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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip From Craig Shaw Gardner

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip From Craig Shaw Gardner

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Craig Shaw Gardner-smallOur Pro-Tip author this week is the prolific and funny Craig Shaw Gardner. Perhaps best-known for his humorous fantasy, he also writes horror and science fiction. Craig sold his first short story in 1977, and began writing full time in 1987. He’s written six or seven trilogies and a whole bunch of stories and novelizations. (At least 34 novels and two collections, and still going strong.) His trilogies include The Cineverse Cycle, Dragon Circle, and Arabian Nights.

Critique Groups and First Readers: Good Idea or Bad Idea?

Most writers (myself included) have something of a Love/Hate relationship with their prose. Often, when I start writing a story, I think “What a great idea! What a clever approach! This will be my best story ever!” And then, somewhere in the middle of the process, doubts creep in. “This is too long! No one will ever read this! I could have done a better job of characterization/ plot/ suspense/etc.”

Chances are, neither one of these visions of your work, both the high and the low, are entirely true. It’s hard to get the distance from your own prose to seriously judge yourself mid-story. This is where other readers come in. Many writers (myself included) depend on a writing group or first reader to give them perspective on what works and what doesn’t. A good writing group can gently tell you about the good and the bad in your story. You may not always agree with their proposed solutions, but their critiques will help you write a better story.

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Down These Mean Streets a Pastiche Writer Goes

Down These Mean Streets a Pastiche Writer Goes

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NOTE: The following article was first published on April 12, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

amis_colonel_sunPoodleSpringsPulp fans are united by an uncommon passion for literary authors and their creations. We read and re-read these seminal works time and again savoring each thrill as if discovering it anew. We read one another’s thoughts on these works in the hope of gaining a greater appreciation of the material or, at the very least, finding some justification for why they affect us so deeply. We dread to consider awakening to a world where there are no new tales of these characters to discover.

A small number of us set out on the precipitous path of making that dream a reality by adding to the existing canon of our favorite characters. Many of those who do so choose to work in the relative safety of fan fiction, content in the knowledge that none will judge their efforts too harshly. Fan fiction, however, is a double-edged sword for while it allows us to work free from criticism, we do so in the knowledge that none will treat our work as a legitimate continuation and that, at the end of the day, is what we all strive to achieve.

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Mysterion Submissions

Mysterion Submissions

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MysterionCoverI’ve discussed Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith, the anthology my wife and I are editing and publishing, on Black Gate before (here and here). We’re nearing the end of our submissions period, so I thought I’d discuss some of what’s going on with us. There’s a week left until submissions close on December 25th, so there’s still time to submit if you’d like to.

I’ve been keeping track of submissions on a weekly basis. As of Wednesday, we’ve received 385 submissions since we opened on October 15th, of which we’ve responded to 315. Most of those were rejections, but we’re currently holding 39 stories that we’re interested in publishing.

We won’t select any stories to go into the anthology until we’ve read them all. Instead, when we read a story that we think would make a good addition to the anthology, we tell the author that we’re planning to hold their story. After we’ve finished, I expect we’ll have somewhere around 50 stories that we’re holding. From those we’ll select the the ones that will go into the anthology.

At this rate, it looks pretty certain that we’ll pass 400 submissions overall. It’s even possible that we’ll pass 500, if we get a surge in the last week equal to what we got in the first week, but I think we’ll probably end up somewhere between 425-450.

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The Halt And The Lame

The Halt And The Lame

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Heinlein WaldoOne of the details that made Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers so unusual at the time of its filming (1973) was a level of realism previously unseen in the historical adventure movie, (think Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood). Lester showed us illness, filth, and poverty in  ways we hadn’t really seen in a movie that wasn’t about illness, filth, or poverty.

Aside: Oddly enough, there’s more realism of this kind in comedy than in any other genre, as though it’s okay to present disease and disfigurement in a way that make us laugh. (Disclaimer: the psychological basis of laughter is not the focus of this post)

Blade Runner did a similar kind of thing for SF movies. Maybe it wasn’t the first time we’d been shown a dark future, but it certainly was the first time we’d been shown one that wasn’t clean.  We may argue that George Lucas did it first, in the original Star Wars movie, where Luke was driving what was obviously a used flying car. (And that’s my Star Wars reference for today.)

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How to Get From Worldbuilding (or Research) to Story

How to Get From Worldbuilding (or Research) to Story

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Golden Falcon
How do you get from the cool world you just built — or researched — to an actual story?… Let’s imagine a knight on a revenge quest.

Worldbuilding is a thing.

People build Fantasy worlds for fun.

They’ve pretty much always done it, either collectively — like the storytellers who built Greek mythology and or theologians who created the medieval vision of Hell — or individually, like the quirky medieval mapmakers and of course Tolkien, and every modern GM who spends more time creating their world than playing in it, and every wannabe Fantasy author who loses themselves in the act of creation.

For a fictional world to live, however, somebody has to tramp its surface.

We need a Homer to dump Odysseus  on the Island of the Cyclops, Dante to have Virgil lead him through the Circles of Hell, and “John Mandeville” — whoever he really was — to take us to the Land of Prester John. Meanwhile, Tolkien must stop building and start writing, the GM has to assemble their players, and the modern wannabe Fantasy author has to…

Ah. That’s the thing.

Once upon a time, you could just take your hero from A to B to C, picking up plot tokens or even just getting closer to the goal while having quirky adventures on the way. We now expect a little more from our authors.

How do you get from the cool world you just built — or researched — to an actual story?

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip from Gemma Files

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip from Gemma Files

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Gemma Files-smallFormerly a film critic, teacher, and screenwriter, Gemma Files is a Canadian horror author who’s published four novels, two short fiction collections, a story-cycle, and two chapbooks of speculative poetry.

Five of her stories were adapted into episodes of The Hunger, an erotic horror anthology series made for Showtime by Tony and Ridley Scott. Her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild’s 1999 Best Short Fiction award. She’s a two-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and has twice appeared in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her latest release is Experimental Film (a contemporary ghost story novel) from ChiZine Publications.

Plot vs. Character — What’s Your Opinion?

My opinion on Plot vs. Character is that you really do need time, space and wordage in order to explore both at once, like in a novel: a long-form, chaptered narrative which develops organically, changing as much through reaction as it does through action. That’s why, when I’m writing a short story, I often find myself making a calculated decision to sacrifice one for the other. It all depends on where you want to place your emphasis: if it’s a deeper exploration of character you’re after, that can mean an overall flattening and simplification of plot, whereas a complicated plot with lots of exposition involved doesn’t leave a lot of room for complex characters. Instead, you get a conglomerate of sketches as your main cast, trope-y but hopefully not cliché, people easily reduced to a few simple traits — the kind of people who show up in movie credits as Angry Librarian or Homeless Artist.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: It Was Only A Dream…

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: It Was Only A Dream…

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Dallas JR EwingJust as there are certain guitar licks, walkdowns, turnarounds, and other patterns that can help with the flow and structure of a song, writing and storytelling have some generic techniques that can be used to great effect, or great failure, depending on how, when, and why they’re applied.

The most universal and familiar in fiction is probably the framing device that starts many children’s stories: “Once upon a time…” and ends them with, “And they lived happily ever after.” Those phrases are an emotional touchstone for most readers, taking them back to a magical time when stories were a centerpiece to our lives.

But most of these shortcut techniques aren’t used as often, and aren’t guaranteed to evoke a specific emotional response. Let’s look at a risky writing technique: The “It Was Only A Dream…” ending.

I generally hate this kind of ending, because it feels like a trick. It feels like the writer is chanting “Neener neener!” and laughing at the audience who fell for this prank.

However, as Eric Cherry (my frequent writing-neepery partner) and I explored specific instances of it being used, I realized that I didn’t always hate it. I just have such a strong emotional reaction when it’s used badly that it overshadows my appreciation of the times when it’s used well.

To use it in a way that respects the audience, it should shine the light of what we know about the story through a prism that reveals new facets to the story, rather than negating all that came before. It should make us embrace what we’ve already experienced within the story, and then view all of that in a new way.

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Thinking About What Makes The Shining and The Exorcist Work

Thinking About What Makes The Shining and The Exorcist Work

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Linda-Blair-in-The-Exorcist-1973
Aw, man. This just ain’t right.

Sometimes in the course of growing as a writer, you fluke into a success before you grow the skills to consistently hit that success. My second-ever fiction sale was to Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2008 and over the following two-and-a-half years, I collected nothing but rejections from them.

My 2008 story had accidentally included enough good elements that it made it into the magazine, but I didn’t understand what those science fictional elements were or how to use them properly until about 2011.

I think the same thing happened to me with a story called “Dog’s Paw.” I thought I’d been writing a lit story when in fact, I had included horror elements that eventually got it published in a horror anthology, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, and a superb audio version at Pseudopod.org (British people make everything sound extra-good). After my experience with my 2008 Asimov’s story, I was under no illusions that I was a competent horror writer, just a lucky one.

This spring, I decided to try to write a horror story. Knowing my weakness, I deliberately tried to figure out what goes into a good horror story. And when I want to analyze story structure, I go first to movies, because I find it easier to see the moving parts.

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A Rose By Any Other Name?

A Rose By Any Other Name?

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ClockworkIt was back when I was teaching a course on satire that I understood for the first time the true importance of characters’ names, and the titles of books. It’s more obvious, perhaps, in a satirical work than in any other, but names – whether of people or novels – are vitally important.

It behooves us as writers to pay them great attention.

To illustrate what I mean, let me show you an example from a satirical work that’s also considered SF, Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange. What’s the significance of the title? We all know what an orange is, don’t we? A type of citrus fruit that grows in semi-tropical areas, which can be eaten, or made into juice, or marmalade or some other specimen of usefulness.

We all know what a clockwork is. A mechanism designed and built by humans to run other items or machines, initially clocks (hence the name), but subsequently a variety of other things. On a large scale, they could run factories, on a small scale, toys. We still find people who would say  a “wind-up” or “clockwork” toy, particularly a “clockwork man.”

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip From Elizabeth Massie

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip From Elizabeth Massie

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Elizabeth Massie-smallOur Pro-Tip this week comes from Elizabeth Massie – a Bram Stoker Award- and Scribe Award-winning writer of horror and historical novels, short fiction, media tie-ins, poetry, and nonfiction, with works published by Simon & Schuster, Tor, Crossroad Press, Apex Books, Pocket Books, Berkley, Dark Fuse, and more.

What Do You Do to Get Unstuck and Solve Writer’s Block?

Some people believe there is no such thing as writer’s block…I know it to be a real problem at times, but it can be overcome. I always have at least two, sometimes three, projects going on at a time. A novel, a short story, a poem. Or any combination. When I get stuck on one, I can slide over to the other to work. Then when I come back to the first, that “locked down” feeling is usually gone and I can see it with a fresh eye.

Another trick is to always stop your day’s writing in the middle of a scene or in the middle of a sentence, even. Then the next day, when you come to it, you will find yourself more excited to get back into the story because you aren’t having to re-heat your engine from scratch.

A third suggestion is to give yourself a day away from writing. Sometimes we need to let our creative wells refill – and they will. So while there are times to push through, there are times to step back.

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