Tag Archives: free advice

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.

How to form a real-life writers group, survive a writing class, and take a critique without melting into the floor

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One piece of advice repeated pretty constantly to aspiring writers is to find a writers group. There are tons of great online groups. Many of them have a fantastic success rate. If they work for you, awesome. Super awesome. Me, I need to know that there is at least one other person who is sitting in a coffee shop waiting for my irresponsible ass to turn out some pages. So, I have a real live writers group. Here’s how I got mine.

I signed up for a writer’s class at one of the local community colleges. Taking a class gives you skill sets, gives you a chance to talk about craft, gives you deadlines, and introduces you to other writers that live in your hometown.

Now, I know as well as anyone that a room full of writers is a grab bag of weirdos. You’ve got your painful introverts, your overconfident extroverts, and a rainbow spectrum of strangeness in between. But in any given writing class, there should be at least one person whose weirdness is compatible with your own. Maybe more than one. Clique up. Tell your potential writer buddy that you enjoy their work (better not be a lie) and ask if they would be interested in meeting outside of class once the semester is over. Chances are good they will want a group as much as you do.

Now, when I say “clique up,” I don’t mean “stop listening to the other people in class.” That would be bad, and a waste of your time and money as well as the time of all the people who bothered to read your submission. Just because someone’s politics or personality grates you doesn’t make their opinion irrelevant. And that leads me to…how to take a group critique.

Listen to your critiques with a blend of logic and instinct. I’ll explain that further momentarily.

Do not speak to defend your work. Only answer direct questions, as simply and quickly as possible. Or just smile mysteriously. Sometimes that’s more fun than explaining yourself.

If something hurts your feelings, keep a stiff upper lip. Critiques are not supposed to be personal attacks on the author, even if someone says a line you thought was particularly clever was cliche, or found your beloved protagonist boring or annoying. A good critiquer is not here to be your friend, as they say in reality tv. However, a good critiquer can become your friend, if you listen to their opinions and are not afraid to give your own when it’s appropriate (when you are critiquing someone else’s work).

Always be gracious when the critique is over. Thank everyone for their time. Mean it. Do you know how hard it is to get someone to tell you the truth in this day and age? Thank them. Mean it.

Now let me go back and break down the logic/instinct thing.

Someone makes a comment. Your gut instinct is a dismayed, Oh shit, they’re right. Or an excited, “Oh shit they’re right, but I know how to fix it!” (my favorite) -mark your own copy of the manuscript for changes. You did bring your own clean copy of the manuscript to class, right? Yes. Of course you did.

Someone makes a comment. Your gut instinct is an enraged, THEY JUST DON’T GET IT. -mark your copy as something to think about LATER, when you’re no longer sitting in the hot seat.

Is it LATER yet? Good. Now is the time for logic. Maybe this person doesn’t understand your chosen genre/theme/motif. Maybe this person really dislikes you and is being petty. But maybe, just maybe this person has exposed a flaw in your work that you don’t want to face.

Did most of the other students agree with this person? If this were someone else’s story, would you agree? Every time you disregard a critique on sheer emotion alone, you are doing your story a disservice. And on some level, you have to believe that the story is more important than yourself. Or else, why are you trying to be a writer in the first place?

I hope this post was helpful. If anyone has more critique survival tips or writer’s group success stories, I’d love to hear them.