Author Archives: Amy McLane

About Amy McLane

As Amy Beth Forbes, her work has appeared in divers locations, such as Flytrap, Kiss Machine, Realms of Fantasy, and LCRW. She is currently slaving away at a multi-book epic fantasy, and often forgets to post at personal blog smolderingink.com. Elusive and quixotic, she likes pie, but wouldn’t say no to cake.

What’s inside the heart of a story? Slice it open and see.

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This week, we’re talking about the emotional core of your story. Tying back into what I was saying last week about endings: you can’t write a proper ending unless you’ve tapped into the emotional core of your story. Without an emotional core you might create something entertaining, but not something memorable.

The best thing I’ve ever read on the subject is this post by Chuck Wendig, who argues that while a story can be about any subject, and deal with any emotional theme, the core of the core is always sadness “like the black cyanide seeds at the heart of the apple.” He uses the notably un-sad movies Star Wars and Die Hard to make his point. I agree with him absolutely. Why?

Because in the end, everything dies, even you and I. It is only the hope that some force, call it God or love or the human soul, is so powerful as to fall outside the brutal entropy of time, only that blind, willing hope, that enables us to shuffle on as human beings.

The thought that we can create something outside of ourselves, a story that will touch others long after we have crumbled to dust, is what drives to us create. It’s the closest to immortality you can quantifiably get. I lived. I loved. Don’t forget me when I’m gone.

There is a desperate sadness in that; and your sadness may be leavened with joy or pragmatism or fear, depending on your personal beliefs, but the sadness is the one constant, the absolute universal, the pain of being human. And that is why it’s the core of the core.

Any story needs conflict. Conflict is two things: suffering, and resistance to suffering, which often begets yet more suffering. We are amused by this because we understand it intrinsically. (And comedians understand it best of all. You laugh, so you don’t cry.)

So the conflict, the plot, is easy. What’s harder is finding the grace notes; the killing line of dialogue, the expert conveyance of mood through setting, the tone of your particular word choice — every single sentence should do more than simply advance the plot. All these elements must work together to build your story’s broken heart. If you do it well enough, that broken heart will beat all the same.

Listen.

 

And then we came to the end… UGH

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Endings are tough. They make or break your story. A poor ending can utterly spoil an otherwise serviceable story, while a great one elevates it, making it more than the sum of its parts.

I really, really struggle with this. Sometimes everything in the story comes together and your ending is happy, sometimes things fall apart and your ending is tragic, sometimes you’ve got an unsettling mix of the two. But that doesn’t change what the ending needs. That an ending must fulfill whatever you’ve set up on the first page is obvious — without that fulfillment, it’s not an ending at all. But when you’re writing an ending, you’ve also got to ask yourself: does this hit all the right notes? Does it leave the reader with resonance? Is it logical and evocative? Sometimes the ending just falls into your lap and comes out perfectly the first time you type it. But if you’re like me, most of the time writing a decent ending is a serious undertaking.

I don’t have any sort of easy answer for this. My best solution is to simply open a new file, copy the climax from the original file and paste it in, several times in a row. I put in page breaks between each ctrl+p so I don’t get visually overloaded, and then I riff. I write an ending. I scroll down past the page break and write a different ending. And so on.

It might take me six or seven tries to get close to what I want. But I find that if I keep myself noncommittal and open to possibilities, and write the most obvious thing just to get it out of the way and then ask myself a torrent of questions in the vein of: what else could I say here? Where else can we go? And what am I saying anyway? And how else could I say it? that eventually I’ll come up with something that resonates the way I want it to.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. That’s why I subscribe to partial insanity instead. I write my endings over and over, changing them a little each time, until I finally get what I want. I wish I had a clever, EZ, lazy way to do it.

But I don’t.

500 Club (2/9)

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It’s time once again for the 500 Club, the little flash-fiction game that could!

How to play:

  1. Choose one of the two prompts below.
  2. Write a 500 word flash based on the prompt, and post it to your blog.
  3. Drop a link in the comments below so we can read the rest. Give us the first line or two to bait the link.

Today’s prompts are based on misunderstandings:

1. Everybody thought Mary was the nicest girl.

…or…

2. Dear John. Let me clear up a few things for you.

 

Oh dear! Have fun and happy writing!

a cheater’s guide to worldbuilding (and other noises)

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Confession, part one, the confession part (you can skip this if you like): This last month has pulled me in a dozen different directions at once, a bit like taffy, only less delicious. I have the unfortunate problem of having too many ideas and too little time. At first it was an energizing sensation, since I am far more familiar with writer’s block than I am with creative overload, but now I feel fragmented and distracted. Because I have to choose, and I am haunted by what I choose not to do, constantly pestered by the sensation that I’m forgetting something. Which self-fulfills, driving me into what I think of as “flake” mode, a deeply distracted and self-agitated precursor to a bout of depression. I guess I can’t do anything about that but keep working, because I know damn well that it’s when I stop writing altogether that the trouble begins.

Confession, part two, the useful part: So, with that cheerful forward, I’ve been simultaneously working on final edits for my novel and doing some top-down worldbuilding for a new science fantasy novel. I’ve always used earth, near-earth, or alternate earth type settings, so inventing a planet has been a novel and educational (and occasionally frustrating) experience. I’ve learned why we have seasons (axial tilt), the upper limit on how short a day can be without the planet spinning to pieces due to the force of it’s momentum overwhelming its gravity (about 3 earth hours) and lots of other tidbits that have enabled me to cobble together a world I am currently calling Planet A (so creative!).

I have a touch of dyscalculia, so grinding out elaborate physics equations is just not my bag. So my two main resources for cheat-sheeting my way through a full world-build are:

The Khan Academy. Educational videos make understanding scientific concepts a whole lot easier.

Creating an Earthlike Planet Do not be fooled by the 1.0 design of this bad boy; it has everything you need, including a handy table that breaks down the minimum and maximum number of earth days that would be in a year for a planet rotating around any given star type. SUPER USEFUL if you’re not going for a G-type star like our sun.

So I’m bouncing between world creation, culture creation (based on what I already know about the world, and I am having a ball with this), and just plain writing out the first few chapters so that they stop eating holes in my brain. Once I’ve got things solidified, I’ll write out a beat sheet and get everything plotted properly so I can really go to town.

In a month or so my kid will start preschool and I will get a few hours to myself three days a week; until then I just have to tough it out and work in the stolen moments between this, that, and the other. It’s not ideal, but life never is.

In the Beginning, there was a dilemma.

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So you’ve got this really amazing fantasy novel idea. Maybe you sat down to write a short story and it just exploded on you. Maybe you actually did write a short story and your critique group said “this feels more like a first novel chapter” (that one happens to me all the time). Maybe you’ve just got this burning image in your mind that haunts you every time you drive your car or do the dishes.

Awesome, sit down and start writing, right?

Er… yes and no.

The problem is that fantasy contains too many $*(#&$#$ variables. Granted, if it’s urban fantasy, you’re probably good to go (and I hate you, because I just don’t write urban and it would make my life much easier if I could). But otherwise, you’re kind of SOL, because you can’t write a story set in a world you don’t know anything about. Well, you can, but chances are excellent it’ll end up completely crappy and derivative, and if obvious crappiness is the sort of thing that bothers you, you’ll end up wasting a lot of time trying to remedy your issues in subsequent drafts (says the weary voice of experience. Be smarter than me, please.). Half-assed, Medieval Times world building will hem in your story in unpredictable ways. It will deny you fully-rounded characters and plot possibilities.

Hey Nonny Nonny Myrtle Beach Piggly Wiggly

Now, I’m not saying I’m against swords or sorcerers. Hell, if I get peckish while I’m reading I’ll most likely grab a mid-book snack of bread and cheese and apple; the only thing saving me from straight-up Hobbitry is that I’m too lazy to be frying any mushrooms. Sad but true.

So it would be fair to say I like high/low/epic fantasy best, and that is why I’m especially critical of it.

The problem with diving head-first into writing fantasy is that you’re gonna get stuck if you don’t do the homework. What’s the climate like? Terrain? Major food sources? Technology levels? Population density? Physical traits (what do these people look like)? Religion(s)? Politics? History? Gender equality? What is a normal family unit? Is queerness a nonissue, or will it get you run out of town? What social taboos are there, then? What about art, music, literature, and other expressions of culture? Figure all that out and you’ve got one race/culture. One. Then you get to suck it up and do it three or four more times, because even if people of other countries/races/cultures do not currently figure into your plot, their existence will inform your work in unconscious ways, especially if you have a large city in there anywhere.

And that’s not even touching the magic, which has to have some rhyme and reason to it, or languages (Though I love etymology, I’m not a big conlanger myself, and thus of the opinion that just making a working vocabulary is enough, so that you can consistently name people and places and create a few good swears).

Even if you end up making a lot of choices that cause your world to resemble medieval Europe, reasoning that this is an alternate earth or is actually our world but set incredibly far in the future, your setting will still have an inherent genuineness to it.I mean, let’s face it, there’s only going to be so much that is strange about your world as it’s hard to get away from oak trees and rabbits and sheep without getting into the weird smeerp thing anyway (warning! that link leads to TV Tropes, see you in six hours). It gets exhausting, so the main thing is to develop the cultures, and not worry too much about the rest. I mean, bread is bread, unless it has some sort of specific quality that makes it different from bread as we know it. Like, it makes you telepathic, or is actually made of the ground up bones of Englishmen. You get the idea.

Worldbuilding is a lot of work, something that is magically onerous and fun simultaneously. But if you want to make a world or a city that people remember, a Middle Earth or a Bas Lag or a Hogwarts or an Oz, you have to do the homework. If an idea for a fantasy novel is burning a hole in your head, by all means dive in, but do your worldbuilding in tandem, and save yourself some grief in the long run.

500 Club (1/19)

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Happy Thursday, y’all! It’s time to write some flash with the 500 Club!

How do you play? Here’s the rules.

  1. Choose one of the prompts below. (or get crazy and do both)
  2. On your blog, write a 500-word story or scene based on the prompt.
  3. Post the first line or two of your story in the comments below with a link to the rest.

Here are today’s prompts:

1. Alien Invasion. They’re here, and they’re not what you would think. Twins? Cats? Cars? Only our narrator knows the truth (or does (s)he)?

…or…

2. Go pull one of your favorite books off the shelf. Flip around and blindly pluck out five lines at random. Write a flash fiction inspired by at least one of the lines.

Here are my lines, chosen at random from The Graveyard Book

Bod had never walked anywhere as a sightseer before.

He was going to have to fall straight down, he decided, onto the steps, and he would just hope that the ghouls wouldn’t notice that he was making a break for it in their desperation to be home and safe.

Mrs. Owens said simply, “I cannot. My bones are here. And so are Owen’s. I’m never leaving.”

“I wanted to go to Acadia Avenue.”

“First we put you somewhere safe. Then we deal with them.”

 

Happy writing!

Auspicious Pudding, Part I

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Pianos. Penguins. Pandas. Ty rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

“Oh my God.”

Jasper wormed around in his sleeping bag. “What’s up?” he said muzzily.

“If a flock of crows is a murder,” Ty said quietly, “And a flock of rooks is a parliament, what’s a flock of magpies?”

“A tidings. Or a charm.” Jasper fumbled about in the grass next to his head, located his wire-rim glasses, and hooked them over his ears. “Or sometimes, also a murder.” He looked up. “Holy God.”

“That’s what I said,” muttered Ty. The trees circling their campsite were covered in a flock of black and white birds. Branches swayed and sagged beneath their weight as they quorked and shat and preened. Endless pairs of dark eyes stared down and through him.

“There must be at least a hundred of them.” He looked more closely. Most of the birds were clutching green sprigs in their talons or beaks, maybe for their nests?

“An auspex would count them, and tell us the future.”

Ty glanced at Jasper, who was fastidiously settling his deerstalker on his bald head, his long fingers quivering. Jasper hoarded obscurities like they were two-for-one coupons. Was he taking the piss, as Effie would say?

“Don’t need an ‘auspex’ to tell us that,” said Ty, thinking of the twisted mass growing in his gut. In the movies, an alien would just hatch and burst out of your chest. Over quick. Industrial light and magic.

“I could do it, I think. There are several instructive folk rhymes to that purpose. Presuming the total number of birds divided cleanly into a number between one and ten. The real question is; what are they doing here?”

“Creeping me out?”

“Magpies are not indigenous to the area. They’ve come from somewhere else.”

Jasper unzipped his bag and stood. The magpies launched into the sky, a swirling flock, buzzing the old man like a swarm of bees.

Ty reached up and tugged Jasper to his knees. “Mistook you for a scarecrow,” he half-yelled over the burr of wings, “They’ll be gone in a minute.” He watched the birds circling directly overhead, wincing, then punched himself twice on the arm, trying to shake off the dread infusing his bones. That’s two for flinching.

“I should have counted them,” Jasper said, distraught.

“Call it a hundred. Ten by ten, nice and round. What’s ten?”

“Gold. Or a time of joyous bliss. Or, the Devil himself.”

Ty shook his head. Never one answer when three would do. Something plopped on his shoulder: a leafy sprig. More bits fell in a sudden pelting storm.

“Oh what the hell,” Ty shouted in exasperation. Both men ducked under the barrage. The rain of greenery was gentle, almost like a blessing. Ty found himself thinking distractedly of rice thrown at weddings. And then it was done.

Jasper picked up a bent blade adorned with small circular leaves. “Pennyroyal. Pudding grass if you want to get colloquial. I don’t know what they’d want with it; certainly not to eat.”

“Just saving it to heckle—” Ty exhaled as his stomach cramped tight. He rode out each pulsation of pain, biting the side of his tongue and clenching his fists. Jasper watched him worriedly, the unasked question plain in his pursed lips and half-raised eyebrows.

“Fine,” he managed, straightening. “No problem.” His eyes widened. “I take that back. Big problem.”

The unimpressive stand of birches they’d camped in had transformed into a hardwood forest, ancient trees rising forbiddingly tall, bedecked in verdant lichen and moss. The light overhead had taken on a cool quality, filtered through the layers of canopy.

“It’s a weald. Well, now we know from whence the magpies came.”

“Which is?”

To be continued on Wednesday….

Three Forthcoming Fantasies to Foam Over

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WordPress ate the first version of this post. It’s never done that before, and when I say ate, I mean mercilessly devoured, leaving no drafts whatsoever, only the title and tags, like little scraps of bone. So, here they are again: three forthcoming novels I’m watching for.
The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel
The Wind through the Keyhole by Stephen King, out April 24
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…..*head asplodes*…. ahem, sorry. This is a new Dark Tower story set in long tall and ugly’s youth. The scuttlebutt is something about Cuthbert and werewolves? Whatever, I’M IN.
The Order of the Scales: The Memory of Flames, Book III
The Order of the Scales, by Stephen Deas out February 7.
Intrigue, betrayals, dragons. The Memory of Flame trilogy comes packed with all the good stuff, and if you haven’t read the first two books, well you’ve got a month to catch up!

The Scar
The Scar by Sergey and Marina Dyachenko, out February 28.

Amazon saith: ”Plotted with the sureness of Robin Hobb and colored with the haunting and ominous imagination of Michael Moorcock, The Scar tells a story that cannot be forgotten.” The Dyachenkos have written quite a few books, and garnered a ton of awards for them. The Scar is the first of their novels to be translated from Russian to English. They’ve got the first chapter here on their website. It’s gonna be goooood, guys.

choosing the tortoise over the hare: the search for patience

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I spent 2011 pretty focused on changing myself externally- lost some weight, got some stories in the mail. These changes have been really good for me, but they’ve also illuminated many of my flaws: impatience, ego, desire, and did I mention impatience? While I plan on continuing on in my quests for better health and more publications, I think my focus needs some readjusting.

So, this year I’m going to work at cultivating patience, to focus on the process rather than the end result. What does this  mean, practically speaking?

That in my writing, the focus will be on making words. Not marketing, not selling myself, not the cart ahead of the horse. Just the horse. This year, I want to write my heart out and love every minute of it and not give a tinker’s damn about anything else.

I want to write more short stories, but rather than demanding of myself to produce a certain number of stories under a particular time constraint, I’m designating one day a week to dedicate to writing short fiction, and again, my plan is to just focus on the work, the means, rather than the ends. The ends will happen, I don’t need to sweat and strain and bulge out my forehead veins to get there.

In my personal life, the focus will be on making connections of empathy and kindness. I have a three year old boy, a delightful, hilarious, infuriating little person of constant motion and noise. He needs me to be present, mentally and emotionally, and I need patience for that, and that’s all there is to it. And really, my overworked husband could use some empathy borne of patience from me too. And that’s just the family, just the start of the possible connections of kindness I could make this year.

In the interest of cultivating patience, I am starting a meditation practice. I really hesitate to write that down, because it seems exactly like the sort of thing one does for two weeks in January and then abandons, but there you are. Yesterday I bought Mindfulness in Plain English, read most of it, and meditated for 20 minutes. I thought I would get really bored, but when the timer buzzed it shocked the hell out of me: I thought it’d been five minutes, not twenty. I’m not saying it was easy or that I was particularly good at it, I’m just saying I did it and think I should probably do it some more, if I am sincere in this quest for patience.

I am continuing to journal, because it’s very helpful for me to stay aware of myself. I am going to keep track of every new book I read this year, and I plan on reading my face off. I don’t have a set “goal” of books to hit, or have chosen a specific place to write about them yet: my blog? Maybe Goodreads? I dunno that I’ll review them in any depth, I expect merely to note the title, the author, and a few general impressions, but I do plan to start keeping track of everything I read.

So, in 2012 I will:

write my heart out

read my face off

be kind: present, thoughtful, empathetic

meditate

…and hopefully, as the result of all this, I will cultivate more patience.

Confessional Classic: 3 Tips to Make Your Writing Stronger

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The PLC is on vacation, please to be enjoying some of our favorite posts from the vault. Happy Holidays!

This week’s 3 Things… theme is 3 Things I wish I’d known then. Here are three pieces of advice on writing I wish I had understood as a wee moppet with 12 point Courier twinkling in my eyes.


Cutting is Not Losing. You write your novel. You print it, read it, and realize something doesn’t work. An entire subplot doesn’t work. Maybe 10,000 whole words don’t work.

I used to cling to those smelly scenes, unable to “waste” my work by such merciless cutting. But here’s the thing:  Serious cutting doesn’t make your work disappear. Every word you write is a step in the right direction. Every word you write makes you a better writer. Being able to see that something doesn’t work just means you’re a better writer now than you were when you first wrote that storyline. Cutting 10,000 words that don’t work isn’t a loss. It’s a gain.


Take Tiny Bites. Writing a novel, revising a novel, these are huge projects. They can be overwhelming. And when you have a lot of work on your plate, it can send you into a tailspin.

I used to let the sheer enormity of my own ambition overwhelm me, sending me straight into writer’s-block-land. But I have found if I tighten the scope of what I need to do on any given day, my project becomes much less intimidating. Don’t worry about the next 50,000 words. Only worry about the next scene. One scene a day. Start with that, and you’ll find yourself doing more.

Don’t Use The First Idea. This advice came to me from the incomparable Jim Sallis. Once I really understood it, it became one of the most valuable pieces of writing advice I have ever received. Our first impulse is often generic. So don’t use it. I’m not talking about those brilliant-gut flashes you get, I’m talking about everyday writing-work.

Here’s an example:

One of the characters in my current work in progress is a servant. She was caught doing something wrong and was to be punished by her master. I thought I would have her whipped. Because when I did something very wrong as a child I would get a spanking.

I started to write the scene. As I wrote I realized a whipping would be boring. Everyday. So I stopped. I thought about my setting (a bedroom), thought about the disciplinarian (a power-hungry sadist), and I thought about my servant and what would hurt her the most. What I wrote instead of the whipping surprised me. It wasn’t obvious. It made me sick to my stomach afterward.

And every time I read that scene now, I get chills.

So what about you? What do you know now as a writer that you wish you’d known then? I’d love to hear it.