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Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jantar_Mantar_-_Laghu_samrat_yantra.JPG
…when we sit down to write a book

OK I admit it, I put the Harry Potter reference in the title as link bait. Well almost. Take a look at the word counts for each of the Harry Potter books:

  • The Philosopher’s Stone – 76,944
  • The Chamber of Secrets – 85,141
  • The Prisoner of Azkaban – 107,253
  • The Goblet of Fire – 190,637
  • The Order of the Phoenix – 257,045
  • The Half-Blood Prince – 168,923
  • The Deathly Hallows – 198,227
    (source)

That’s a lot of words, and it illustrates the mountain an author contemplates when we sit down to write a book. Until recently, the length of The Prisoner of Azkaban was pretty much industry standard — 100K words is an economic sweetspot for printing and distribution. Lengths seem to be drifting down of late, because there’s no economy of scale for ebooks.

Who knows? Perhaps we’ll one day return to the sanity of the 35K-word 1970s pulp?

But thirty-five thousand words is still a lot of words!

So it’s natural to look at the project, divide target word count by available days and use that as a measure of progress.

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Using Feedback from Beta Readers and Editors: The Parable of Frankenstein’s Monster

Using Feedback from Beta Readers and Editors: The Parable of Frankenstein’s Monster

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frankenstein
A book, my friends, is like Frankenstein’s monster.

Beta readers — friends who read and comment on your work — and, if you are lucky or flush, professional editors, are great. They tell you things like:

“The characters seemed thin… I just lost interest.”

“The main character was such a #### that I couldn’t read on.”

“Too much technical detail. I got bored.”

“The fight scenes went on too long.”

And they are always right — because reading is a subjective experience — but they are usually wrong, because the issue is usually not the issue.

It’s like Frankenstein’s Monster.

No, really. Let me explain…

In fact, let me tell you a story.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Taught You: A Look at How Peter Straub Crafts His Opening Chapters

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Taught You: A Look at How Peter Straub Crafts His Opening Chapters

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Peter Straub smallTaking advantage of the fact that I’m not teaching this summer, I decided instead to take a course in the Fiction Program at Columbia College: Censorship and Writing. The course explores many kinds of censorship, not just the book-banning, burning, remove it from the library kinds. It includes self-censorship, social censorship, and censorship in the news, among others. Last week, one of our assignments was to write an essay about something we had learned about writing from reading another author. I chose to look at how Peter Straub crafts a rich and complex opening chapter, looking especially close at the beginning of his novel The Hellfire Club. With my blog deadline looming, I decided it would be equally appropriate to share it with you.

Lessons from Peter Straub’s Fiction

Peter Straub is an international best-seller of dark fantasy, horror, thriller, and mystery works. But he’s also a damned-fine writer, which is probably why he isn’t as big a household-known name as Stephen King, but also why his writing is more revered and studied.

From Straub I learned that commercial genre fiction can blend literary techniques, lyricism, and narrative grace with fantasy and horror tropes and mystery and thriller structure to produce work that is pleasing, popular, and thoughtful.

He is also a master of what I call the Story Promise, which is literally the promises made to the reader in the first few graphs, the first few pages, about what to expect from the story.

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Results of a Writing Retreat in Tangier, Morocco

Results of a Writing Retreat in Tangier, Morocco

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DSC_0042

My local produce seller, a farmer from one of the villages in the Rif

 

When the writing gets tough, the tough writers go to Tangier…

One of the advantages of living in Europe is that you have North Africa right at your doorstep. Sadly that region, with all its diverse cultures and beautiful landscape and ancient sites, has largely become a no-go area. Algeria and Libya are war zones and Tunisia and Egypt are highly unstable as well. That leaves Morocco, a safe and stable country that’s drawn me back several times to use as a writing retreat.

As I mentioned in a previous post about Living in a Moroccan Medina, I regularly go to the northern port of Tangier to get away from email and editors and take some time to do some serious writing. Not only does the city resonate with literary giants of the past like Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and Mohamed Chukri, it also provides inspiration in the form of a large traditional medina, fine views over the Strait of Gibraltar, and a growing arts scene.

So what does a Canadian writer living in Madrid work on when he’s in Morocco? Read on. . .

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Nebulas and the College 7

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Nebulas and the College 7

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2016 Nebula Awards College Seven Tina Jens-small

Six of the College 7 with their instructor. From left to right, back row first: C. T. Booth,
Lexi Baisden, T. Daniel Frost, Sara King. Front: Rissa Martin, Tina Jens (instructor), Kali Rose.
(Not pictured, because she does not do pictures, Tazmania Hayward)

The fact that the Nebulas were held at the Palmer House this year, which is just a handful of blocks from Columbia College, meant that a select group of students and I could finish the last week of classes, deal with graduation, and still take part in the SFWA festivities.

Thanks to the kindness of event coordinator Steven Silver, and the SFWA Powers That Be, they agreed to allow seven students, mostly seniors, to do volunteer work before, during, and after the Nebulas, in exchange for memberships to the weekend of panels, signings, and awards galas.

I taught two classes at Columbia this semester, meeting on Thursday and Friday afternoons. On Thursday, I was able to twist the arm of Laura Anne Gilman, a former high-powered SF/F acquisitions editor and now full-time novelist and editorial freelancer, to come speak to my Fantasy Writing Workshop class for the first hour. (As she told one of my students, it’s not like she could say no, she was sleeping on my library futon for the weekend.)

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Table of Contents for Mysterion

Table of Contents for Mysterion

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Mysterion-smallI’ve talked about the anthology my wife and I are editing and publishing before (see here and here). Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith is a professional paying speculative fiction anthology of stories which engage with Christianity. It brings together twenty writers, both newcomers and established authors, including two Nebula nominees, in stories running the gamut from science fiction, to fantasy, to horror. We avoided preachy stories, instead looking for fiction with Christian characters, themes, or cosmology that deals with them in ways that feel authentic to our experience in the faith, neither sanitizing nor vilifying.

I haven’t had anything to say in the last few months, mostly because we’ve been busy — selecting the stories, editing the stories, getting contracts signed and paying authors. We’re still busy — right now we’re looking for well-known authors and editors to blurb the anthology, and preparing advance reader copies for them, and copy editing and formatting. It’s a ton of work, but we’re finally ready to make some announcements. Namely, our table of contents.

Here are the stories that will be appearing in our anthology.

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Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers

Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers

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Allingham MindLately I’ve been looking at SF-like inventions or discoveries that turn up in crime/mystery novels, first with John D. MacDonald‘s The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything, and then with a variation on that same invention in an SF mystery, Spider Robinson‘s Kill the Editor/Lady Slings the Booze. This put me in mind of another example of mystery meets SF in Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers (1965).

Allingham (1904-1966) is considered one of the mystery writers of the British Golden Age, along with Christie, Sayers, and their ilk, and her earlier novels certainly have a touch of that Jazz Age charm.

At first glance Albert Campion seems to be another variation on the gentleman sleuth with a friend on the force, a la Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey. The reader is given clear hints from time to time that he’s probably a younger son of a noble family, like Wimsey, but we never see Albert in family situations. He doesn’t live like a rich man, or a rich man’s son, and while it’s also pretty clear that “Albert Campion” is a pseudonym, we never learn his real name. Instead of the traditional English manservant, Albert employs Lugg, a former cat-burglar who’s lost his figure. Their relationship provides a great deal of the humour in the novels, but these books aren’t written for laughs. The characters may not take themselves very seriously, but they are serious about their work.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Going to the Nebulas

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Going to the Nebulas

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Nebula Awards Weekend 2016-smallSo I’ve been falling down on my blogging duties the last few weeks, but as the title of my blog maybe tells you, I’m a teacher before I’m a blogger. It’s the end of the semester and I’ve been teaching two classes, a directed studies (think independent study but with weekly meetings), and advising Myth-Ink, the Columbia College – Chicago student science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing club.

I require the students in the more advanced course, the Fantasy Writing Workshop, to complete at least one story and submit it to a semi-pro or pro market. But the course aimed at writing majors and non-writing majors alike, Exploring Fantasy Genre Writing, has more than half the students ready to submit a poem or short story for publication, as well. There’s always a few, each semester, but more this semester, I think.

So we’ve been doing a lot of copy-editing and proofing exercises, reviewing manuscript submission format, learning how to find appropriate markets, reviewing market guidelines, learning what and what not to put into a cover letter, walking them through writing their first author bio, and talking about what scares them about submitting. I’ve gotten the feeling that the last one is maybe the most important one of all. I’m going to have to think on that.

As part of the last week of classes, for both my courses, I’m having a representative from our department’s Publishing Lab (run by students, for students, to help them submit their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction) come in. They help read proposed cover letters, find markets, and provide emotional support. The drill is this, with their laptops open and everyone tapped in to the school wi-fi, when a student author says they’re ready to submit, their finger hovering over the send button, the group does a mission-control countdown from five.

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One More Time(Piece)

One More Time(Piece)

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Robinson Kill EditorIn my last post I talked about John D. MacDonald’s The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything, and today I’d like to take a look at Spider Robinson’s homage to that classic story, Kill the Editor.

I should begin by telling you that Kill the Editor was published separately as a limited edition (1991) but also appears as the first two thirds of his longer Lady Slings the Booze (1992), which is in itself a follow-up (avoiding the dreaded “s” word) to Callahan’s Lady. In Lady Slings Robinson tips his hat to several other mystery/crime writers in his acknowledgements, but it’s MacDonald’s watch that interests me here.

As you’ll recall if you read my last post, Kirby Winter inherited a watch that would stop time for the person holding it. A ton of other people wanted to get his secret from him – most without knowing exactly what the secret was – and defending himself and defeating the bad guys constitutes the plot of that story. (Or the plot of pretty much any story, I suppose.)

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The Girl The Gold Watch And Everything

The Girl The Gold Watch And Everything

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MacDonald Gold Watch1John D. MacDonald is one of my favourite crime writers, and he’s probably best known for his Travis McGee series, starting with The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964) and ending with The Lonely Silver Rain (1985). Others, such as Glen Cook,  have used this device after him, but I’m fairly certain that MacDonald’s the first person who identified individual books in his series by giving each one a title colour.

While John D. is well worth looking into for any of his genre or non-genre novels, I’d like to draw your attention in particular to his only SF contribution, The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything.

In this story a mild-mannered young man, Kirby Winter, inherits from his uncle a watch that will stop time for everyone except the person holding it. Of course Uncle Omar used the watch to make himself rich, but he also did a lot of good. He tried to keep as low a profile as possible, but unscrupulous types figured out he had something that gave him a edge in the money world, and now they’re after Kirby to get whatever it is for themselves. That’s the essential problem and conflict of the novel, and with the help of Bonnie Lee Beaumont, a young woman who happens to be a good deal quicker off the mark and savvy about the world than Kirby is, the problem gets solved.

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