Black Gate

(This article is a follow up to my blog post “Story In Its Many Forms“)

In a previous blog (linked above), I talked about my Exploring Fantasy Genre Writing class and how they’re required to try their hands at forms beyond the basic short story: including poetry, blues songs, plays or radio plays, comic books, and mock journalism (any of the print or broadcast forms). For other weeks, they can choose yet a different form, but they can’t work in the exact same form twice.

They adapt to some forms fairly easily, because they see the parallels and similarities to the form they’re most comfortable with. And though different parallels and similarities exist between any two forms, they just can’t see them sometimes.

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This is part 6 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

Continuing in our exploration of 8 distinct POVs, we come to:

#5.  Serial: 1st,  2nd, Tight Limited 3rd, Limited 3^rd, or Blended

The Serial POV is a common variation of Mixed View Points in genre fiction.

It’s sort of like serial monogamy. You use more than one character’s viewpoint, but you don’t go hopping around in multiple heads in the same sentence, paragraph, or scene, often not even in the same chapter. This can be done with a series of alternating 1st Person, alternating 2nd Person (Very unusual!), alternating Tight Limited 3rd, alternating Limited 3rd Person, or an alternating blend of some or all of the above.

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Nicknamed “The Writerghoulie” in the early days of Twitter, A.J. Aalto is a Canadian urban fantasy writer, author of the paranormal comedy series The Marnie Baranuik Files, and an active member of the Horror Writers Association.

Butt-In-Seat: Discipline and the Muse

The Muse loves to strike when you’re in the drive thru or walking your llama and can’t immediately capture those perfect snippits of dialog or subtle plot twists.

There are many ways to get around this. First of all, don’t own a llama. Secondly, set up regular meetings with yourself, to get your creative mind into the habit of showing up for work on your schedule.

Any time I have trouble being disciplined, I return to the habit that seemed to work best for me. Pro tip: 4 A.M. is prime creative time. I set my alarm, snarl at the clock, slap it a few times, throw myself out of the sack, slog to my office to load my documents, and put on a pot of tea. While the kettle heats up, I curse my boss; since I am my boss, I know exactly which insults cut the deepest.

Then I start the music in my headphones: Dubstep, K-pop, whatever music my teenagers say I’m too old to listen to. Then I shake my booty in the dark kitchen, where no one but my cat has to witness my cool-ass dance moves. Once the tea is ready, I’m wide awake and ready to work; thanks to the habit, the Muse is, too. In the beginning, you may need to bribe yourself to show up at 4 A.M. (I find that desk-chocolates work and desk-kale does not), but once the habit is fixed, it’ll be much easier to get your butt where it needs to be.

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Seriously, [novelist’s name redacted],

I get that you were writing a romance with a post-apocalyptic setting and plot, and not a post-apocalyptic novel with romantic elements. I get that the pacing and structure is significantly different between those two categories.

BUT, I don’t care which one you’re writing: you don’t get to leave out the middle of the third act! It would only have been a couple scenes; they could have been done in as little as 4 or 5 pages (though 8-10 would have been better), but they were important scenes. You can’t just toss the events off in a couple of graphs of narrative summary in the scene you jump to.

You had built that villain into a bad mo-fo: you can’t cheat us out of the meat of their encounter!

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Our Pro-Tip author this week is the multiple award-winning writer and editor Nancy Kilpatrick. She writes dark fantasy, horror, mysteries, and erotica. Her publishing credits include 18 novels, over 220 short stories, 7 collections, and 1 non-fiction book. She has edited 15 anthologies.

I Can’t Seem to Get the Ending Right. What Should I Keep in Mind?

A short story is a slice of time in the life of the protagonist. What happens has to have a beginning, middle and end, even though most of the time the protagonist had a life before the events of the story and will (hopefully) have a life after. A short story should read from the beginning as if the reader does not know where the story will end–that’s suspense. But once the story is finished, the reader should feel that Yes!, this is how it had to end. That makes a satisfying read.

Your protagonist has a problem, aka ‘conflict.’ If he/she doesn’t, you don’t have a story. That conflict is an either/or conflict. The protagonist is torn between two basics. Base line example: live or die. The reader reading the story knows this because they see the conflict and the obvious solutions to that conflict. If the story ends with either of these obvious endings: the protagonist lives/the protagonist dies — the reader will feel let down. The writer’s job is to find either an alternative ending or a variation on one of the two obvious endings so that the story has an intriguing and unanticipated conclusion.

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I am proud to announce that my student Courtney Gilmore received an Honorable Mention ranking in the prestigious 2016 Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, for her story, “The Numbers Queen of Harlem,” which she wrote in the Columbia College-Chicago Advanced Fantasy Writing Workshop (which I taught) last semester.

The judges are pleased to announce the winner, runners-up and honorable mentions for the 2016 Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing.

Dell Award Winner, Runners-up and Honorable Mentions for 2016

Winner: “Lullabies in Arabic,” by Rani Banjarian of Vanderbilt University
First Runner-up: “Nostos,” by Eleanor Griggs of Grinnell College
Second Runner-up: “Get Out of Here,” by Laura Davia of Vanderbilt University
Third Runner-up: “Wags,” by Eleanor Griggs of Grinnell College

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Our Pro-Tip author this week is Carlos Hernandez. Full disclosure: I got an uncorrected proof reading copy of his short story collection, The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, (which has been described as 12 stories of fantasy, science fiction, interstitial weirdness, and a few boldface lies), this past summer at the Nebula Awards weekend.

I gobbled that book down, and promptly made one of the stories, “More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give” part of the reading curriculum for the Advanced Fantasy Writing course I teach at Columbia College – Chicago. The story, synopsized by Carlos thusly: “A Cuban expatriate travels to Cuba and hires a local historian to suck the ghost of his mother out of the bullet hole where she was shot at the dawn of the Revolution,” is part history, part magical realism, and in equal parts an admonishment to be brave and dare to step off into that adventure, no matter how scary that first step may be.

Columbia College is very diverse economically, socially, ethnically, and in gender/sexuality identities. I encourage /p/u/s/h/ my students to explore stories, settings, characters, and themes beyond white knight in a generic Medieval European land rescues princess from dragon. We’ve all read that, wrote our own fan-fic, bought the “knights are crunchy and good with ketchup” T-shirt and wore it out. It’s past time for new kinds of fantasy stories.

And that is exactly what Carlos gives us in his first collection. That marvelous title, once again, is The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, and it’s due out at the end of January 2016 from Rosarium.

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My Exploring Fantasy Genre Writing course was designed based on the idea that “story” can be told in a vast array of forms; and exploring those forms, both through observation and by wading in and taking a crack at them, enriches the way we work when we return to our preferred art form. Even if one’s painting skills are closer to a kindergartner’s finger-painting “masterpiece” than Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” the act of working with paints can help us better understand the use of color to create a desired mood.

The course is designed specifically to look at the reach of the Fantasy genre across a wide array of media and forms including fiction, fairytales, film, television, cartoons, children’s books, music (classical and otherwise), music videos, plays, radio plays, audio and video blogs, art, photography, fashion, comic books, mock journalism, poetry, games, and any other form we may stumble across.

Each week starts with an exploration of a Fantasy theme that has a large body of work built around it, such as Mermaids, Pirates, The Big Bad Wolf, Alice in Wonderland, Voodoo, Arthurian Legends, the dizzing array of Faerie creatures, The Ring of the Niebelung, and psychic detectives. After covering the basics of the theme, we read, look at, watch, and listen to various works based on or inspired by that trope.

For example, for the Pirates unit we: read issue 2 of the comic book Cursed Pirate Girl; read the short story “We Are Norsemen” (because Vikings are simply Norse pirates), recite three short poems about pirates by Shel Silverstein and laugh at his cartoon drawings; watch a short, animated historical film about Jean Lafitte, America’s most famous pirate, on YouTube; then read an essay I wrote about some little-known pirate women from around the world.

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I’m pleased to have author and agent Lucienne Diver in the Pro-Tip seat this week. She’s a literary agent with The Knight Agency with twenty-three years of experience in the areas of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, romance and young adult fiction. She’s also author of the Vamped young adult series and the Latter-Day Olympians urban fantasy series.

Plot vs. Character?

Plot and character are both vital to your writing, BUT you can have the greatest plot in the world and no one will read your work if your point of view character isn’t compelling.

On the flipside, if your main character is intriguing and original with a voice all his, her or their own, you can truly invest your readers in what’s going on and keep them turning the pages to make sure everything turns out okay for your protagonist. A unique, dimensional antagonist is equally important. People are complex; your characters should be no less.

I guarantee that if you come up with amazing characters, you won’t settle for ho-hum things for them to do. Interesting characters will have interesting goals and real stakes. This is what really drives your story.

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Virtually anyone who writes dark fantasy, horror, thrillers, or any other type of fiction with violent or disturbing subjects, sooner or later gets asked the question, “How do you write that kind of stuff?” While it may be couched as a question, it usually sounds like and is intended to be a moral judgement along the lines of, “That’s awful stuff, and only awful, dangerous, twisted people write that stuff (or so I believe), and I don’t think you’re awful, so please don’t write it anymore – you’re making me uncomfortable.”

However, that same question can be asked as a no-judgement, sincere query, one writer to another. That’s what happened when my Advanced Fantasy Writing class was doing a Q & A via Skype with Laura Anne Gilman, a Nebula nominated author, prolific novelist, and former NYC editor a few weeks ago. One of my students asked a really good question: “If you’re writing something really dark, and have to go to a really disturbing emotional place to do it; how do you get out of that headspace when you’re done?”

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