I tend to get very reflective as I approach the 100k word mark in any manuscript. I think it's brought on by a combination of looking at my outline and seeing how much I still have to write and looking at the notes I've been taking along the way and realizing how much I have to change or add in. I don't have enough words left if I want this book to be a reasonable length! And for the thousandth time, I admire those who can write with brevity. I'm doing well in terms of my personal timeline, although I'm growing skeptical about finishing the first draft as soon as I thought I would a few months ago. Oh well, plenty of extra time built into my schedule!
Still, my first draft (so far) for this manuscript is better than my first draft for my last manuscript. I've learned a lot from my previous mistakes. The problem is, and always will be, that there are plenty of new mistakes to make. Even with an extensive outline, there are instances where the plot reveals it's more shoddily constructed than I had anticipated, character motivations need reconsidering, or details need to be added earlier to support the current events of the novel. I suppose encountering new problems a good thing, though, or else writing wouldn't be a challenge anymore, and I'd probably go bored with it. And the fact that I can recognize these problems even as they arise is probably more indicative of growth than I would expect. You can't fix a problem you don't know about, after all.
Still, it might be nice to sometimes feel like a super-genius. Maybe tomorrow will be the day.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
One at a time vs. all the things, all the time
I am very single-minded when it comes to reading and writing. I read one thing at a time, or if I'm reading two, one is fiction and one is non-fiction. I write only one story at a time. At worst, I write the first draft of one, revise something else, and then write the second draft.
And when it comes to books I don't like, I either quit very early on--like, a chapter or two in and only if it's obvious nothing is going to make me like this story--or I soldier through, pressing through the narrative with gritted teeth.
So it's a bit surprising that as soon as a book I'd been awaiting showed up on my Kindle yet, I set aside the one I'd been reading (about 20% through) with little hesitation. The previous book is OK, though not terribly gripping yet, and the one I'd been waiting for is exciting so far, so I'm not regretting this decision, though I do feel a bit of guilt. The other author wasn't a bad writer. I'm sure I'll like the other book when I go back to it and get further in.
And now I'm finding myself tempted to do it with my writing, even though I'm on a roll with my current WIP and am enjoying my current place and pace. Plot bunnies have been forming like mad these past few weeks, both for future projects and revisions of short stories. The latter are making me debate whether I should set aside my manuscript for a week or so, but I'm managing with just noting down my ideas for later.
Perhaps it's a sense of freedom brought on by the completion of school. It's still difficult to fathom just how much mental energy even the steady semesters took, let alone the crazy-busy-I'm-going-to-die ones. But now my creativity is rebounding and I'm so grateful for it.
What about you? Are you a one-story-at-a-time type or one who bounces between eight things at once? How do you manage conflicting desires?
And when it comes to books I don't like, I either quit very early on--like, a chapter or two in and only if it's obvious nothing is going to make me like this story--or I soldier through, pressing through the narrative with gritted teeth.
So it's a bit surprising that as soon as a book I'd been awaiting showed up on my Kindle yet, I set aside the one I'd been reading (about 20% through) with little hesitation. The previous book is OK, though not terribly gripping yet, and the one I'd been waiting for is exciting so far, so I'm not regretting this decision, though I do feel a bit of guilt. The other author wasn't a bad writer. I'm sure I'll like the other book when I go back to it and get further in.
And now I'm finding myself tempted to do it with my writing, even though I'm on a roll with my current WIP and am enjoying my current place and pace. Plot bunnies have been forming like mad these past few weeks, both for future projects and revisions of short stories. The latter are making me debate whether I should set aside my manuscript for a week or so, but I'm managing with just noting down my ideas for later.
Perhaps it's a sense of freedom brought on by the completion of school. It's still difficult to fathom just how much mental energy even the steady semesters took, let alone the crazy-busy-I'm-going-to-die ones. But now my creativity is rebounding and I'm so grateful for it.
What about you? Are you a one-story-at-a-time type or one who bounces between eight things at once? How do you manage conflicting desires?
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Interesting AMA about sounds
My friend David linked me to this very interesting Ask Me Anything segment on Reddit, in which a deaf aspiring writer asks about sounds and the best contexts in which to use each word. It's a fascinating read for both deaf and hearing writers, and full of useful information concerning the nature of particular sounds, the social contexts in which they're used, and so forth. Check it out!
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
So, your background characters have lives outside of your protagonist.
A quick tip for adding more depth to your world and characters: show how your background characters relate to each other, not just your protagonist.
I've been noticing lately in a lot of novels that background characters tend to never interact with each other, only with the POV character. Even in group settings where they're standing around talking, they only address the protagonist. Sometimes they may echo each other, but rarely do they engage each other unless there's some animosity and conflict. There's little indication that they know each other, or talk to each other at other times, or have lives outside of the time they spend with the protag. There's little sense of shared history, camaraderie, interpersonal relationships. In groups that have recently formed within the story, characters tend to remain islands and only react to the words and actions of the protagonist. (Or perhaps they form small subgroups, but each of these groups functions as its own island, often with one leader and a few mostly-mute followers.) I find this unrealistic.
In any group, individuals are going to interact with every other individual. They are going to develop relationships and share experiences that shape their opinions of each other, and these things might happen (or have already happened) when the POV character isn't around to witness them. But they should still have an effect on how these characters behave toward each other when the protagonist is present, and adding little details to show this adds to the characters' personalities and the overall depth of the story.
Granted, you may not want to spend hundreds of pages fleshing this out. If you're using a limited POV, your protagonist obviously won't be proxy to the fight X and Y had or that shared coming-of-age experience between A and B. But they would still notice the little things, like how Y scoffs at X's suggestions or that joke about stew A tells that always makes B snicker. These are the things that help make A, B, X, and Y into fleshed-out people instead of interchangeable cardboard characters, even if they are minor characters. Of course, you don't want to bog down the story with details like these that aren't relevant to the overall plot, but in appropriate amounts, they can add a lot of atmosphere to the story. Experiences and relationships shape who people are, and providing hints of the ones your background characters have had that don't relate to your main character can help make them feel real.
I've been noticing lately in a lot of novels that background characters tend to never interact with each other, only with the POV character. Even in group settings where they're standing around talking, they only address the protagonist. Sometimes they may echo each other, but rarely do they engage each other unless there's some animosity and conflict. There's little indication that they know each other, or talk to each other at other times, or have lives outside of the time they spend with the protag. There's little sense of shared history, camaraderie, interpersonal relationships. In groups that have recently formed within the story, characters tend to remain islands and only react to the words and actions of the protagonist. (Or perhaps they form small subgroups, but each of these groups functions as its own island, often with one leader and a few mostly-mute followers.) I find this unrealistic.
In any group, individuals are going to interact with every other individual. They are going to develop relationships and share experiences that shape their opinions of each other, and these things might happen (or have already happened) when the POV character isn't around to witness them. But they should still have an effect on how these characters behave toward each other when the protagonist is present, and adding little details to show this adds to the characters' personalities and the overall depth of the story.
Granted, you may not want to spend hundreds of pages fleshing this out. If you're using a limited POV, your protagonist obviously won't be proxy to the fight X and Y had or that shared coming-of-age experience between A and B. But they would still notice the little things, like how Y scoffs at X's suggestions or that joke about stew A tells that always makes B snicker. These are the things that help make A, B, X, and Y into fleshed-out people instead of interchangeable cardboard characters, even if they are minor characters. Of course, you don't want to bog down the story with details like these that aren't relevant to the overall plot, but in appropriate amounts, they can add a lot of atmosphere to the story. Experiences and relationships shape who people are, and providing hints of the ones your background characters have had that don't relate to your main character can help make them feel real.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Race
I've been struggling a lot with race in my writing lately. Specifically, this is one of the first novels I've written that's set in a near-enough future that race issues (which shouldn't be complicated, but are) are not likely to be much different than today. Luckily for me and, I hope, for everyone in the long term, there's been much talk about this in the speculative fiction world for the last few years. SFWA posted a really great article on race in YA fiction last week, but the advice there is good food for thought for writers of any genre.
My current WIP is about a crew of humans (mostly Americans) who voyage to another planet. They are diverse because I believe that's an accurate representation of American society. It's what I grew up seeing. My high school was recognized for its diversity, and it's always been a bit of a shock for me to travel anywhere (in the U.S.) predominantly white. As a child, I was struck when one of my non-white friends remarked on the lack of people who looked like them in popular culture, in films and TV shows and even in our toys. Occasionally there'd be the token black character, or Asian or Latina. These were usually color swaps, at least when it came to toys: same mold, just a different dye in the plastic. So I think a part of me has always realized how ridiculous this is and wants to more accurately reflect contemporary society in the composition of my characters.
The source of my struggle is fear.
On the one hand, I don't want my characters to be tokens. I don't want to fill quotas. I just want the characters to be fully-formed individuals who happen to be this or that, and if I can shake people from mentally defaulting characters to white by mentioning that their skin happens to be some other shade (preferably not described through coffee lingo), then so be it. Because I think that's fair. On the other hand, I recognize that race does inform identity, especially for people who aren't part of the dominant group, and that at the very least this can make it harder for them to pursue certain opportunities. They've got it a lot harder than little old me, trying to figure out how to represent them.
So the question becomes: how much should I focus on race? How race has affected their path through life? How race affects their personalities, customs, habits? Is it enough if I include POC characters, or is it just my own version of color-swapping if they're not substantially different from the white ones? Do I need to delve deeper into the cultural and political complexities brought about by race relations?
Like I said, my current crew is pretty diverse. The captain is a black woman, just because that's how she came into my head. I think it's appropriate to mention that as such, she probably had to work several times harder than a white man would to prove she was right for the position. But given that the crew is an isolated group of nine on an empty planet, racial politics don't play much a role in the story and take a backseat to much more pressing concerns. Other characters are people of color just because the names that evolved in my head marked them as such. My goal wasn't to make a point about the capabilities of any of these races when I created the individual characters. I just wanted to create a variety of interesting people. Perhaps a detailed examination of race would be more important if the story were told from the captain's POV. But it's not. The POV has learned Earth history but never lived there and had to deal with society firsthand. We know she's at least half-white, since her biological mom appears earlier in the story, but her father's identity isn't stated. Long story short, in this very small group that is just trying to survive, she doesn't have to deal with any of the cultural BS she might experience if she were born on Earth and her father was a POC.
But am I just trying to avoid very real issues if I structure my stories to be as post-racial or race-irrelevant as possible? And am I doing anyone a disservice in that?
And what if someday I did want to write a story from the perspective of a POC in contemporary society? Most of my stories have been in societies far removed from our own, either created from scratch or set far enough in the future that I can pretend humans aren't jerks who care about skin color much, so I haven't had to address this issue. My fear then becomes being misunderstood or accidentally offensive. Societal ills run deep, and I'm probably not as free of indoctrination as I like to pretend. Of course, this fear of accidental offense applies to my current story as well; I may not be aware of the cultural connotations of some trait I give to a character, simply out of ignorance. Scary.
Like any other aspect of my story, it is my responsibility as the writer to do some research so I don't rely on stereotypes or something equally stupid. It's my duty to read books, talk to people, and so on to try to expand my perspective and represent it faithfully. But then sometimes I wonder: is it even my right to try to represent these other groups, rather than let them represent themselves? I write from a position of privilege. I'm white (and light-haired, -eyed, -and skinned at that), I'm Christian (though my more moderate/liberal brand of Anglicanism sometimes puts me at odds against the more mainline churches), and I'm (lower)-middle class. The only "strike" I've got against me is being a woman. But my telling a story featuring marginalized groups should not prevent members of those groups from also having their stories heard. Publishing should be big enough to put out good books regardless of the characters' or author's background AND actively provide room for marginalized people to tell their own stories. And we as readers should support these writers equally so that publishers realize they are marketable and valued and give them more opportunities to make their voices heard.
My best guess is that this is an issue that will continue to evolve throughout my life, inviting me to continuously reevaluate and try to do better each time. And I get the feeling that reader perspectives will probably vary by individual: some will read unintended offense into the way I kill off a character or the flaw I choose to give them, believing my portrayal of that individual represents my feelings toward their whole race (or religion, or other social division, etc.), while some may be happy just to see someone with the same phenotype (particularly if that character is one of the good guys). In my ideal world, I could just treat each character like a real person and that would be enough. But the real world is messy, and I have to live there.
What's your perspective? I've got many more musings, but this post is ridiculously long as is.
My current WIP is about a crew of humans (mostly Americans) who voyage to another planet. They are diverse because I believe that's an accurate representation of American society. It's what I grew up seeing. My high school was recognized for its diversity, and it's always been a bit of a shock for me to travel anywhere (in the U.S.) predominantly white. As a child, I was struck when one of my non-white friends remarked on the lack of people who looked like them in popular culture, in films and TV shows and even in our toys. Occasionally there'd be the token black character, or Asian or Latina. These were usually color swaps, at least when it came to toys: same mold, just a different dye in the plastic. So I think a part of me has always realized how ridiculous this is and wants to more accurately reflect contemporary society in the composition of my characters.
The source of my struggle is fear.
On the one hand, I don't want my characters to be tokens. I don't want to fill quotas. I just want the characters to be fully-formed individuals who happen to be this or that, and if I can shake people from mentally defaulting characters to white by mentioning that their skin happens to be some other shade (preferably not described through coffee lingo), then so be it. Because I think that's fair. On the other hand, I recognize that race does inform identity, especially for people who aren't part of the dominant group, and that at the very least this can make it harder for them to pursue certain opportunities. They've got it a lot harder than little old me, trying to figure out how to represent them.
So the question becomes: how much should I focus on race? How race has affected their path through life? How race affects their personalities, customs, habits? Is it enough if I include POC characters, or is it just my own version of color-swapping if they're not substantially different from the white ones? Do I need to delve deeper into the cultural and political complexities brought about by race relations?
Like I said, my current crew is pretty diverse. The captain is a black woman, just because that's how she came into my head. I think it's appropriate to mention that as such, she probably had to work several times harder than a white man would to prove she was right for the position. But given that the crew is an isolated group of nine on an empty planet, racial politics don't play much a role in the story and take a backseat to much more pressing concerns. Other characters are people of color just because the names that evolved in my head marked them as such. My goal wasn't to make a point about the capabilities of any of these races when I created the individual characters. I just wanted to create a variety of interesting people. Perhaps a detailed examination of race would be more important if the story were told from the captain's POV. But it's not. The POV has learned Earth history but never lived there and had to deal with society firsthand. We know she's at least half-white, since her biological mom appears earlier in the story, but her father's identity isn't stated. Long story short, in this very small group that is just trying to survive, she doesn't have to deal with any of the cultural BS she might experience if she were born on Earth and her father was a POC.
But am I just trying to avoid very real issues if I structure my stories to be as post-racial or race-irrelevant as possible? And am I doing anyone a disservice in that?
And what if someday I did want to write a story from the perspective of a POC in contemporary society? Most of my stories have been in societies far removed from our own, either created from scratch or set far enough in the future that I can pretend humans aren't jerks who care about skin color much, so I haven't had to address this issue. My fear then becomes being misunderstood or accidentally offensive. Societal ills run deep, and I'm probably not as free of indoctrination as I like to pretend. Of course, this fear of accidental offense applies to my current story as well; I may not be aware of the cultural connotations of some trait I give to a character, simply out of ignorance. Scary.
Like any other aspect of my story, it is my responsibility as the writer to do some research so I don't rely on stereotypes or something equally stupid. It's my duty to read books, talk to people, and so on to try to expand my perspective and represent it faithfully. But then sometimes I wonder: is it even my right to try to represent these other groups, rather than let them represent themselves? I write from a position of privilege. I'm white (and light-haired, -eyed, -and skinned at that), I'm Christian (though my more moderate/liberal brand of Anglicanism sometimes puts me at odds against the more mainline churches), and I'm (lower)-middle class. The only "strike" I've got against me is being a woman. But my telling a story featuring marginalized groups should not prevent members of those groups from also having their stories heard. Publishing should be big enough to put out good books regardless of the characters' or author's background AND actively provide room for marginalized people to tell their own stories. And we as readers should support these writers equally so that publishers realize they are marketable and valued and give them more opportunities to make their voices heard.
My best guess is that this is an issue that will continue to evolve throughout my life, inviting me to continuously reevaluate and try to do better each time. And I get the feeling that reader perspectives will probably vary by individual: some will read unintended offense into the way I kill off a character or the flaw I choose to give them, believing my portrayal of that individual represents my feelings toward their whole race (or religion, or other social division, etc.), while some may be happy just to see someone with the same phenotype (particularly if that character is one of the good guys). In my ideal world, I could just treat each character like a real person and that would be enough. But the real world is messy, and I have to live there.
What's your perspective? I've got many more musings, but this post is ridiculously long as is.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
My final set of finals
Studying like a fiend this week for the last final I imagine I will ever take while still trying to make my writing quota. I think I can do it.
That is all.
That is all.
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