Tag Archives: writing

February 13, 2014 · 10:29 am

Author Robin Hobb Offers Brilliant Writing Quotes

Robin Hobb, fantasy (and science fiction) writer extraordinaire, did an AMA on Reddit recently. This was one gem from the conversation:

Question: from user Livin_Right

How much time to you spend daydreaming about your stories before you put pen to paper? Do you have most plot ideas worked out in your head first, or do you start writing and let it take you where it may?

RobinHobbAMA Author

Daydreaming? That’s almost my full time occupation! But from the time I get an idea to the time when there is enough of it to say, “This will be a book and it’s time to start writing” is usually at least a year, and often much longer. Many times I’ll get a tiny gem of an idea, and I love it, but it’s not really enough to be a whole short story, let alone a book. So I set it aside and wait. And other bits of it come to me, dialogue or names or settings, and I add that to it. And Wait. And what usually happens is that I’ll be perusing the story seeds, and I’ll suddenly see that two or even three or four are all parts of the same story. When you put them together, they start striking sparks off each other, and growing. It’s wonderful. Then it’s time to write the book.

I love this comment so much. It’s just so perfect. With my first book, I had the idea a good three years before it formed itself into a nice book-sized concept, and it took 6 months to complete (even with the 50,000 words clocked during NaNoWriMo!). Just so fantastic!

Question: from user -August-

Hello and welcome back. I’ve read you will write a story without trying to form it along a certain path and just let if flow, if you will. While I enjoy this idea when reading it, seeing the characters go through good and hard times, I’m sure it could have its ups and downs on the writing side. Do you ever regret writing like this? Is there anything you would change?

RobinHobbAMA Author

I think of Story as this big river. If I can get out into the main current and then hang on for dear life, it will sweep me along and I just follow the story wherever it goes. It works wondrously well for me. Except when it doesn’t. And when that happens, when I suddenly find myself stranded in the muddy shallows with the story going nowhere, then I have to ‘lighten the raft’ so to speak, usually by discarding the last 50 or 100 pages that I’ve typed. So. Yes, there are definite hazards to trusting your Muse, but my experience has been that the rewards are greater than the risks.

This is fantastic, too. I’ve never cut out 50-100 pages of a story before (and OUCH does that sound painful!) but Robin Hobb is an excellent fantasy writer and I’m completely with her comment regarding trusting the muse. I could not have told you how my book would have ended when I began. I had a feeling, but not a certainty. It took working with the characters and the environment to formulate it into a cohesive whole.

I’m glad I discovered this AMA; it’s excited me as a writer and as a reader. I read a crush of Hobb’s Rain Wild series in middle school, but lost track of the series. I think I know what I need to pick up as my next book!

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January 31, 2014 · 10:00 am

The Secret to an Awesome Novel? Science Knows. Kinda.

Rest assured, plebeian writers of Earth: science can now solve all your problems!
That’s right: Science has cracked the code to a best-selling novel! And the answer is…
Wait, this can’t be right. The answer is…” heavy use of conjunctions such as “and” and “but” and large numbers of nouns and adjectives.”
The Telegraph reported on this story, which says that Stony Brook University in New York used science to analyze the best-selling novels (and even poetry!) to analyze what factors led to one book becoming successful over another. They found their analysis could predict with an 84 percent accuracy whether or not a book was successful.
But it’s pretty hard to take this and figure out what, exactly, made one book successful (perhaps–dare I say?–authoring is more art than science?).
The article says the secret to success was “range of factors determine whether or not a book will enjoy success, including “interestingness”, novelty, style of writing, and how engaging the storyline is, but admit that external factors such as luck can also play a role.”
So is there anything useful to authors here, in terms of boiling down the magic to success? Well, maybe.
First, it’s probably not a good idea to write Jaws except with a whale, but it still eats people and the boat is still too small. Being completely original (or “novel”) is certainly a challenge, but it pays off.
There’s no note on how “style of writing” or which style of writing leads to success, but that can be seen as another way of saying “develop your own voice.” Chuck Wendig’s writing “sounds” very different from Joe Hill’s. The only real way to do that is by writing.
“Engaging” and “interestingness” might be ways of saying “keep things moving.” That can be a struggle in some stories, but as you edit, be sure to ask yourself “does this move the story along, or is this scene filler”? I’ve been playing through the “LEGO Lord of the Rings” game and it has made me realize how, while the background story is very basic, Tolkien really kept throwing new perils at the little Hobbits (oh, you managed to survive that horde of orcs? Great. How about an Oliphant?!)
Regarding the “heavy use of conjunctions”: that sounds like “complex writing” to me. It means using advanced writing forms, rather than a series of simple sentences. That takes skill and, again, practice. You could take a class in this (or hire a good editor to help connect the dots), but the best thing you can do is just keep doing it. And read the good stuff; you’ll pick up on the rhythms subconsciously.
It’s great that they acknowledge luck. I’m very grateful for that, because too often a lot of “how to write” books make it sound like you really can boil down some sort of methodology and it comes across as a get-rich-quick scam. It’s not. Just keep chugging.
I am not particularly worried that an agent, editor or publisher is going to start running manuscripts through the SuccessCalculator5000 anytime soon, so this study gives me a rudimentary baseline: Do good work, and keep doing it.

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January 28, 2014 · 9:58 am

Disappointment and New Decisions

After waiting for 15 months, I finally heard back from HarperVoyager’s open submission contest yesterday.
Considering the odds (12 selected out of more than 4,500!), it isn’t surprising that I got a rejection. But it sucks to be so close (in the final week!) and yet still not be among those selected. (Worse, I just got a form letter. I had been hoping for maybe something more personal–and helpful in terms of understanding what to change–since I am in the final tier.)
On the other hand, each piece was looked over by several editors and other readers, and they liked my work enough to keep it to the bitter end. That means it must be pretty strong, right? Nigh-publishable, even if not exactly to their particular taste? That, in a way, is good news.
It’s still a bitter feeling to have waited so long and come so close, but I’m trying to take a positive feeling from it. It does, however, leave me to wait for new decisions: What do I do now?
I submitted that manuscript, Alt.World, to HarperVoyager’s contest because I had already gone through an unsuccessful round of queries that got me little response, and I was emotionally exhausted by the process. But now I have new hope and renewed energy, and I think I am going to spend a few months at least, using all that I’ve learned about writing a good query letter, to pitch it to agents again and restart the process.
However, it is a tough choice, and sometimes I wonder about self-publishing it and going (hopefully) the Wool route. It is a near-future speculative fiction work, after all, and I have some concerns that it is a little too close to real-world timelines. I feel like there is an imperative to get it out relatively soon before it becomes less relevant.
Tough choices.

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Video

Worldbuilding 101: For Authors

This talk has nice animation, but doesn’t get to the good stuff until about 3 minutes in.

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January 25, 2014 · 2:35 pm
January 23, 2014 · 10:05 am

Things Are Interesting in Spamalot World

While I’ve been waiting to hear back from HarperVoyager regarding their open submissions (just two more weeks! Oh the email-checking anxiety!), I’ve been feverishly inspecting my spam folder, just in case something slipped into the wrong folder. And boy has it been interesting.
I seem to have a fairly solid spam-catcher, and that means I have been missing out on a wealth of bizarre emails.
Now, it used to be easy to disregard spam as spammy–everything was just churning out viruses disguised as viagra. Nowadays, though, boy howdy they have gotten diverse. I’m starting to question my understanding of the spam-bots, too, developing a more earnest and empathetic relationship. Sure, it used to be low-AI robots who assumed only men existed on the internet (and only easily fooled, poorly literate, horny to distraction men at that).
But they’ve stepped up their game, and I’m mildly impressed (not sufficiently impressed to, you know, click them, but still!).
First, we have our tried-and-true category of spammers trying to convince netizens to click a link that will lead them to an attractive and desperately sexually deprived woman to talk to. That’s nice, really doing a service for all the lonely housewives out there, right? They’ve gotten better at their human-like come-ons, too; now I have fake Facebook messages, fake Ashley Madison solicitations; fake “I saw you on the subway” messages.
Basically I think we’re seeing the first steps to an AI that can successfully replace our prostitutes. (Oh noes, they be stealin’ our jobs!)
Now we also have the “exotic investment” category. This is traditionally propelled by the “long lost Nigerian prince” type of scam, but the scammers are hip and with it: they now offer to sell me Bitcoins at a low rate, and sometimes they even have a treasure trove of gold and silver they got from someone’s basement. What a deal!
In light of the Target debit/credit card breach, it’s also relevant to highlight the “I’m totes a legit business” type of spam. It’s not just Target, though; these guys cleverly disguise themselves as all sorts of companies. Banks, Starbucks, Kohls, random online dealers I know nothing about. These aren’t particularly convincing, though–spammers, you may want to take a hint from fake-Facebook-friend-Adriana and get more human.
Dear Spammers: It’s nice to see you’re evolving. Keep up the good work! But…don’t be so good that my filter can’t detect you. 
XoXo
-Me

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January 21, 2014 · 10:00 am

To Sleep: An Ode to Early Morning

A bit of flash writing, in celebration of one of my favorite activities: sleeping. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

—————-

To Sleep: An Ode to Early Morning

Everything is heavy. I’m pressed against the mattress, breathing in my own warm air, comfortably squeezed by gravity and my heavy blanket. The light is dim and everything is perfect.

Right now, in this moment, I am only myself. I am not my hands, nor my job, nor my friendships; I am not the number in my bank account (or not in my wallet), or responsible to anyone but myself. I am not even a body. I am a wisp, weighted down only by the memory of a body.  With my eyes closed, I am just thoughts in the darkness, drifting in perfect contentment.

This is happiness, or the nearest thing to it, because as long as I stay half-asleep I have no need of emotions, the wanton rages that make me tingle and burn up and down my skin. Anxiety has left me, and all that is left is a deep simmering joy; I am and am not.

I think about moving, why I’m not exactly sure. A moment prior it would have been unimaginable, but my limbs are quickening all of their own accord, so I stretch and roll languorously. There is peaceful bliss in this as well. My shoulders move easily, warm  and eager, the muscle slipping around the bone with a welcoming happy hug. My toes point and flex in the squiggly bits of sheet down at the bottom of the bed. My little cocoon of warmth remains, but now that I’ve shifted, one side is just a bit cooler.

This, too, is perfect.

I can hear now. The house is buzzing quietly with its gentle hum. A machine in the kitchen whirring as the electrons zolt by. The wind thrumming against the window in random cadence. A groan from a beam somewhere deep within a wall. Maybe a bird singing a tune as it flutters.

Even behind my closed eyelids, light blooms. The sun is tiptoeing through the curtains which never lay quite flat. It blankets the bed, a little at a time, warming eyelids to a soft red.

I resolve to run from it, so I roll again, hiding my eyes against the dark and cool of my cotton pillowcase, snuggling down closer under the blanket. But this was a mistake; this choice was too conscious and the neurons in my brain take it as a cue that they can begin to dance.

My day marches before me, unfolding like a fabric fan, each panel decorated with a chore, a task. I squint my eyes to force it back, but too late. The nagging questions arrive: How much time do I have before the project is due? Do I have enough toilet paper? What was that phone number again?

I bury my head under the pillow, but any comfort there is lost in the warming light.

The brigade of questions will not stop. There is no choice but to acquiesce.

Begrudgingly, I roll over, sitting up until the blankets puddle in my lap. I stretch and yawn, and my feet find their way to the floor. Momentum will handle the rest.

The day is begun.

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January 14, 2014 · 9:03 am

Is Your Character Stuck with a Fad Name?

I read an absolutely fascinating article on baby names, and how they change over time and how some names sort of move in packs and what is currently going on with the state of baby-naming (hello, yoonik names!). It’s really delicious.
The only things I’ve named recently are my cats (after literary characters) and my car (Sassafras, because she’s so Sassy — also, the word sounds really cool). With no kids to inflict odd names upon, I’m left with the people I make up for stories.
A quick review of recent name choices for my characters offers a smattering of my friends’ names, a cluster of intentionally old Biblical names, one “scifi” variation on a historical name, a few names tied to jobs and fibers for a cult of characters, and a bunch of fairly generic common American names.
I feel like I need to now take those names (or at least those of significant characters) and run them through the name research gauntlet as Wait But Why did.
Picking a character name is tricky. Maybe — dare I say it? — harder than picking a baby’s name. Bear with me here: a kid grows into a person. Over time, they aren’t defined by their name, necessarily, but it becomes just an appellation attached to that person. Sure, we may say that “John” is a “good strong name,” for example, but if John the kid turns out to be kinda puny in the strength department, we don’t think he is a failure as a “John.”
But a character? Well, they should grow, certainly, but they exist, fully formed, before the reader even enters the story. And a name is one way for the author to tell the reader something about the character. (I’m looking at you, Hunger Games).
Plus books take the “weird name” thing to a whole new level, with stories in different universes, fantasy scenarios, the far future. Heck, I’m reading “The Shipping News” now, and the main character’s name is “Quoyle,” as in a coil of rope. (There’s a rope/ship repeating pattern throughout.)
So names can really matter. Sometimes it seems like authors just take a “real” name and screw with the letters to make a character name, like “The Left Hand of Darkness.” Fantasy has a lot of names that are actually other nouns, often nature-related. Or names drawn from ancient Greece or Rome. (Related: Does anyone know where JRR Tolkien got the names for Lord of the Rings? Like, is there a guy out there who was named Frodo who got a lot of unwanted attention when it first came out?).
Naming a character can be loaded and fraught. How do you choose? Careful analysis and selection? Name origins? Concocted names? Or do you just go down a baby name generator and spin until something feels good?

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December 31, 2013 · 9:18 am

2013 Unresolved

I am one of those people who makes resolutions.

I think most people “become” a resolution person for at least 2 hours around New Years’ Day, and stop being a resolution person, definitely, but January 3.

But I make resolutions and actually try to do them; at least, I have for the past few years. I contemplate the year ahead, write out some goals, and stick them on the door to my closet, where I’ll be forced to look at them every stinkin’ day. For the most part, this keeps me on track and I feel like I’m accomplishing something, so I like it.

Last year, I made a swath of resolutions, but three are particularly pertinent.

  • Build a website.
  • Send out queries for my most recent book.
  • Devote 4 hours a week to personal writing or editing.

The first one,  you’ll note, went pretty well. I launched this blog on February 12, 2013, and I have more or less stuck to a schedule of publishing at least two posts a week since then. WordPress tells me I’ve written 138 posts this year. Not too shabby, and I’m still proud of my little self-made blog. Not too bad at all.

(As a corollary, I launched my official Twitter presence at about the same time, and I’m up to 629 followers, utilizing my “don’t follow any particular strategy” strategy. However, this factoid is depressing when I realize that literal spambots have more followers than me, by the thousands. At that point, I start to hate humanity, give up on counting followers and go eat some chocolate or something.)

For the second goal, I … I was doing pretty well until May, then it came to a screeching halt. But I swear that is for a good reason. In May, that book I was sending query letters out for received two full manuscript requests. Courtesy says you are expected to stop trying to solicit other agents when this happens, so I stopped, completely. Which…maybe I shouldn’t have been courteous, because one agent declined the manuscript because she was switching agencies and the other, even now, hasn’t responded to me. Ah well. Perhaps next year.

However, I did learn that all the massive failures of my query to attract attention was, most likely, not because my book sucked, but because my query did. I had gotten a little overeager and tried something “different” in my query, which seemed brilliant at the time, but I found, at DFW Con, that it was getting me insta-rejected. So have heart! It may not be your book that’s the problem; just your query.

Finally, the writing goal. I was inspired by Stephen King and his dedicated blocks of writing time every week. Four hours a week was pretty ambitious for me, but I “allowed” myself to count blog-writing time as that personal writing time. At first, I was doing pretty well. In fact, here’s the chart I used to keep track:

2013goals

Each little X after the first two columns (used to track a different goal) represents 30 minutes of writing time. Each row is a calendar week. So from my helpful fridge chart, we can see that I did a damned decent job of writing or editing for myself for… half a year.

And then it’s blank.

I got some bad and stressful news in June, and basically lost the willpower to keep up with this fairly difficult goal. But I didn’t entirely quit writing (after all, blog posts continued to flow!). I lost the gumption to keep track of my writing, and to motivate myself to try more personal work, more flash fiction, or working on my novel. If I had to guess what the remaining six months would have looked like, had I bothered to keep track, I’d guess there would be a few blank weeks, but most of the weeks would be at least partially filled in. (Especially November. I wrote like a demon in November in order to win NaNoWriMo).

Even though I did an impressive pratfall on my writing resolution for the year, I found it to be a very helpful goal. It was too hard for me, regardless of what Stephen King manages to do, and I’ll have to recalibrate for next year, but having that little chart to remind me was a good way to get that “butt in chair” part of the equation going. I’m still figuring out what I want to focus on for my already-busy 2014, but I know that should be in there somewhere.

What are your writing/publishing goals for the coming year? How will you keep yourself on task?

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December 10, 2013 · 10:30 am

Review: Wicked Plants

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical AtrocitiesWicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked up Wicked Plants as a brain-break after NaNoWriMo, and it was a great decision!

It turns out much of the natural world is trying to kill us. This book will permanently banish the idea that “natural” means “good for you.” Plants are downright homicidal, and they’re quite creative with all the ways they are out to poke, poison, incapacitate, intoxicate, inflame, nauseate, and kill us.

While it’s not exactly written as a chapter book, I choose to read it straight through as if it were. It is organized loosely alphabetically by plant name, with occasional breaks for themed sections. While the named areas go into detail and history on one particular plant, the themed sections pile in a bunch of plants with only short descriptions. The inclusion of these “quick-hits” is fantastic, because you really get more information, but they are also what make this book useless as any identification guide.

The plants are labeled with markers like “illegal,” “dangerous,” “offensive,” “deadly,” and “intoxicating,” so you’ll know exactly what kind of trouble you’re getting yourself into. The information included is basic locational and taxonomical stuff, with anecdotes about people who were killed or drugged or in some way related to this plant (including the detail about Lincoln’s mother).

One of the added pluses for this book is the detailed and beautiful cover. It’s a hardback with old-book style, and really lights up your bookshelf. It comes with a ribbon bookmark sewn into the spine and a light gold shimmer on the light parts of the cover. The interior is just as lavish, with black-and-white etchings of the plants, just in case you really need to identify something, and morbid or garish illustrations of all the ways we’re going to be murdered by our flowering foe. The pages have a faux-aged patina that looks really great. This book is an attention-getter, for sure.

This book is a riot. It’s educational, beautiful, and fun. Triple-whammy. I’ll be dipping into it for trivia night for sure. Plus, any writer worth his salt needs this book; it’s chock-full of incredible, natural, believable ways to kill off your characters.

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December 5, 2013 · 10:36 am

Filling Buckets

It’s been an emotional year. I’ve attended two funerals, and wasn’t able to go to two more. These deaths were all unexpected, even for the elderly man and the friend who had cancer. No one was ready.

I’m not very good at talking about what these deaths have meant to me. Even though I know I should have gone to the receptions to support the families of the deceased, I couldn’t make myself do it. What could I possibly say? Instead, after accepting the well-intended but poorly timed greetings of those I hadn’t seen in a long time, those people who were brought back into my life only by our mutual sadness over the life of a friend, I retreated to my car, where I cried big hiccuping tears until my heart stopped hurting and I could breathe again.

I wasn’t particularly close to any of those who died this past year, but I cared for them, and those who loved them, deeply, and sometimes that empathy was like a knife to my heart. I continue to mourn for the sadness of those families still trying to recover from that pit of grief, some nearly a year later.

I don’t know if I am alone in this, but the thoughts of those who have, to put it euphemistically, passed on linger always on the edges of my mind. Sometimes I close my eyes and can see, perfectly clearly, my cousin, who died in an unnecessary and completely preventable drunk driving accident several years ago, lying unnaturally still in the coffin surrounded by perfumed white flowers. I’m starting to feel crowded in by thoughts of those who have passed; I think of them in the grocery store, in the morning as I get ready for work, in idle and unexpected moments.

I say all of this by way of explaining that I’ve been thinking about death a great deal this past year, about what causes it, whether we can understand it, what it means.

My Netflix DVD of “The Bucket List” arrived the same day that I was notified of the death of a family friend. Considering the content, I put it on a shelf and ignored it until I could wrangle my feelings.

As movies about an impending death go, it was pretty terrible. (Last Holiday was excellent, though, and I highly recommend it.) It was trite and predictable and completely lacking heart. But it, coupled with the weight of the funerals I’ve recently attended, did make me think about what things I want to do before I shake off this mortal coil.

One of those things was “write a book.” By now, fueled forward by NaNoWriMo, I’ve written three. I find it curious that, while I would like to be published — I would definitely like to be published! — that doesn’t make my list. I don’t feel like my life will be any less fulfilled if that doesn’t happen. Other things matter more, like seeing Ireland or getting married or controlling my career’s path. Writing the stories, that was the important thing.

I need to keep working on my bucket list; so much of it right now is very vague and undetermined. But I’m curious as to where ‘publishing’ falls on other writers’ lists?

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll change my mind about the importance of publishing when I’m not as melancholy. Maybe.

Is publishing an important life goal/bucket list item for you?

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