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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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Writing in Shared Worlds: An Introduction to Hellmaw

Writing in Shared Worlds: An Introduction to Hellmaw

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Hellmaw logo-smallEd Greenwood, of Forgotten Realms fame, just announced a slew of new worlds he’s created, all under the banner of Onder Librum. These are all shared world initiatives, meaning that creatives can come and create their own stories in the setting.  These worlds offer a variety of settings for readers, including sword and sorcery, space opera, hard SF, gothic romances… something for everyone.

It’s freaking cool, and at a scale that I’m not sure has ever been done before.  As soon as Ed told me about these new worlds, I jumped in enthusiastically and without looking (still falling off that cliff, and still haven’t hit a cactus). I signed up with a tight deadline for book set in Hellmaw, a dark urban fantasy shared world.  With daemons. It’s pretty fun (the second book in the series, Dragon Dreams by Chris Jackson, just came out).

I was a bit concerned about writing in a shared world. Questions bounced around my head like pop rocks in my mouth. Will I feel stifled? Will I understand the lore well enough? Will there be enough coffee????

So, with these concerns in mind, here’s what writing in a shared world helped me learn about my writing.

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Transitioning from Short Story to Novel

Transitioning from Short Story to Novel

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"The Hand that Binds" art by Matt Hughes
“The Hand that Binds” art by Matt Hughes

There’s a lot of writing advice in the world. A person trying to read it all, in fact, would likely never be able to get anything written: I suspect more is written about writing in a given day than any one person could feasibly read in that same timespan.

That doesn’t mean that writing advice isn’t useful, of course, because it can be absolutely essential to a writer’s development. In my case, for instance, one of the key bits of advice I ever received as a young novelist-to-be was to try to cut my teeth on writing short stories. Doing so, it turned out, allowed me to hone my craft in smaller, more manageable chunks. It also led me to my first fiction sale: to Black Gate, which published my story “The Hand That Binds.”

Publishing short stories was an amazing experience. In composing and selling short fiction I learned far more than I could have ever imagined, and each of those “little” victories of publication were a shot in the arm of the best drug available to a writer: the confidence to know you can do it. So for me (though admittedly not for everyone), starting with short stories was vital to the development of my career.

What I want to talk about today, though, is that next move: transitioning from short stories to novels. Because although I loved (and still love) writing short fiction, I knew I wanted more. I wanted to be a novelist. What follows are the five principles and one rule that helped me make that leap.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Younger Sibling of 1st & Tight Limited 3rd: Simple Limited 3rd & The Case for Choosing A Single-Character POV

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Younger Sibling of 1st & Tight Limited 3rd: Simple Limited 3rd & The Case for Choosing A Single-Character POV

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Victorian POV

This is Part 5 in the Choosing Your Narrative POV Series.

We’re continuing our examination of eight POV approaches commonly used in Fantasy. (You can find links to the previous installments in this series at the end of this article.) This week we’re looking at another variation of 3rd Person that is more closely related to 1st Person than to the Omniscient 3rds. And, I’ll explain why I think a single POV is most often the best choice for a traditional fantasy narrative.

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World Fantasy 2015: It’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of Convention Reports

World Fantasy 2015: It’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of Convention Reports

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The Saratoga Hilton

The Saratoga Hilton, site of the 2015 World Fantasy Convention

Ask a literary agent how writers should pursue representation, and they almost always say, “Go to any convention, and we’ll all be in the hotel bar.”

In years past, I’ve tried agent/author speed dating at the Nebulas weekend, pitch sessions with agents at writing conferences, commenting on agents’ manuscript-wish-list blog posts — all the in-person variations but the bar, because the bar is not my natural habitat. Then again, in years past, I didn’t have an award in my pocket. Lots of people may be ambivalent about awards, but agents like them. This year I figured I might be out of my element, but I would no longer have that aura of desperation that surrounds unpublished novelists with no specific prospects. I finally had something an agent might want.

So I set my sights on the World Fantasy Convention, a con known for a base of attendees consisting almost entirely of professionals in the field. I love a good panel, I love a good reading, I love a good casual schmooze, but I had a mission. One that was certain to throw me into a wide variety of interactions that would range from the awkward to the absurd, with perhaps a little sweet spot of productivity in the middle.

When John O’Neill asked me to write a con report, I told him I had none of the kinds of impressions people record in them. What I had instead was my misadventures in agent hunting. John was laughing already, and urged me to post it.

If you want to know about the World Fantasy Awards and their banquet, memorable quotes from notable figures, the controversy over the toothless harassment policy, I’m not your girl. Not this time, anyway.

But you can time-travel back to the start of my most recent unfinished agent hunt and watch me indulge my hubris.

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The Series Series: Why Do We Do This To Ourselves? I Can Explain!

The Series Series: Why Do We Do This To Ourselves? I Can Explain!

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The Wheel of Time-small

What’s up with the Big Fat Fantasy books? Books that crest a thousand pages, books that fell forests, books that travel in savage packs of series. We wait three years, five years, ten years for the next volume. Meanwhile, the scope of what the author must remind readers about between installments expands (a storytelling problem anatomized over here by Edward Carmien). We click over to the fan-run online encyclopedia to remind ourselves who the characters are, both because it’s been so long since the last volume, and because the cast size is just that large.

Yet many of us love such books. In my case — and maybe yours, too — not just a few odd specimens of the type, but the type itself.

Thomas Parker laid out all the objections that can be leveled against the sprawl of our genre’s most popular novels, not as an outsider but precisely as an insider shocked at what has become normal to him. (Embrace the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole and just go with it — the main point’s still sincere.)

Someone please tell me. Why? Why do we do this to ourselves, we devotees of science fiction, horror, and (especially) fantasy? What did we do to deserve this? What crime did we commit in some previous existence that we now have to expiate with such bitter tears? Judge, I deserve to know! I demand answers!

If readers are asking themselves that question in that way, even in jest, you can bet the authors are, too, often with a greater level of frustration.

I have to marshal all my hubris to say this in public, but guys, I think I might have the answer. Seriously, not just an answer, but maybe the central answer.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip From Theodora Goss

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip From Theodora Goss

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Theodora Goss-smallThis week’s Pro-Tip comes from Theodora Goss, a popular and multi-award nominated writer of fairy tales and poetry who teaches writing at Boston University and the Stonecoast MFA program. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” won the World Fantasy Award.

Do You Write for More Than One Medium or in More Than One Genre? Why?

Let’s see, what have I written? A novel, which is coming out from Saga Press in 2017, with a sequel in 2018. Novellas, short stories, poems, essays. Some of my poems have been set to music, although they weren’t intended as song lyrics. I’ve written a poem to accompany a work of art in an exhibit. I’ve even written academic articles. There are certainly things I haven’t tried, but I’d like to . . .

Why do I write in different genres? Part of the reason is that for me, writing is half craft and half art. Writing in different genres lets me work on my craft: writing a poem, for example, will force me to pay attention to rhythms and the sounds of language, while writing a novel is an exercise in plotting, in constructing a more thoroughly realized world than I can create in a short story. Every genre requires something different from me, and writing in them all allows me to remain flexible, to practice my craft in a variety of ways.

The other part of the reason is that I love doing different things, just like a dancer who is trained in ballet but does modern and jazz, for the fun of it, to see what they will require from her, to rise to new challenges. I love new challenges! I haven’t yet written a script or a screenplay, but who knows… maybe someday!

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