Tag Archives: Beginnings

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.

The Chopping Block: Find your Beginning, Make it Pop

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The Chopping Block is a multi-part series on how to lower your word count without losing everything. This is Part One of the series.

So you’ve finished your first draft. Congratulations! It’s 120,000 words long. You’re a monster, a marathoner! They call you Steelfingers, baby! 120k of blood, sweat and tears… and you know that as a brand new author you really ought to get it down to around 100k before you shop it. What to do? Do you start hacking away description and dialogue? Wait a minute, before you get out the axe.

Look at your story arc. What is the story really about? To figure that out, write your hook- your one line sentence that you’d put in a query or use for an elevator pitch. Yes, it’s a bear. Do it anyway. (You can read more about hooks here and here.) So, now that you know what your story is about, did you open in the right place?

Are you sure?

It’s pretty common for first draft stories to not really begin until the second or even third chapter. The first chapters are muddling around, setting things up, chock full of expository chunks that mean nothing to the reader. For example, my first draft of my first chapter involved my protagonist looking out the window at the moon and thinking about stuff while she waited for the right moment to make her play.

Looking out a window. Thinking. About Stuff. Yup. Cue the sad trombone.

I knew something was wrong, but I just couldn’t let go of my moon-musings. The reader needed all that information to understand my fantasy setting, dammit! So I trimmed and tinkered and farted about without ever losing the flat, passive feel of my opening. Finally I asked for help from someone who writes better than I do. He said, (and I’m paraphrasing)

“You’re starting in the wrong place. Start with her flight, her fear. Be visceral with your physical details, be brief when you explain the stakes. And then, once I am invested in her, do a jump cut and take me back.”

A jump cut. It never, in a million years, would have occurred to me to use a jump cut. I ended up killing the whole thing and rewriting it from scratch. Once I did this, I lost about 5 pages of flab and gained a dynamic opening.

So take a hard look at your opening chapters and find that moment of action, that moment where everything comes together (or starts falling apart). It might be page two, it might be page twenty. Cut everything that comes before it and drop it into it’s own document. Now you can fish from that new document to add in backstory later throughout the novel, you can use it as a jump cut, or you can get spartan and just close it without saving.

The last way really is best. After all there are thousands of words between you and the writer you were when you wrote those first sentences. You’re much, much better now. Thousands of words better, in fact. So don’t make a sacred cow of your opening. Chances are it’s more fat than meat anyway.

Next time on The Chopping Block, I’ll be talking about housekeeping scenes.

Building Characters, One Trait at a Time

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Write what you know. It’s one of those Creative Writing 101 Rules. But what about characters?

A week or two ago on a twitter chat, (I think it was #writechat, but it might have been #litchat, I lurk in both as smolderingink whenever I get the chance) there was a discussion on character building that got me thinking. Many writers model their characters after people they know. This seems to me to be a dangerous way to go about character creation. What if the modeled person recognizes themselves? Maybe they will be flattered. Maybe they will be offended. And if you base your character solely on yourself, you run into the danger of Mary Sue-ism.

Say your character is stubborn. Many of mine are; stubbornness can be a heroic quality, but can also lead to downfall. Instead of making your character behave exactly like the first stubborn person that comes to mind, think about all the people you know whom you would consider stubborn. Compare and contrast them. I have a stubborn friend who is principled in her stubbornness. She never caves in to what she thinks is wrong, and sometimes this behavior rears up and bites her on the buttockal areas. But the way she always stands up for her beliefs is admirable to me. I, on the other hand, am only stubborn at my worst, when I am also being petulant and childish. So I have tried hard to eradicate the trait from my personality. I also know someone else who was raised to believe flexibility is weakness, and so he never gives ground on anything, be it a political stance or where to go for lunch. So, that’s three ways to be stubborn, right there.

How do these different behaviors fit with the other traits of my stubborn characters? Well, one of my characters, Sahrel, is an ex-concubine. Because of her past, she is used to either being spoiled and indulged, or having to obey her owner in totality. She is also used to manipulating others to get what she wants, but she is aware of and doesn’t like this part of herself. So she is often childish, but can be principled on occasion. Over the length of the story Sahrel may choose to shed her childishness and become a more sympathetic character. Or, she may choose to cling to it, perhaps to her downfall. It really depends on the rest of her personality, as well as how the plot pushes her. Another of my characters, Wil Imbrel, is a death priest. He is always principled, according to the code of his order, but doesn’t like to explain himself. So he often comes off as snobbish and inflexible, especially when the code of his order does not adhere to the same morality as the rest of society. So whether Wil chooses to buck up and lead by example or to sneer and put others down depends once again on the rest of his personality, and the demands of the plot.

As you can see, I don’t hammer things down- I like to give my characters a little breathing room to surprise me. If I give my characters enough nuance they begin to act on their own. And the moment  a character begins acting on his or her own is the moment I know I have created a real person who just happens to live in my head. Sure it’s a weird zip code, but it’s not their fault.

This is how I have always written characters, by observing traits in others and melding them into what would be most appropriate for my character given their current situation. This trait-melding is instinctual to me, I had to really think about how to explain it before I sat down and wrote this post, because setting and plot are tied up in this method as well.

So, how do you create your characters? Do you start with a template of someone you know and change things? Or do you piece traits together from scratch, based on the needs of your plot? Or do you do something else altogether?

The Evolution of a Fantasist

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Each week PLC will have a theme- this week’s theme is how we got to where we are now.

I have to say I feel a little self-indulgent talking about myself. But writing is personal, and I think readers of this blog ought to know just who the heck writes this stuff anyway.  So here goes.

My name is Amy McLane. Up until last year, it was Amy Beth Forbes, and that is the name I have published under. Going forward, I’ll be publishing as Amy McLane. My career has been sporadic and quiet enough that I don’t think this is going to be a big problem (I guess we’ll see, won’t we?). I write speculative fiction, namely fantasy, although I do dabble in horror and science fiction from time to time. I also love YA and plan on writing some- after I finish my current behemoth of a project, and the one waiting after that- er, YA is in the queue, anyway.

As a kid, I always loved to read. Writing came later. For a long time I thought I could never do something so audacious, so magnificent, as write a book. But as I became an adult, I realized no one was ever going to pay me to sit around and read, and so to remain in the world I loved most, that of the written word, I would have to be audacious.

When I was twenty-one, I had the extreme good fortune of getting in to Clarion. I was enthusiastic but clueless. Thankfully the instructors, as well as my peers, were just as fired up as I was about writing, and I learned things during those seminal six weeks that I have never forgotten.

Out of Clarion, I got the seriously good advice from James Patrick Kelly to shop a minimum of three stories at all times. Out of Clarion, I also got my first publication, via Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, at Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Other publications and contest placings followed- which you can see here in my bio. I average a sale every other year- the truth of the matter is that I find short stories extremely hard to write, and I tip my hat to those who have greater skill at this than I.

Don’t get me wrong- I love short stories. But what really calls to me is the novel. Novels give me the space I need to explore, to play, to say what I really want to say, to fall in love with the voices in my head. I’ve written two terrible novels- I knew they were terrible at the time, too, but writing junk is an essential part of the learning process. Now I’m working on a not-terrible novel, The Iron Key. Which is actually two not-terrible novels. (Er, what happened with that is that my first draft was too long, yet rushed, so I chopped the MS in half. It’s gonna be four books when I am done. Pity me, for I am a fool.) Currently I’m rewriting the first chapter so as to make it irresistible. Jim suggested reconstructing what I had and making the opening scene in medias res, so I’m beating my head on that this week.

I also struggle with writer’s block. Entire years have gone by without my typing a word. I finally figured out how to fight it- by taking writing classes. I get deadlines, accountability, although I must say not all classes are created equal. I once enrolled in a class at a major university and the instructor marked me down every time something fantastic happened in one of my stories. Fantasy is my nature- you might as well ask a frog not to ribbit. The class I take now is at a local community college, so I would advise other writers not to confuse high tuition with quality. Just find an instructor that works for you, and enroll repeatedly. In my case, that instructor is the aforementioned James Sallis, who is pretty much the definition of a quality writer, and I reckon you will hear more about him later this week from my cohorts.

It’s weird, but a big part of my history as a writer is about not writing. I think writer’s block is a demon in the closet, one inscrutable to non-writers. How can you say writing is what you love and then not do it, right? Especially when for most of us, writing has to be classified as a hobby, seeing as it doesn’t pay our bills. But fishermen don’t get fishing block. Toy train enthusiasts don’t get toy train block. So I want to know, have you suffered from writer’s block? What have you done to end it? Or are you still stuck?

Hello And Welcome!

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Confessions are hard. Take away the screen, the church, the anonymous priest waiting to give you absolution. Take away the buildings, the congregation, the tithing baskets. All that’s left is a parking lot. Faded white paint, cracked asphalt, the phosphorous amber glow. Just three cars left. And us.

It felt unlike any other confessional we’d ever attended. We stayed long after the other students left. Long after our writing instructor packed up his notes. We stood there, pouring out our writing hearts to one another. When finally the cold and our waiting spouses drove us to our separate homes, we felt cleansed, healed, atoned. The next week we met again, confessed again. And the next week. And the next.

We became fast friends and colleagues, supporting each other in our writing goals. We formed a critique and support group. Eventually we felt another calling- this blog. And it needed a name. A name that fit. When the eraser dust cleared, only one name encompassed us completely.

It gives us all great pleasure to introduce you to the Parking Lot Confessional.

We are a group of writers hoping to help your writing by chronicling our own, be it bad or good, totally en fuego or just slogging along. Each of us offers a unique view-point, being at various stages of our writing careers, from almost famous to almost almost famous. Some of us have been published and placed in contests. Others are perfecting our first works and agent hunting. We have different writing styles, write in different genres, and see different flaws with our editing eyes. We understand the writer’s brain, provide each other with a source of inspiration, and most importantly, keep each other in check and strapped to our chairs. That’s why we’re so good for each other, and that’s why we think writing this blog together will create something worthwhile for you, gentle internet denizen, to read as well.

Though our motivations and struggles may differ, the PLC shares a common goal: write until our fingers bleed. And with any luck, get paid for it too.

Follow our journeys here. Join in our conversations. Learn from our mistakes, celebrate our successes, and tells us in the comments about your own moments of triumph and despair. After all, even though we work apart, we’re all drafting this journey of writing together.