way: Moderating a Writer’s Workshop

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Graphic from Bo’s Cafe Life

Moderating a writer’s workshop at a con is easy.  Someone has passed you the power to sit down and conduct.  All you have to do is show up, say go, and let the people talk. Right?

Yes…but no.

Moderating a writer’s workshop well at a con is not so easy.  The point of a workshop is not to see that a half dozen people get to talk on a manuscript; the point is to guide the workshop to help an author make a better manuscript.  Workshops can do that, but they can also do the reverse.

I know of one instance where the writer went home, took the advice of one of the pros, and totally chopped up the manuscript.  I was at the workshop so I heard the advice, and since I know the writer, I saw the result.  The advice was a reiteration of something I’d said: writing structure should reflect writing content (a blog for another time).  For instance, in the writer’s action scene, her sentences sometimes got away from her.  They were longer and occasionally more rambling than they should have been for the situation: a gun fight in the forest. While these sentences were perfectly good sentences for the right situation, right there, they needed to be shorter, punchier, and more directed to the immediate events (no time to dissemble on stray thoughts).  However, what and how the pro said it may have confused that writer  for she went home and applied the advice to the whole manuscript to its detriment.  Took her a few months to undo the damage.

You as moderator want to try to keep the workshop session focused on the goal of helping author-entrants to improve their works.  The value of those works should not be under discussion. At one time, I had a writer’s group member make the comment in group about my work, “Ho hum, another Conan the Barbarian novel, but I guess you know that” (No, I didn’t, he is the only person to have ever said that—I left that group as a result).  Another con workshop I heard about had an author-entrant writing about Norse mythos.  A workshop participant compared her to Marvel’s Norse-influenced work and said they liked Marvel better.  We writers need to follow our bliss, so don’t judge the author’s choice.  Instead, guide each author to make his or her take on the subject his or her own unique story.  So in your workshop, judge the intent of the stories and help the author-entrants meet their goals. If this type of judgment does happen, be prepared to gently redirect the attention to the intent and those goals.

Over the years, I’ve learned from my mistakes and successes to develop pretty simple guidelines.

Workshop Format

The science fiction and fantasy cons I’ve moderated for use the same format.  The workshop comprises three author-entrants, two pros, and a moderator.  Three manuscripts of up to thirty pages are delivered to all the workshop participants in advance to be critiqued in a three-hour session.

I will breakdown the process of a workshop using this format. If your workshop varies, you’ll have some math to do. This also assumes the room is yours for the full three hours. If it’s a dedicated room to the workshop, this is likely the case, but if a panel follows you, they will assume you were supposed to be out before the hour.  To be sure, ask your program coordinator or look to see who is in the room after you.

Introduce yourself and that this is a workshop session. If more people are in the room than you expect, let them know it’s a private session. Go around the table and have everyone introduce themselves. I like to ask the pros to share their latest project—a moment of shameless self-promotion if you will. Set the rules for the workshop.

Rules

I’ve adjusted these guidelines from my college creative writing workshops.  Each critiquer reviews the manuscript without interruption either from the other critiquers or the author-entrant. The critiquer whose turn it is to speak should not engage the others at the table (including the author-entrant) with questions unless the critiquer has a quick clarification he or she needs to make a point.  He or she may then ask a question to elicits a very short answer from the author-entrant. You as moderator should be prepared to say, “let’s make note of that and address it further at the end” if the answer goes on too long.

The author-entrant will have time to ask questions.  I like to stress that this workshop is for the author-entrant, not the critiquers.  Author-entrants should not defend their work. After all, a shrink-wrapped version of the author does not come with every copy of the book sold.  It’s not important that the critiquers understand what the author-entrant is trying to do, it’s important that the author-entrant understands what a reader may infer.  No rebuttals or justifications are necessary and no good ever comes of such.  If a critiquer is wrong, it’s just not that important that he or she knows. You as moderator may be called on to gently curtail an author-entrant who is trying too hard to defend the work.  The only exception to this is if an author-entrant would like clarification on why a critiquer came to a particular conclusion. In this case, the author can outline the back information necessary to frame the question, ask where he or she went wrong, and inquire about suggestions to fix it.

Timing

  1. Each manuscript gets (about) 1 hour.
  2. Each critiquer will get up to 8 minutes to speak with a one-minute warning at 7 minutes. (I use my phone to have an alarm go off at the seven minute point. This way, I don’t clock watch, can remain engaged in the workshop,  don’t lose track of time, and  don’t have to personally interrupt folks.)
  3. 10 to 15 minutes of open table time starting with asking the author-entrant if they have questions.  This will usually instigate an open table conversation. If it doesn’t, be prepared to ask questions to get conversation rolling.
  4. 5 minute break

Order

I give the order the critique will go in.  This is really up to the moderator. I usually go clockwise, counter clockwise and clockwise again.  However, some people may have never been involved in a workshop or feel insecure about going first, especially in the presence of pros. If one of the author-entrants is sitting left or right of you, you might inquire if they would prefer to go later (but don’t forget them!  It’s quite embarrassing).  Or you may just choose to start with one pro and move in a circle from there. Or you could determine an order before you even arrive and announce it when you start that critique.  I tell people I will go last so that I can adjust for timing if it gets off.

I then announce the order of the manuscripts. Because of the workshop introduction, the first manuscript may go over the hour. You may wish to start with a manuscript that is shorter or you think might elicit fewer comments.

End of Workshop

Thank everyone for their time and participation.  Remind the author-entrants to take time to think about and feel out the advice they have been given. They are here to learn, but ultimately they are the shepherds of their own work. They are the ones that need to guide it.  Sometimes in experimenting with new ideas and ways of doing things, the writing can go wrong. So make a clearly marked back up of the story before massaging it.  It will be liberating, allowing the author-entrant to push harder, and it will ensure that writing paths that lead to dead ends don’t lead to a manuscript’s dead end.

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July 21, 2015 by

Travel into Your Imagination

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No good vacation goes unpunished.  They are work from the whole booking-travel-and-lodging thing to the packing thing to the prepping-your-work-and-personal-life-to-survive-two-weeks-without-you thing. I find myself so harried before vacations that I wonder, why am I doing this again?  This vacation, my work life was particularly bad…STRESS!

But I marched all my ducks into a row with my trusty cattle prod and got on a plane to cross another bucket-list item from my to-do list.  I’ve always wanted to take any one of my good friends back to the Northeast to share my childhood stomping grounds.  Finally one of my dearest friends agreed to come with me to spend a week each in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

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But this is a blog about writing, not vacationing, so what’s the deal?  Well, in addition to the fun, family, and friend time, I’ve gotten more out of my travels. I’ve cultivated  a wider first-hand understanding of the world from people to places to nature.

This was my friend’s first trip to the Northeast.  For the most part, she’s spent her time on the West Coast.  Sharing such a different place with her was an interesting experience for me.  I saw things in new ways. We spent a lot of time driving so we talked a lot.

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Wolfeboro claims to be the oldest resort town in America. We got to see it from the deck of the Mount Washington on a day cruise.

For instance, we were driving through New Hampshire when my friend asked, “What is the biggest city in the state?”  Huh, I didn’t have any idea.  So out comes the trusty smart phone and voila!  It’s Manchester. Of course next to that information is the population: 109,565.  Wow, that twisted my head.  Largest city in California is Los Angeles at 3.8 million.  My hometown, what I think of as a medium-sized suburban area between San Francisco and San Jose, has a population of over 140,000.  Shoot, the population of the Bay Area is five times the whole state of New Hampshire (7 million vs. 1.3 million).  And cities…well, the Bay Area alone has 101, while New Hampshire totals 13.

The point of this is that wherever we are, we get sedentary in our thoughts of what is “normal.”  While we know that things are different in some way anywhere we go, feeling it gives a whole new perspective.  If you follow my blogs, you have heard me say that what readers want from fiction is an emotional experience.  You as a writer can give them that experience so much more vividly if you yourself feel it first.  Statistics don’t generate such emotion, but every day of our week in New Hampshire, we felt and saw the ramifications of these statistics.

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That sign reads: Five dollar fine for riding or driving on this bridge faster than a walk.

NH.cov.bridge.20150703_104546_resizedI live within three minutes of three major freeways.  I go everywhere on freeways.  But in New Hampshire, we went almost everywhere on twisty two-lane highways (just one lane each direction) with turnouts for passing if we were lucky.  We only got on the interstate thrice in the week, and two of those were to cross into and out of New Hampshire.   Every day we were there, we drove along highways overhung with leaves that I knew would burst into glorious golds, reds, and oranges in the fall.  We rumbled across a one-lane covered bridge with a sign warning of “dire”  penalties if you drove faster than a walk (a walk?! How different is that?  Not even a number, just something subjective…talk about a different mindset from the Bay Area).  We rode alongside twisting brooks bubbling white over river rock.  We wended through notches of bald granite towering over us.  I never noticed how spectacular they were until my friend did…I had remembered them as normal from childhood; I needed her eyes to really see them.  The whole state of New Hampshire is granite, and it infiltrates its very nature…maybe down to the state motto, which is as intractable as the craggy granite cliffs: Live Free or Die.  Something as simple as the ground people walk on can characterize not only them, but become a metaphor for an entire culture.

NH.conway.church2.20150702_163415_resizedOn our car trips, we passed through dozens of towns, with clapboard general stores, steep, snow-shedding-rooved old houses, and quaint white churches that looked like they belonged on postcards.  But you better be paying attention…some towns were only two blocks long—no blinking.

This trip reminded me of how people in a smaller, less populated world lived (or at least one of the ways).  And as small as these towns seemed to me, many were metropolises compared to the types of towns I put into my fantasy novel.  These contrasts generate the feelings I draw upon to write from an emotional place to create an emotional experience for readers. I can characterize entire civilizations with just a few choices, so long as they are good solid choices…solid as granite. When I write, I lean on the memories of these woods where I roamed as a child, on the snow and the thunderstorms, the small towns that close up at 5:00, and the apple pie that grandma put on her old rustic farm table. Even the air smelled different on the forested little island of Black Cat where we stayed.  Travel refreshes and adds to those memories.  This trip revitalized my connection to things that I use in my writing.

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Grandma’s house, full of hugs, apple pie, and memories. I used to sleep in that room to the upper left, but it was a shed dormer then, not a gable. And Grandma’s beloved tiger lilies are gone…but then, that’s why we need our memories.

Whether you live in a concrete metropolis with seven million people trying to rush about on ten-lane freeways or alone on a tiny island that needs a boat to get to the nearest town, if you write, you can weave travel experiences into your imagings.  Get out of your “normal” and feel—feel something different.  Everyplace has its own characteristics, from real estate to food to landscape to nature and to people. Get out there. Smell it, touch it, taste it, listen and see it.  What surprises you? What touches your heart?  What can you use to make your own worlds come to life?  Weave the magic moments of your travels into your story the next time you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to create vivid new worlds to share with your readers.

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Cabin on Black Cat Island, a view from the dock.

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July 1, 2015 by

The Writer’s Toolbox
Real Heroes Don’t Get Charlie Horses
Part 4: But how do I do it?


inkwellIdentifying the words that have connotation worth mining can be a challenge if you are not used to thinking of words in this fashion. Poetry is rife with examples of mining connotation. Find some you like or that has an emotional component like one you are looking for and read it. Make notes; pay close attention to metaphor; write down words that attract your attention. Contemplate what those words contribute. Look them up in the dictionary, then the thesaurus.

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Hey, as long as you have the thesaurus open on your desk or desktop, peruse it. Think about how some words evoke different feelings within you, even though they are under the same heading. Pairs like shadow and shade, rock and stone, chill and cool all have different connotations. Shadow tends to be spooky or disturbing, shade restful. Rock is a little less formal-sounding than stone, and the use of rock is more common in the western United States and stone more so in the east. Cool is refreshing, chill is unpleasant, even scary.

As you look through the thesaurus entries, note that the long and complex words tend to leave you cold. Long Latinate-based words can be too neutral. In the worst scenario, they can be so dispassionate as to feel cold. When you are working with neutral words, some are better than others even if neither has heavy connotation. Shorter words tend to be better and are usually not Latinate. Our original example of The clouds moved across the sky, though neutral, is much better than The clouds locomoted across the sky. They are both synonyms from the thesaurus, but locomoted is long and Latinate. Latinate words run the risk of being boring, off putting, cold, or scientific feeling. That said, I like the sound of The clouds traversed the sky. Maybe there is a story where that would be the right choice.

Now that you have looked through some thesaurus entries, it is time to try an exercise to help your next scene. I had a terribly difficult time with a battle scene, and I kept consulting with readers and SCA fighters and reading books on tactics. The scene got more organized, but it never got better. I finally figured out that all the staging and proper window dressing in the world was not going to save the scene. What it lacked was an emotional connection to the reader. Emotional situations were happening; they just weren’t connecting with my reader on an emotional level. So I did two things, I looked for ways to expand my understanding of what sensory events were occurring in a battle (in my case I watched movie and Internet clips), and I spent time with a thesaurus to generate lists of words related to events, the sensory experiences of the characters, and relating to what I watched on the clips. Here are some of the words I looked up: battle, slash, clangor, explode, rage, weak, energy, dance, destroy, adrenalin, taste, scent, perfume, odor, cloying, and fetid. Note how the last five relate. If a word doesn’t work (perfume didn’t work for me) keep looking. Look up entries from within the list you are looking at, they themselves will likely have alternative choices, which will help you refine your word lists.

Now you have useful words swimming about your head ready for you to pluck. Or a list you’ve generated to peruse when you feel you need stronger or different terms. The result for my battle scene was nothing short of transforming. It may not have become the definitive scene to end all battle scenes, but it jumped the chasm from boring to engaging.

Go Forth and Do

If you look at your writing, you may see that you have made choices already where connotation is aiding you. Now you understand what it is you were doing when you chose those words. With your conscious understanding of connotation as a tool for writing, you can control more effectively how your reader connects to the scene you are portraying. You can amp up or dial down the emotional elements, revving up your readers or resting them so you can take them refreshed on the next thrill ride. Your job as a writer is to provide the reader the emotional experience they seek. Connotation can be a powerful and subtle tool for manipulating the emotional connection between your story and your reader, so get out your virtual whetstone, hone your new tool, and put it into your writer’s toolbox.

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June 27, 2015 by

The Writer’s Toolbox
Real Heroes Don’t Get Charlie Horses
Part 3: Pitfalls, Why Are There Always Pitfalls?

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As with everything, pitfalls await you as you experiment with connotation. For one thing, connotation can be cultural. 9-1-1 instantly brings up painful memories for people in the United States, but this combination of numbers might leave a blank stare on the face of someone who lives in South Africa for instance. Both are English speaking, so they share a language, but that culture did not experience the tragic events of September 11.

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What is true culturally is also true individually. Your experiences within your culture differ from your neighbors, your coworker’s, even your own relatives. So what you find meaningful is not what someone else might. Every family has its stories, its inside jokes. These create a micro culture that is specific to that family. “Johnny, do you want a chicken leg?” mades my great aunt bust up laughing, but leaves me cold. She and her brother shared a chicken-leg story from their childhood. They’ve told me it, but I wasn’t there, I don’t remember the mundane story, but the event is etched vividly on Grandpa’s and Great Aunt’s minds such that chicken legs now have additional connotation, but a connotation that cannot be mined to reinforce the emotional scenery of any story I might write.

Another risk is that of purple prose. If you push too hard too fast with heavily laden connotations, you can wind up overwriting your scene such that it becomes melodramatic, trite, or comic. So when I push, I try to get readers to review the words, and then I question them about spots where I felt I might have pushed too hard if they haven’t already mentioned it.

This is a clunker from my past that I took a brief risk with: He finished his run of the line with a feather of hope tickling his liver. The grounds upon which I based this risk were that among the four humors, hope is associated with sanguine, blood, and liver, so I went for the liver tickle. Problem is, the four humors are more remote than, say, liver and onion jokes. And the association of liver with hope is a distant connotation that just doesn’t ring soundly enough with modern readers to rely upon it. Solution? Just drop the last three words. I knew at the time it was likely headed for the axe, but it is worth taking risks. I’ve been amazed at what uncomfortable risks have paid off. Try them, just be prepared to execute them.

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