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Writerly Lessons from Louis L’Amour’s The Walking Drum

Writerly Lessons from Louis L’Amour’s The Walking Drum

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WalkingDrum
…this literary failure is still a heroic one.

I read Louis L’Amour’s medieval adventure novel The Walking Drum so you don’t have to (link).

A thorough edit  would fix the expository intrusions (L’Amour keeps taking out his research and waving it around). However, this would not have fixed the structural problem (there was no structure).

Even so, this literary failure is still a heroic one. The book not only displays the craft of a veteran adventure writer, it is also an object lesson in career strategy.

As an author I benefited from reading this book. Let me tell you why…

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Living in a Moroccan Medina

Living in a Moroccan Medina

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The Jemaa al-Casbah, the mosque in the Casbah, just uphill from my house, that broadcasts predawn sermons over a loudspeaker.
The Casbah mosque, just uphill from my house, broadcasts predawn sermons over a loudspeaker.

Hello again, Black Gate readers! You may have noticed that I dropped off the blog, and indeed the rest of the Internet, for all of October. You did notice, didn’t you? You didn’t? Well, I was gone. I spent the entire month on a writing retreat in Tangier, Morocco. I’ve written about visiting Tangier before on this blog, but this time I decided to dedicate a longer time in the city to some writing. My current project, The Last Hotel Room, is a novel set in contemporary Tangier, and I thought it a perfect opportunity to try out my own version of a writing retreat.

Through local contacts I was able to rent a house in the medina, the old historic quarter. My house was a traditional building of northern Morocco — two stories and a rooftop terrace surrounding an airshaft topped with glass. Sunlight and ventilation came courtesy of the airshaft, the only other windows being small ones in the downstairs kitchen and upstairs kitchenette. The interior was cleverly designed so that each room felt open to the sunlight from the airshaft while remaining out of view of the other rooms, providing openness and privacy at the same time.

This sort of architecture has an unusual acoustic effect. Noises next door and on the street just outside sound like they’re coming from inside the house. Your neighbor’s door opening sounds like your door opening. It’s a bit weird at first, but it never makes you nervous because your house is a fort. Doors are made of metal and secured with heavy bolts. The airshaft has a cage-like barrier to keep people from dropping in unannounced. My two windows were both well above street level and protected with iron bars.

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NaNoWriMo is coming!

NaNoWriMo is coming!

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Storyteller-Tools-New-Cover 255
I wrote a book on all this…

Like Winter, NaNoWriMo is coming and aspiring writers are even now planning to do a Frazetta on the whole business of writing a novel. This is great — momentum is all — but it’s way too easy to grind to a halt or lose time going round in circles trying to reinvent the wheel.

I wrote a book on all this, but some of my previous blog entries might also help you avoid dead ends and rampage through your novel to the very end — I promise you both an affirming and life changing experience.

So, here they are in digest form:

Some Writing Advice That’s Mostly Useless (And Why): The following writing advice is mostly useless — “Work on your motivation,” “Revise, revise, revise,” “Have a chaotic life,” “Just write,” “Know grammar and critical terms,” “Practice skills in isolation.”

World Building Historical Fiction using Military Thinking: Don’t fall down the rabbit hole of research or worldbuilding. Instead use a layered approach, focussing your world building  as you descend from Strategic (villas exist and can be raided for supplies), through Operational (this villa sits on this ground amidst these fields), to Tactical (here is the ground plan of the villa and here are the people guarding it) level.

NaNoWriMo: How to “Pants” Through Your Novel like a Rampaging Panzer Division in 1940 France (and Why You Should): If you subscribe to the “Just Write” approach, then — seriously — just write. Switch off your spell checker, don’t edit or tinker, and if you need to add something to the story, just make a note and move on. You can mop up later.

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Books for Writers: A Guide to Improvised Weaponry

Books for Writers: A Guide to Improvised Weaponry

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A Guide to Improvised Weaponry-smallThere are a lot of how-to manuals for writers out there–books about world building, books about grammar, books about finding markets, books about almost every aspect of the writing life. Sadly, there’s no book telling writers how to defend themselves if an axe murderer invades their home office.

Until now.

A Guide to Improvised Weaponry is the perfect self-defense manual for any writer. It tells you just how to defend yourself when ISIS terrorists decided your work in progress makes you a candidate for their next YouTube video. It’s written by Terry Schappert, a Green Beret and Master sergeant in the U.S. Army Special Forces. This guy knows how to kill you with a pencil. It’s co-written by Adam Slutsky, a professional writer who probably had to explain to Terry that a disappointing advance, low royalties, and non-compete clauses are not valid reasons for killing an acquisitions editor with a pencil.

Each chapter focuses on a common object that you probably have in your home. I was especially interested in objects that are in my home office, ready to be picked up the moment one of my many anonymous online haters kicks in my door.

First, my coffee cup, strategically located to the left of my computer, ready to protect me and mine. Schappert makes the obvious suggestions, like flinging my hot Ethiopian brew into my attacker’s face or using it as a knuckle duster, with the caveat that there’s a good chance of hurting your hand with that second method. He also explains how you can use it to catch the tip of your attacker’s knife and deflect the blow.

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Writing Through February

Writing Through February

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120px-Girl_with_stylus_and_tablets.Fresco_found_in_PompeiI have a bad case of February.

I know I’m not the only one, because I live with two small girls and a husband who are suffering from the same malaise. You know it: it’s cold. It’s dark. It has been cold and dark for a long time. Christmas is over, spring is a long way off, and everything is just… hard.

If you live in one of the particularly snow-covered zones this is doubly true. Crossing the street is hard. Getting out the door is hard. Heck, getting out of bed in the morning is hard.

So writing? Pffft. The irony is that, like exercise, I know that writing is one of the things that keeps me healthy, whole, and sane.  Keeping the commitment to myself and to the page is necessary. But like everything else at this time of year it is so terribly, terribly hard.

I know what helps me:

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Writers – Don’t Start at the Start…

Writers – Don’t Start at the Start…

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Block_TellingLiesChapter 25 of Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun and Profit (which should be on EVERY writer’s bookshelf) is titled, ‘First Things Second.’ As he succinctly summarizes (nice but unneeded alliteration there), “Don’t begin at the beginning.”

It’s a popular screenwriting maxim to enter the scene as late as you can. In other words, don’t begin at the beginning. I seem to recall William Goldman espousing this.

Block tells of being advised to switch the first two chapters of a detective novel he had written. Basically, this put the reader in the thick of the action from the outset, with some explanation following. Tension can be created at the outset and carried forward by not beginning at the beginning.

Sitting here at the keyboard, I can’t think offhand of a Sherlock Holmes or Solar Pons story that uses this technique. There’s a reason we’ve all got the image of Holmes and Watson sitting in their rooms at 221B Baker Street when a client or Inspector Lestrade comes to visit and we’re off on a case.

As I read this chapter, I thought of Will Thomas’s Barker and Llewlyn books (love them, but what’s with the two “L”s at the beginning of that name?). Barker has more than a passing resemblance to Sherlock Holmes (I suspect that Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal owes a debt to these books) and Llewellyn is his Watson (or Boswell). Mind you, they are excellent books and not simply Holmes copies.

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Words Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me

Words Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me

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I belong to the first generation of tabletop roleplayers. In fact, I’m probably among the youngest of that generation, since Dungeons & Dragons first started to reach popular culture when I was about seven, and my friends and I were playing it regularly by the time we were eight. We didn’t really know what we were doing—the rules for the game at the time, spread over various manuals and sets, could often be confounding to adults—but rolling the funny dice and fighting monsters was what our imaginations craved, and for us it became the equivalent of a previous generation’s “Cowboys n’ Indians.”

None of our parents understood what we were doing, and when the anti-D&D campaign hit the magazine circuit with its fundamental misunderstanding of roleplaying, we got some grief. Most older people thought that Dungeons & Dragons was a big waste of time, even if they didn’t think it was outright dangerous or unhealthy.

I don’t play Dungeons & Dragons any more. When I do play RPGs, which is rare these days, I only use Fudge, which is simply the greatest roleplaying system I’ve ever encountered . . . simple, flexible, and brings out great storytelling skills. And any game adapts to it. But I don’t regret one moment of my youth with D&D. Because I believe Dungeons & Dragons helped prepare me to become a fantasy and science-fiction reader, and eventually a writer as well.

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Seventh Sanctum and Randomness

Seventh Sanctum and Randomness

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Normally, I get verbose on my posts here at Black Gate. But I’ve had a busy week, the crunch comes down on the last day, and I don’t have time for a long amble through my usual obscura. So today I’ll dash through with a link to one of my favorite “writing experiment” sites.

Seventh Sanctum is a website of randomness. It contains an array of “generators” that can create instant character names, evil organizations, magic weapons, and super-powers. The bulk of the site consists of anime- and RPG-slanted generators, most of which were coded as a “lark,” in the words of the site’s creator. “Roll up a bunch of results. Use them. Make a ton of money. Or use them in a fanfic or an RPG.”

However, I’ve gotten a lot of writing practice ideas from the category of generators under the heading “Writing.” A general heading that covers a number of great randomizers that can hatch up story settings, themes, and “what-if” scenarios. For example, today on Writing Challenges (my favorite of the generators), I pulled out this confluences of different elements for a strange tale: “The story ends during a war. During the story, an organization begins recruiting. The story must have a lost soul in it. The story must involve some oil at the end.” That was enough to keep me scribbling in my composition notebook for at least an hour; and even if I develop a story that doesn’t contain any of those elements, battering the ideas about always develops something of interest I can use later. One of my favorite short stories I wrote in the last year emerged from using Seventh Sanctum’s What-if-Inator. The finished work had almost nothing to do with the original “what-if” from the site, but I probably wouldn’t have started the journey without the push.

Any writer could get a few decent exercises from Seventh Sanctum—maybe even a the start of something more serious—and you can always waste some time with the Humorous Fantasy Classes generator. (I like the “Stripper-Lancer” and “Valkyrie Salesman.” Both might work in a Risus campaign.)

“I have become Death, Destroyer of First Chapters”

“I have become Death, Destroyer of First Chapters”

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Having written five novels beyond at least the first draft stage, I’ve noticed a trend. In each of them, with a single exception, the original first chapter either got cut, moved to another berth in the novel, or got re-tooled so extensively that it was no longer recognizable.

I didn’t set out in any of these cases to follow the adage about “cutting the first three chapters.” I find most writing maxims and sayings cute slices of wit, occasionally instructive, but disposable on a case-by-case basis. But I seem to have followed this one with lock-step dedication without even thinking about it. Most other writers I’ve talked to have noticed a similar machete-wielding brutality toward their early chapters when the time comes to dig into the second draft.

Why does this seem to happen so often? After all, first chapters usually are the section of the book that writers have the most solidly defined in their heads before they sit down to pound out that first draft. Even if the writer doesn’t work from an outline (I do, but that’s a subject for another post) he or she often has the full “move clip” version of that awesome opening all queued up and ready to play. “I’ve got this terrific opening,” the writer likes to say to friends. “I’ve even composed the perfect first line.” Some people hatch an entire novel from thinking of one single eye-grabbing opening sentence.

And yet, this first chapter often ends up scrapped, re-located, refurbished, or replaced with a Winnie-the-Pooh ride.

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On Anticipation: Story Openings

On Anticipation: Story Openings

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At Clarion, the great short story writer Howard Waldrop, he of “Night of the Cooters” and “Fin de Cyclé,” once talked to us about the crucial difference in reader response between “Huh?” and “What?!?” It took us a while, as it sometimes does with Howard, to sort out what he meant. He was distinguishing between two kinds of mystery that a writer can create.

“Huh?” is a good thing. The reader comes to something a little odd, something that raises a question or tickles their interest, and they want to know more. “Huh?” is a forward impulse, and a pleasant one. “What?!?”, on the other hand, is a bad thing. The writer has given too little information or too much or the wrong kind. The reader can’t sort out WTF is going on. “What?!?” is the expression of confusion that stops the reader and throws them out of the story.

I was thinking about the reader’s forward impulse yesterday in the used book shop we frequent. Books new and used hard to come by in the UAE and my son has read through most of his school library. I’ve been looking for fantasy in the adult section of the store that he might get into. What often stops him there is the first page–not necessarily because it is full of “What?!?”, but because there is no “Huh?” Successful kids’ books are usually really good at openings, because kids won’t read through four pages on the history of the royal house of Glomph to reach something interesting. A good opening isn’t necessarily one where something exciting happens–I’ll go out on a limb and say it rarely is. A good opening doesn’t necessarily rest on the first sentence or first paragraph either, but because of space limitations I’m going to focus only on those.

Pulling books off the shelf more or less at random (not too many books on our shelves here, and most of them are kids’ fiction), here’s part of the first paragraph of Megan Whalen Turner’s Newbery Honor winner, The Thief, which as I remember my son sucked down in a single sitting. …

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