Writing What You Know and Researching What You Don't

Beginning writers are often given the advice "write what you know." It's not a rule, not by a long shot. It's advice.

And it's not even advice that applies  long-term.

It's training wheels.

When you're starting to write, you have a lot of brand new considerations to make. You're learning to balance craft -- storytelling, grammar, narrative, pacing, character, dialog -- and the best way to do that is to do. That is, write. And if you're spending the majority of your time researching, then you're not writing.

Further, it can become hard to parse if your story isn't working because of craft issues or because you're writing about something you clearly have no experience with. It's best to eliminate variables to help diagnose the problem. In this case, eliminating places, careers, time periods, situations, etc., that you're unfamiliar with, means that the problems that are left are probably craft problems.
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So once a writer reaches the stage where her writing feels solid enough to take on research . . . well, that's a brand new, fabulous can of worms.

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Research: it's like spinach for writers

You need to know what you're talking about. There it is. The reason we say "write what you know." You need to know what you're talking about. If you've experienced it, all the better. If you haven't, then you need to research it to make it something you know.

And there are three layers of knowing to consider: details/mechanics, emotions, and cultural/social structures.

Details and mechanics can always be researched. Start with a Google search. Read articles on the topic. Read books on the top (or the relevant parts of books on the topic). Visit the location. Visit museums or reenactments of the time period. Watch/read fiction with a similar setting.

You can find Writer's Police Academy events put on around the country -- very popular with mystery writers for obvious reasons. They walk writers through some routine procedures, let them learn what it feels like to be handcuffed, answer questions, and the like.

Of course, technical details can be gleaned from reading-research or watching-research, but nothing beats the real thing for the sensory experience. The smell, sound, taste, and feel of the thing/place can instantly make fiction real, regardless of how well we can "see" it.

Emotions. The way people react in certain situations and the ways they process information, grief, etc. -- those are much harder to do direct research on. The best research on this count is life experience. The more situations you've encountered in your life, the more you know about your own reactions and the reactions of others. Some can be discerned through people-watching, and some through really engaging with fiction, but nothing beats life experience.

Have you ever read something where the character's emotion seems totally off base and you just have to wonder, has the writer ever actually experienced the death of someone close to them? or falling in love? had their heart broken? been cheated on? lost a job? been told they had a life-changing diagnosis? been in combat? or whatever the situation is. Research/experience is important here too.

Not to mention social structures. Different social groups have different structures and rules that determine how people act. Be aware that characters from different backgrounds will act differently, whether it's a cultural, generational, or linguistic difference. I've seen good writers fail miserably while attempting space-based military science fiction. They love the genre and have a grasp of the science, but absolutely no experience with the military, and it killed the realism of the character interactions in that particular setting. Can someone who's never served write good military SF? Probably, but it'll take a lot of research and the help of experts.

Research makes writing stronger. Like spinach.

But like Popeye, you don't apply the spinach directly to the problem, you ingest it and let it work through you. Don't dump research directly into the writing, let it work through you. Let it become part of your character building and creative process. Let it become part of your body and brain until you use it unconciously.

And beware the infodump-disguised-as-dialog route. That's a bit like swaping coats and expecting facial recognition software not to find you. Savvy readers will be able to see right through that disguised research dump.

But research that's well incorporated can heighten the reader's sensory experience. Do you know what a morgue smells like? I don't. Not from personal experience. But a well-written scene could transport me there even if it's not an experience I really want to have firsthand.

Research: it's like entering the Fire Swamp

Do you know someone who's been "doing research" on their novel for years? When you ask how the writing's going, they tell you about this or that resource they've found and how it's inspiring them, but updates on the actual writing of the story are much more sparse.

Research, as wonderful and necessary as it may be, can become a Fire Swamp for writers that prevents them from reaching their ultimate goal: the writing.  Patches of lightning sand to suck you in and suffocate you. Spouts of flame. R.O.U.S.s that creep along in the shadows, tailing you, wiggling their ugly noses to stay on your scent.

The Fire Swamp is absolutely not someplace you'd like to build a summer home, but it is a place you could live quite happily for a while . . . so long as you get out before one of the three great dangers of the Fire Swamp does you in. Or rather, kills your chances of completing a project.

It's the twists and turns of research that suck you in so that you never feel like you've reached the bottom, that you know enough, and can stop researching. It's the spurt of flame that destroys one idea, so you move your feet quickly and start down a new path of research you didn't expect to go down in order to flesh out a second idea. It's the creeping doubt that you're not getting it right, you need to know more before you can proceed or the critics and experts are going to eat you alive.

You may have to traverse the Fire Swamp of research. Just remember, once you go in you can make it out.

But why bother doing deep research at all? Because Wikipedia is a wonderful place to start research but a horrible place to end it.

Moving beyond Wikipedia

Wikipedia, a horrible place for your research to end. Yep, it's worth repeating.

Wikipedia can't tell you what a morgue smells like. It can't express to you on a scale of 1-10 how itchy and uncomfortable a Civil War uniform is. It can show you pictures of the coast of Ireland or the Amazon rain forest or the Southwest, but it can't tell you how the air feels on your skin in those places or the wuzziness of altitude sickness in a desert is like. Nor is it going to differentiate between technical detail and day-to-day details of certain occupations.

Consider Wikipedia on par with asking your spouse or neighbor or co-worker, hey, have you ever heard of such-n-such, and then discovering that they have a good passing knowledge of the thing. Conversational knowledge. They can give you keywords and point you in the right direction as you continue to research and read things by actual experts that is more in depth than a Wikipedia article could ever be (and eventually you can contact those experts, more on that later). Whether those are news articles, journal articles, or books.

And no, not all those resources are going to be free.

Well, not free on the internet. But if you have a library card, you can bet your ass they're still free. You just have to do some work and carry your butt down to your library.

Only have a popular library in your town? No access to a research library (usually a university library)? Actually, you do have access to huge libraries even through a tiny little small town library. Most public libraries are connected to a state-wide network that connects both city and university collections. In Michigan it's called MeL Cat, the Michigan eLibrary Catalog. What you can do with that website catalog is take your library card, the one from Podunk Town, and use it to check out books from the University of Michigan or Michigan State University or whoever has the book you want. And best of all, those libraries will deliver the book to your local library for free. You pick it up and check it out using your regular old library card.

If you have access to a system like this (and again, in Michigan you almost always can get access and I have to imagine other states have similar systems), you can get access to serious, vetted, in depth resources, some of which would be expensive -- or impossible, if they're out of print -- to purchase on your own.

All you have to do is be patient and wait for them to be delivered. Use that time to write the next scene. You know, avoid feeling like you're building a summer cottage in the fire swamp.

When/how to consult an expert

In the Roundtable Podcast interview "20 (more) minutes with Jeanne Cavelos, the host remarked that Jeanne Cavelos had several appeals for help listed on her website's front page. One of which was for experts in scientific fields she was not herself well versed in, and another appeal states, "My main character is bipolar (manic-depressive). If you are bipolar and don't mind sharing some of your experiences..."

I agree with the Roundtable Podcast host Dave Robison about the absolute remarkableness of reaching out. As writers who are creating whole worlds in our minds or who are perhaps hard pressed to carve out time alone to do the writing, the idea that we then need to reach out to others is . . . tough sometimes. Such an easier route is to just jump on Wikipedia and call it done.

Jeanne Cavelos urged writers to do research, "whether to make the setting more real, the science more real, or the magic more real." And divulged that when she started writing she didn't want to ask for expert help because she felt embarrassed to not know.

She also shared what she's found to be the best way to approach an expert: gather as much information about the subject as you can before you approach the expert -- asking them to give you a crash course in the topic isn't useful or polite -- so that by the time you're reaching out to them they know you "just have some questions that only a person can answer." Even mentioning the time she contacted an expert in manhole covers after reading the book the expert had written.

Yes, an expert in manhole covers. There are all sorts of people out there with specialized knowledge.

It reminds me of an Anne Lamott essay in Bird by Bird where she recounts becoming obsessed with figuring out the word for the wire thingy on top of a champagne bottle. It's called a wire hood, by the way, but gaining that knowledge led her down a path that eventually had her on the phone with a monk who worked in a vineyard. Her point in the essay was that researching by reaching out to speak to experts makes writing more communal (which Wikipedia cannot do -- although  admittedly, she was penning the essay before the rise of Wikipedia).

"Sometimes I think I know the answer and I just want to confirm it," Jeanne Cavelos says in her podcast interview. "And many times they [the experts] volunteer details that are incredible that I want to incorporate in some way into the book. That's one way primary sources and experts can really help you, providing these details that you can't imagine and you can't find in a book. As writers, we tend to believe we have pretty good imaginations, but really the truth is often way stranger and more interesting than we can imagine."

I once heard from a paramedic who said he'd been prepared to see weird stuff when he'd worked in New York City, but hadn't truly seen weird shit until he started working the same job in Cleveland. And no, I couldn't imagine the details. Not without asking someone who'd actually been there.

Should You Kill Off Your Characters? (And When)

Not long ago, I was ask to participate as a panelist in the day-long event "Get Published! 2016" at the Herrick District Library in Holland, Michigan. The event was put on by MiFiWriters and was the first such event they've hosted. I spoke as editor of a small press alongside the editors of MiFiWriters and Caffeinated Press -- all Michigan-based small presses. I'm hopeful it was of use to those attending -- I know I was tickled to talk to a near-full room -- and I'm certain it will only become a better and stronger event if MiFiWriters choose to run another one in 2017.

The programming mainly focused on the mechanics of publication, so that's what I'd prepped for. But there were a couple of questions that arose from the interests of the audience that I hadn't prepped for and, consequently, really got me thinking.

One such was about killing off characters. Should you kill off characters or should you avoid it?

We live in a post-Game-of-Thrones world.

The immediate response from the panelists showed me one thing: We live in a post-GoT world.

We welcome Game of Thrones (GoT) being Game of Thrones, but anything else that's as savagely death-happy we're . . . well, we're over it. Which is funny when you consider that in Dexter (the TV show not the books) you had at least one murder per episode carried out by the protagonist and frequently another murder occurring under other circumstances. What Dexter didn't have was the continual, perpetual killing off of primary characters, characters we'd grown to care about, although many did eventually get the ax, it wasn't constant. That's pure GoT.

One panelist even said that he'd been all murdered out by GoT. So many interesting characters had been killed off on GoT that he'd lost the ability to bond with or care about any new character he met in that world. A perfectly normal coping reaction. If you're constantly being tragically abandoned, sooner or later you develop a defense mechanism and assume it's better to not get invested in anyone, because if you do, they're only going to leave you and hurt you in the process. Even if they're just a character in a book.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the sort of stories where everyone lives no matter what.

Stories where, as ridiculous and implausible as it might be for a person to live through Situation X, the characters miraculously do. Further, they tend to survive these scrapes without a scratch on them, certainly not without the months or years of medical treatment normally associated with living through a physically brutal event. So much so that by the next episode they don't even have a limp or a sling or a residual pain that leads them to a pill addiction. Nope. Everybody lives. Everybody's healthy. No need for "scraped and bruised" makeup in the next episode even though it's supposed to just happen a few days later.

Dude. Let me just say, I've had bruises from running into the coffee table that have lasted longer than most lived-through-a-car-accident-on-a-TV-show bruises.

If the above examples represent the two ends of the spectrum, where should a writer try to fit his or her story? 

The simplest answer I can give is: Probably somewhere in between the two extremes.

Of course, the nuanced answer is . . . well, nuanced.

It depends on your plot, world building, and character development. Don't kill off characters willy-nilly just because you can, or because you don't know what else to do with an extraneous character.

True story: I had a friend in high school who, whenever we were asked to write a creative story in English class, would kill off every single character by the end of the story. She wasn't a terribly macabre person -- actually, she was quite bubbly and cheerful -- she just didn't know how to end stories, and admitted as much. If everyone died, then the story had to be over, so everyone died. Honestly, next to her, GRRM looks like a spring pansy.

If a character dies in a story, it needs to serve the story. Or -- what I probably said at the conference this past weekend -- the death needs to serve the plot. 

Then -- boom! -- the following infographic appeared in one of my social media feeds a day or so after the conference. (Or maybe it wasn't serendipity, maybe it came to my attention because I was looking for it, consciously or subconsciously. Or is that in and of itself a precondition of serendipity? But I digress.)

Nifty infographic from helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com on what's a good or bad reason for killing off a character.

The infographic comes from the K.M. Weiland article "How to Successfully Kill a Character," and opens with the utterly provcative statement, "I love killing people."

On the panel we discussed how a character's death can re-frame a narrative. [Hunger Games spoilers, this paragraph only.] How nearly reaching the end of Hunger Games only to have Prim die -- when avoiding Prim's death was more or less the inciting incident of the trilogy -- helps solidify the ultimate narrative outcome as not one of triumph or accomplishment but one of futility and the cyclical nature of human greed and suffering, power and rebellion.

Proving you've got the chops to mete out death.

In a podcast, Carrie Vaughn has described her killing off of a character in Kitty and the Midnight Hour as an act of proving it wasn't another happy-go-lucky world where everybody lived. Indeed, it was more serious than that, more deadly, more dangerous. Like some sort of literary hazing ritual, killing off a character can be a moment when a writer decides they want to prove themselves as someone not to be taken lightly.

But tread cautiously. Carrie Vaughn was still using the character's death in service of the plot. She could have reworked the plot to not need that death. It would have been a different book if everybody lived. And what she's talking about is making that choice to not be the book where everybody lives . . . [read the full blog post on eileenwiedbrauk.com]

The Putty-Theory of World Building

As a teenager, I attended a local day-camp for writers with several friends in what would turn out to be my first creative writing workshop ... workshop-ish. The lead instructor was perplexed (and yet fascinated) as to why my three friends and I all wanted to write fantasy, only occasionally dabbling in realism. None of the other workshoppers dallied across genres that summer, and he'd never seen teens so adamant about fantasy fiction. (Note: this was the universe pre-Harry Potter.)

We told him that the fiction we enjoyed reading the most was fantastic in nature, but this answer didn't appease him as we all admittedly read across many genres

It wasn't until I told him why fantasy was, at the time, easier for me to write that he seemed enlightened. At sixteen, I had (perhaps) half-a-clue as to why people behaved the way they did. Oh, I was engaged in social groups, but half the time I wasn't able to predict how I would react in a situation let alone how other people would. I didn't understand fully what motivated people or how they expressed those emotions, but I cared about getting it right in my fiction. And I just wasn't able to. But when I wrote second-world fantasy, I  could make up some cultural/magical reason for my character's behavior. Having a malleable world let me fill plot holes with fantasy putty.

I've since come to what I hope is a more sophisticated understanding of plotting and world building than I had at sixteen, but the putty or plaster-and-paint-over of fantasy writing was necessary to keeping me writing for years as I came to understand better how humans worked and how the adult world worked. I suppose I could have solved the same problem by setting all my stories in a high school, but that approach brought its own risks (and still does): anytime you write about a setting that too closely resembles your day-to-day life, people assume that you're writing about yourself / people you know. Getting caught in such a situation in high school can be the end of the world. Post-high school it's still pretty damn annoying.

Recently, a discussion came up about which genre was more "freeing" for a writer, science fiction or fantasy. As in, in which of these speculative sub-sets does a writer have more freedom to "just make stuff up." The initial question was posed with a predisposition toward sci-fi as freer, which given my experience, struck me as a goose of strange feathers: I would have never been able to use fantasy as putty if it hadn't been freeing.

As as teen, I also tried writing sci-fi, but like urban fantasy, sci-fi rests on the presupposition that our current society has developed into the story's society. So I'd still have to understand people to build the story. Unless the story was full of aliens, then rock on. But for fantasy set in a secondary world, even if it was pseudo-medieval, it was never actually "earth," so I could wend as I wanted.

Classic (i.e. mid-century) science fiction was open to a lot more possibilities. Recent trends in sci-fi suggest that it should be bound by known physics ... which has led us to lots of post-apocalyptic Earth-based stories since so many scientists believe that faster-than-light travel was impossible (although that opinion might be changing), so we couldn't have space operas or alien encounters (the odds of humanoid life developing independently on another planet are ... minuscule), or space federations or Death Stars, or ray guns, or living ships ... in short, it got serious about its science, which curtailed the freedom of writing sci-fi while sucking the fun out of reading it.

Similarly, there's been a movement in second-world fantasy fiction to make the worlds more rule-based and harshly criticize any novels that don't make rigid physics-like rules for their worlds. Destroying the freedom of bending fantasy into any shape you want and -- to make a personal appraisal -- giving us fantasy novels like Game of Thrones which has a pseudo-medieval setting but very, very few traces of magic and speculative wonder in it. And what magic there is, is disapprovingly scrutinized.

Anecdote: I once heard that a reader, upon meeting George RR Martin, questioned him on why he had a giant wall of ice in his novel as it was physically impossible. GRRM (not pleased by the question) responded, "it's magic."

Personally, I think it's a question GRRM set himself up for by having a world that was so rule based, so seemingly real that the presence of magic sat with the reader as ... odd.

But the notion that science fiction should be bound by physics and fantasy should be bound by a rule system as rigorous and rigid as physics is only one school of thought.

There's another school of thought out there that writers should reclaim the fun and freedom of science fiction and fantasy. That says let magic be magical, not so rigorously studied and understood that there could be a Wikipedia page on it. See N. K. Jemisin's beautiful piece where she asks "Why Does Magic Have to Make Sense? A piece she opens with the Arthur C. Clarke quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's a revival of this fun and freeing fiction going on. I feel it's more noticeable in science fiction as editors and writers take a stand against the dark depressing overtones and produce works like Far Orbit: Speculative Space Adventures, which is coming out in spring 2014.

I say hurrah! to putting the fun and freedom, the mystery and magic, the awe and wonder back into science fiction and fantasy. A novel should, of course, always make sense, but I say that having a malleable world is a beautiful thing, and so long as a writer is willing to sand and paint after they've plastered some strange magic into their world, then bravo!, it need not be one continuous, unblemished piece of drywall. Why take some beautiful, wondrous, unexplained but unblemished creation like an energy field created by all living things that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together ... then go and kill the wonder and restrict its freedom by quantifying it into a threshold number of midichlorians?

Top photo credit: "Students' notice board, 1973," LSE Library via Flickr.

Pick Yourself Up and Start Again

This essay (article, post, whatever you may call it) is going to be about writer's hope, direction, perhaps even the implementation of  some self-discipline. It's about embarking on a new project -- or more precisely, embarking on the finishing of a project, the project itself isn't exactly new just the stirring desire to finish -- with positive, patient persistence. (For hopefulness about writing, read on...)

How I'm going to convey that feeling isn't something I've planned out. Perhaps this is indicative of the fact that I've not much planned my project -- all I have is a feeling to spur me on. But I try to think of these posts as short essays (blog posts are always better when they draw some sort of conclusion that echos the opening, no?), and as I try to implore my writing students, essays are nothing more lofty than an attempt to communicate your personal thinking on some subject, the term "essay" coming from the French essayer (v), to try. Or essai (n) a try.

An essay is an attempt at expression. It may meander, it may be cut and edited, but it shouldn't be overly rigid in construction and planning, otherwise how can you make great discoveries of self and thought while you essay? Save your structure and fact and organization for editing, well after you've essayed your way to some truths.

And so I am trying.

At this precise moment, I'm trying to stay positive, not sick to my stomach as I watch the pest control guy spray just part of the nearby apartment building. Just part? I understand how that's cost effective, but not how that's get-rid-of-the-pest effective. Ug. Another great reason to keep cats: they find the pests before you do and, usually, eat it before you're the wiser.

But the man with a can of pressurized chemical spray isn't the only thing which should be dragging on my sense of direction and hope, yet isn't. For starters, the Attack of the Back has devastated my past week.

The non-compliance of my body to respond to my commands in a useful manner meant that on this past Saturday it took me twenty minutes to go from reclining to standing, unassisted. And then once I was standing it was less than twenty minutes before Attack of the Back protested so loudly that I was forced back into the previous, reclined posture. I am currently on the mend. Mend-ish. I may actually have to give in and go see a chiropractor. You know, get over that aversion/advice I was previously given that once you start going to a chiropractor you can't ever stop. Because hey, isn't that also true for dentists? And because hey, these Attacks of the Back are painful and they don't look like they're ever gonna stop coming to visit me either.

So I'm upright again. Sorta. I had big 2013 dreams of punching out a lot of words starting on January 1 and not stopping until ... okay, just not stopping. But the reality is that the punching out hasn't started. Half-way through the month and I'm still working to get my feet under me (figuratively) from the whirlwind end of 2012 and (literally) from the Attack of the Back. Newyness aside, there's no reason that my self-discipline and goals have to be pegged to calendar start and end points. So sally forth! I say. And tallyho! Cowabunga! And other similar cries which indicate a rush of activity!

No, no, that's not what I want.

If there's one thing I've learned about myself, it's that I am prone to manic writing. Followed by furloughs of no writing. Some of which is deadline driven -- oh baby, there ain't nothing like the sound of a deadline whooshing past to get me on task! -- but some of it is an intensity issue. Frenzied activity in general is easy  to get on board with. It's Day One of the exercise routine/diet where you're super good, followed by week two when you can't even remember that you're on a routine/diet because you just can't take the super good intensity anymore. You're like, dude, chill out with this craziness and get me a cupcake. I need moderation and discipline. Not a celery stick and ice cream pendulum. Not the frenzy that follows the cry of tallyho, but the deliberate fox-stalking which precedes it.

Instead, a gentle push to get me started:

Today I received a lovely, personal letter from a magazine which I respect telling me that my story was well written and interesting, and then telling me all the reasons why it wasn't going to be published by them. What a great big happy-sad feeling that produces. I adore the fact that they took the time to talk to me about the story. I'm pleased with their compliments. But I'm sad to have failed in the endeavor of getting them to publish the story.

"Bittersweet" doesn't really begin to describe the conflicting emotions this particular letter invokes. "Bittersweet" describes previous such letters I've received -- letters which I usually don't blog about because I don't usually feel the desire to make such things public. This time I'm far too happy and far too sad, simultaneously, to reconcile the two into any nameable emotion.

It is however a spur. A gentle push to get me started. Along with all the things the letter said, I take away this: they're eager to see what I send them next. So on to the next. A brilliant nudge to get me to complete edits on a short story I've let languish for eighteen months. And get it done now. Using the short goal to achieve a sense of action and purpose, to garner momentum, enough to pick myself up and start again.

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Note: I couldn't find a way to work it into the above essay, though I did try, but I wanted to point out another lovely post on writer's hope, direction, and discipline that I read today. Rebecca Enzor's "Give Them a Chance to Say Yes" inspired by a beautiful tweet by Amalia Dillin. Her direction is more focused on submissions than creation, but still terribly hopeful. Autumn MacArthur's blog is also great for these sort of inner-looking hopeful-writer-rants which I love.
Top photo credit: "by Stik" By Feral78 via Flickr.

Careers, Critics, and Professors

Kristine Kathryn Rusch recently published a post titled "Careers, Critics, and Professors" in her The Business Rusch series. The article left me saying: Yes! Thank you, yes. Finally someone gets it and articulates it well without being crass, mean, or inflammatory.

I sent the article to a friend getting a graduate degree in music composition. His response was that Rusch was "right on during the half about conservatories ... it sounds like we (the music world) lost out on a great composer."

And where I didn't know anything about music conservatories, I know a lot about graduate and undergraduate writing programs, and Rusch manages to articulate everything (well, almost everything) that frustrated me about my own MFA experience. Frustration that lead me to looking into programs like Clarion and Odyssey and eventually attending the Odyssey Writing Workshop. Frustration that led me to taking the one course offered in three years on publishing and ending up spending more time (because I was more interested) on that coursework than on any other course in my entire graduate career. Frustration that lead me to speak out at the Professors and Graduate Students of Writing meeting that we should offer more publishing classes, offer them more regularly, require students to take them even, not just proceed with "the option to work on the program's associated literary journal."

Oh, and in that meeting, people nodded when I spoke -- one graduate student who had a chapbook published before she started the program also begged for publishing-related coursework because until her publisher sent her a proof of her chapbook, she'd never seen a copyediting mark.

Again, people in the room nodded, then said that students who wanted to learn about publishing should edit the literary journal. I pointed out that the one publishing class they were talking about not offering again had been wonderful because it had been about more than editing. It had been about explaining how a journal works as a business, how a small press works as a business, how a larger press operates, and the course had given a sense of history of publishing and printing.

They nodded again. Then reminded me that, well, the program is an art degree.

I sighed and let it go. I was done with my own degree by that point. I'd been teaching composition for 3+ years on minimal training and lots of hands-on experience. If there's one thing my experiences in academia have taught me, it's how to teach myself by researching and reasoning, improving old skill sets to apply them to new situations. So I'd already sought out other avenues of education on what it meant to have a career and how to go about making one.

Do not mistake my meaning: I learned a great deal in my MFA program. words and line level craft are important and something I needed to be taught. But it's not a holistic approach to the act of writing. And a career cannot be focused on minutia, it has to be holistic.

I'm a work in progress -- aren't all people's careers? -- but I'm fairly certain of what I want and that what I want isn't a PhD in creative writing to perpetuate the art of writing. No, what I want isn't to be an artist, it's to be a career storyteller, whatever form that may take.

Bridging gaps and weaving worlds

Today I'm the writer of the guest post for Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine. Read here to see me make the obvious connection between Rumpelstiltskin and starting a small press.

Meanwhile, writer and blogger Elizabeth Twist is visiting World Weaver Press. her guest post tackles the genre of horror and whether or not it's really a genre or something more pervasive. Her article may just have you rethinking how  you define "horror."

Creating the lie

I love this writing concept!  Outlined in this article, "creating the lie" is all about that thing that your character believes at the start of the story which isn't true. And, in essence, the entire story is about them going through whatever it is they need to go through so that they no longer believe the lie by the end of the story.

Why do I love this concept? Because it's a great way of tying together the action aspects of the story with the psychological aspects of the story. I often find myself writing critiques to other writers about how their climaxes have become all action and no emotion. Now it's true that I've come to agree to disagree about the amount of description that should be on the page concerning emotional reaction / character feelings / character's internal reaction to stimuli.(I'm a big fan of more! so long as it's engaging, because I want to feel as they feel, agonize as they agonize, pump my fist in the air as they rejoice.) But thinking of your character as "caught in a lie they must overcome" forces you to not let the climax be about action alone.

Yes, the climax is tense. Yes, the climax is action filled.  Yes, you're speeding up the pacing by trimming down exposition. But trimming exposition doesn't mean  you have to trim emotion. Actually, Monica Wood's book on writing called Description has absolutely awesome discussion and examples of just this, so let me say it again: amping up the pacing and cutting exposition does not mean you have to cut character emotion -- it just means delivering it in short bursts relative to the pacing of the action surrounding it.

How story defines the self

I recently heard a re-broadcast series of radio-articles from NPR's Radio Lab that explored the question of what makes us ourselves. Not just what makes us human, but what makes us have the personalities that we do and, essentially, how we understand our own personal histories and use those histories to create identity.

But what struck me as the most memorable moment of the show -- and the whole thing was fascinating to me as a writer and creator of fictional people, and I think most writers would agree with me that the discussion is fascinating in a philosophical sort of way -- was when they boiled down what creates the "self":

The "self" is the ability to experience, then abstract those experiences into story.

They were talking mainly about the ability to tell people stories about your day, and dig up your war stories to rehash around the fire. But they also touched on the ability to fictionalize. And to imagine that which we've never seen. No one's every seen a man with wings, but we are able to abstract the experience of man and the experience of bird and then imagine an angel.

I think these radio articles are fascinating for any writer and a must-hear for fantasy writers out there.

Fantasy's contract with the finite world

There's a great Ursala Le Guin essay that's (re)printed in The Secret History of Fantasy (primarily a short story collection with a couple of essays).  In her essay, Le Guin points out that while fantasy fiction and surrealism differentiate themselves from realism by dealing in that which is realistically impossible, fantasy and surrealism are not interchangeable.

Surrealism, she says, is when the rules of reality are subverted.

Fantasy is when the rules of reality are subverted, and replaced with a new set of rules.

Therefore fantasy is more like realism than surrealism. You read fantasy fiction and realism expecting a certain set of rules to shape and guide the world and your reading of it. Therefore, if something strange happens in a fantasy story, you don't ask if it was a dream. Fantasy authors aren't subverting rules, or trying to trick your mind; if they tell you something happened, then it happened. Believe the words on the page: it was real, not a dream.

(You have no idea how badly I wish I could have gotten my MFA workshop groups to read this Le Guin essay or at least listen to the above statements, but I digress.)

And so the fantasy reader enters into the novel having a contract with the finite world. The realism reader makes that contract with the author before she opens the book. The fantasy reader gives the author (roughlyt) the first 50-100 pages to set the terms of the contract. She'll believe events that are based off of that contract -- but throw any "extras" at her, and she's likely not buying.

I've been struck more than once by a situation (often near the end) which a dramatist would call deus ex machina -- essentially, a moment when a god or some other device, enters into the novel and "fixes" the narrative problem, allowing everyone a happily ever after.

Why am I writing about this specifically in the context of fantasy? Because sometimes you'll be reading a fantasy novel with, say, vampires and then the narrative problem will be solved by the appearance of, oh let's say, a ghost.

It's all gravy, right?  I mean it's a fantasy novel -- we expect fantastic things, right?

Wrong.

The appearance of the ghost is a form of deus ex machina because the sudden appearance of the ghost broke the contract with the finite world.  In Le Guin's terms, the fantasy broke the rules of reality that it had established for itself.

If the viability of ghosts in this vampire world was established early on as part of the rule building / world building, then the sudden interruption of a ghost at the end of the story would not warrant a cry of deus ex machina.  It would warrant perhaps a subtle oh, another ghost -- clever.


Yesterday I posted about series novels, and discussed the ever-growing superpowers as a breech of contract with the finite world. If we're sticking with the contract metaphor, then every-growing superpowers (the kind that get surprisingly bigger and better with each book) would be a legal gray area. Not an outright violation, but not exactly in the spirit of the contract either. As a reader, I'd much rather see characters deal with the situation using what they have, getting cunning and clever -- after all, making a character work within the rules of her reality makes her story resonate with the human experience, and that's what all fiction, no matter the genre, should strive to do.

Tell me! -- No! Shh, don't tell!

There is a lot of literature on the web about how to self-promote your writing.  Particularly how to build a platform and use it to shout across the web.  Sites like Kristen Lamb's Blog (which I find fascinating) explain how to use social media to your advantage -- effectively, she instructs you on how to do the digital equivalent of enunciating when you speak.  But for as much noise as the make-noise-brigade, um, makes, there is a quiet backlash of people who don't want to tell anyone that their publications even exist.

This weekend, Dinty W. Moore posted a fab little article on the blog of his online magazine BREVITY.*    Moore is also a faculty member of the Ohio University graduate program in creative writing.  He's noticed recently that he has students who won't tell people their work has been published.  It's not that they're shy wallflowers -- in Moore's story, he was the one offering to make the announcement, he just needed specifics from the student -- it's that they don't want to share.

I understand some of the backlash.  There is such a thing as overkill.  Or being tactless.  I don't want you to spam me about your new book, but I do want the opportunity to find out about it.  Publications are not CIA agents, they do not need to blend in and accomplish tasks that only a select few will ever know of.  But neither do we want our publications to be politicians or Paris Hiltons, always looking for the photo op or thinking about what they could do to get a sound bite on Entertainment Tonight.

Moore points out that Facebook can be nice, or it can lead to spamming.  It's all about tact.  I've read blog articles because someone has multi-posted the subject and link on Facebook and Twitter ... but I've also been put off when a find a person's entire feed is them posting links to blog entries again and again (as in, multiple links to the same entry, or suggestions to "catch up" on their old blog posts).

I got frustrated last fall when no one in the department knew that I'd gotten two short stories published because the publications had happened over the summer.  Their "not knowing" didn't bother me as much as them behaving like I was still unpublished.  I had an awkward conversation with a faculty member who told me I'd feel much better about myself once I got something published.  Awkward because I didn't feel like I could interrupt her to explain I was published, and awkward because I didn't feel any different before my publication than I did afterward.  But more to the point: we had that conversation because she didn't know.  In fact, she couldn't have known.  I wasn't cray-cray girl running around telling everyone that I had a story pubbed, but neither had I exercised the channels in place for department promotion.  Because, to be honest, I didn't even know those channels existed!  So run out and do that now: locate the person in charge of your department newsletter and find that email address.  A quick blurb will tastefully disseminate that information without being cray-cray girl.

To make it more palatable to those who would otherwise stay silent, Moore breaks it down into "sharing" vs. "promoting," with "promoting" being the creature that maybe you don't want to ride to the finish line.  He also points out that often publications (particularly independent presses and magazines) don't get bought without word of mouth sales.  "Sharing" your publications contributes to those publications audience base.

Here are Moore's six rules of sharing:

1.     Self promotion is when you spam all of your friends and those who are barely friends and repeatedly say “buy my stuff,” or “look at my stuff.”  We don’t need daily updates.
2.     Self promotion is NOT when you share good news with fellow strugglers (like grad students in your program, or the faculty who are rooting for your success).  That’s just being part of a supportive community.
3.     To my mind, even a link on Facebook, or on your blog, or as a signature line in your e-mail (subtle, not blaring), is NOT self promotion, at least not the bad kind that folks want to scorn and avoid.  Certain people wish to know your good news, or read your poem, or buy your book, so it is fully acceptable to tell them that the work is now available.  It is, in fact, inconsiderate not to tell them.
4.     Tell them once, of course, not fifty times, and give them a clean link rather than e-mailing PDFs of everything you’ve ever written.
5.     If you assume your friends would hate you for your success rather than be pleased for you, maybe it is time to look for new friends.  Or look at yourself.
6.     Writing is not bad.  Publishing your writing is not bad.  Don’t treat it as if it were.

If you're interested, I recommend the full article.

Oh, and btw, I just got a story accepted at Enchanted Conversation! (eeee!) That was an excited noise.  And I will be posting when the issue goes live.

* I love BREVITY's nonfic mini-essays ... I just wish they'd publish one of mine.


Photo credit: Sasha Wolff at SashaW

Searching, Receiving ... now if the universe could just deliver me a story before deadline

I've been searching for the Robert Heinlein article/letter titled "On the writing of speculative fiction," ever since Elizabeth Twist referenced it in her post earlier this week.  It's better known as "Heinlein's rules of writing."  All I can find of it on the internet are the rules themselves and that it's supposedly from a 1947 private letter to Heinlein's agent Blassingame.  I've contacted my father to see if it's in Grumbles from the Grave, which I remember skimming for a report in high school and recall having Heinlein's letters in it.  Hopefully I'll find it soon because I want to see the whole of the essay.

I also sent for and received The Monsters and the Critics, a book of Tolkien essays on Ursala Le Guin's recommendation.  no, Le Guin and I are not chummy -- but oh how I wish we'd discussed it over coffee! -- I have a long list of "seminal work to read" courtesy of Le Guin's essay in Secret History of Fantasy edited by Peter S. Beagle (and still available in book stores).  And the copy of Monsters and the Critics I bought arrived by Royal Air Mail -- apropos, I think.  In there is "On Faerie-Stories," his famous what is fantasy essay.

And ... I'll be up half the night finishing a short story for deadline.

I love having these weekly MFA thesis deadlines, but they also set a tough pace.  Yep.  Still lovehate deadlines. And I'm on another one.  Right now.  Okay, universe, time to deliver.