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.

Rhythm and the Hook

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Well everyone, yesterday was my husband’s birthday, so I was out of the office (side note, if you are ever in Glendale, AZ for whatever reason and you like German food, do yourself a favor and stop by Haus Murphy’s. Amazing food and beer delivered by thickly-accented blonde waitstaff — pretty much perfection.). Today’ I’m back in the saddle to talk about queries.

A query letter is comprised of three paragraphs.

1. explain why you’ve chosen to contact this agent

2. The Hook

3. A courteous close, where you list any sales or relevant credentials you may have.

I think paragraphs one and three are fairly self-explanatory. Sure, you will torture yourself over them, and you should, because every word counts, but salutations and bios are not the hard part. The hard part is The Hook.So I’ll be talking more about that in a hot minute.

Salutation, hook, bio/close. That is what comprises a query letter. But that doesn’t define the whole. What a query letter actually IS: a writing sample. It is an attempt to intrigue the reader, in this case a prospective agent. Your goal is to interest them enough to get them to ask for more.

How to do that? Here’s the practical advice I’ve gleaned over the years from blogs and conventions like Pitchapalooza (hosted by the always awesome Changing Hands Bookstore). I’m going to assume y’all already have had some exposure to this stuff before, but I just want to share what’s made the biggest impact on me.

Regarding The Hook:

You can’t glom your whole plot into a few sentences. So don’t try. Instead, give a taste of the plot. Touch on it, but don’t be summary. Write in your own, particular style. If you try to cram the whole book into a few sentences, you will not be able to give the agent a sense of your style. Instead you’ll have something reminiscent of a high school book report. Use telling, vivid details to show what makes your hero stand apart from the pack. Try starting with action. Start with the whistle of falling bombs, whatever the equivalent is in your book. Be sensory.

Keep in mind that you will be drafting this query dozens of times. That’s cool. Embrace it. Get crazy, get out of the when/then box. This falls under “totally unverified opinion of a non-professional”, but I have a particular dislike of the when/then after/but before/yet formula. Because it’s formulaic. Because it’s soooo popular that the agent has to see a zillion when/thens a day, you know what I mean? And because the when/then combo sets you up for a droning rhythm of iambs. Prose has meter too, guys, and it really shows when you only have a page. Let me hit you with an exaggerated example:

When Riven Dumbname gives his cat the gun, he never dreams of what is yet to come.

Yeah I rhymed it too, but seriously I could go on for pages of when truffle humple scoodle poodle naddle do; flibber flobber tibby wobber hoopty hoo. DO YOU HEAR IT? I CAN’T UNHEAR IT. I have no proof, (again, this is Opinion Time) but my gut tells me this construct is a really good way to get an agent ready for a nap.

So let’s try that opening line in a more immediate manner. This is just total spitballing; I have given myself permission to be as wack as I want to be.

The cat has the gun and Riv has the kibble.

Riv Dumbname has three regrets: these damned chinos, that fourth boilermaker, and giving his cat the gun.

“Drop the nepeta cataria and nobody gets hurt.”

Riv Dumbname is staring down the barrel of a Colt .45. The slinger? His eleven-year-old poly-dactyl tabby, Sir Throckenbrock Percival Mittens.

"FalcomPSX"'s cat, "Bullet". Just so you know, I always image search AFTER I write my posts, and can I just say I love the internet so much? Seriously, what are the odds?

Five minutes on the crazy train and I’ve already got a couple of ideas to play with. The second pitch is strongest imho — the chinos and the fourth boilermaker tell us a lot about Riv, and even hint at the setting, the construct of the sentence has some flavor, some punch. Of course I’d tinker and tweak and write a dozen drafts, but that’s the name of the game. Now I’ve probably got room for two more sentences to flesh out Riv, the cat, and the actual conflict, but the stepping stones are there.

It’s ugly because it’s true; for any given project, you get ONE SHOT with any particular agent, and you are in heavy competition. Yes, there are lots of agents out there, but some of us write in particular genre niches where honestly there really aren’t that many fish in the sea, certainly not the mythical “hundred agents” we’re told to query. So rather than writing just one hook, write twenty and tweak and rewrite the best of those twenty. I can hear you groaning from here, but I am in the middle of this process right now myself and I promise you it does get easier the more you do it. Blind poll your friends and have them select what hook they like best (NOT while you stand there looking like a hungry dog, for goodness sake). Do that and you’ll soon start to get a feel for what draws attention, what entices, what leaves them asking for more.

The Steel Remains

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I admit it; despite being a fan of the new fantasy-noir subgenre, I avoided reading Richard K. Morgan’s The Steel Remains for a long time. I avoided it because I’d read reviews mentioning graphic rape scenes.

Rape in fantasy is a particularly touchy subject for me, because I’ve noticed a disturbing trend where writer utilize rape for shock value, or even worse, as setting/scenery, to show the reader that we’re really not in Kansas any more. The problem with this approach is that it reduces women to objects and makes light of the very real suffering of rape survivors. Unlike orcs, magic swords, and dragons, rape is real. And it should be written about; but not in a way that normalizes it or reduces the raped to the same plane as a burning tavern or slaughtered horse. There are not enough explicatives in the world to adequately express how I feel about that.

I’m not sure why I eventually decided to give The Steel Remains a go anyway. Probably I downloaded the first chapter onto my kindle app and was taken enough with the quality of writing to give it a shot. It is very well written, in the low fantasy style that dumps the “thous” and “mayhaps” for “screw you” and “oh hell.” Personally, I really like this stuff; I know it doesn’t work for a lot of people who want their mayhaps. (I know I get zinged by my writing class every time I slip a curse into my own work, and I’m really not sure where I stand on that any more. But that’s another post for another time.)

Now that I’ve read the book (and am halfway through the sequel, The Cold Commands), I’ve come to this rather sad conclusion regarding the rape scene:

1. The rape bothered so many readers because the victim was a teenaged boy (the protagonist, Gil, in flashback), not a girl, as we are sadly used to.

2. The rape bothered so many readers because it was written with clarity and pain, not as some sort of halfassed Lawry’s Seasoning Salt for this Brutal Fantasy World

I thought the rape scene was handled well, buoyed by the strength of Morgan’s writing. I can see it being triggering for survivors, but I imagine fantasy is a real mindfield for the easily triggered these days. That being said, I do have quibbles about the book:

First of all, I would’ve liked the storyto be longer because the last third felt rushed to me, when the mystical elements leading to the climax came into play, they could’ve used more fleshing out.

Secondly, I had a hard time buying into the romantic relationship that Gil got embroiled in during the latter half of the book. It, like the plot, seemed rushed.

Lastly, it irked me that the two male characters (one gay, one straight) both constantly had sex on the brain and got a lot of action while the female character (gay) was totally repressed, with no obvious cultural reason to be that way. It just felt unbalanced and weird, in a book chock full of sex, that the woman would be the one to deny herself. (By the way, this book is chock full of sex. And violence! Did I mention it’s fantasy-noir?) I’m not sure what Morgan was going for with that, but it had a slight whiff of subconscious puritanical bs about it.

Richard K. Morgan has a lot of talent, and my quibbles certainly didn’t stop me from picking up the next book, which I am thoroughly enjoying. So if you like fantasy and don’t mind a lot of violence, cursing, and sex (both gay and straight), you’ll probably like The Steel Remains. If any one of those elements has you curling your lip, skip it.

Either way, Morgan is definitely a writer to keep your eye on.

500 Club (3/1)

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It’s the first of March, so let’s bring this 500 Club in like a lion. Prompts wait below, warm in their lair and ready to play.

The Rules:

  1. Write 500 words based on one of the two prompts below.
  2. Post it to your blog.
  3. In the comments below, drop the first line or two along with a link to the rest of the story.

The prompts today have a qualifier. Think of your default protagonist. White, male, adult, straight? Today I want you to change at least two of those defining characteristics. If you always write men, try a woman on for size. If you always write about straight characters, hit up the LBGT spectrum. If you always write about white people, try slipping into the POV of an asian, or native american, or black person. And if you always write about people in their mid-20s, try an elderly or very young perspective instead.

(If you get absolutely stuck, try this: write as you normally would, then go back and change Paul to Pam, but leave in the girlfriend. The point is to stretch as a writer, and to realize you CAN write from the perspective of X Y or Z. Just write a person, know what I mean?)

1. Billy found the body in the river. 

OR

2. It all started when the cat came in. I knew it was bad luck, but nobody listened to me. God, I hate being right.

Happy writing!

Don’t SPOILER your plot!

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THURSDAY BONUS POST! AKA, I don’t know why I try to use the Post Scheduler and write things ahead of time. That thing hates me. It steals my socks and puts nails in my tires and stands over my bed at night with a knife in its hand, just watching. FOR NOW. Anyway, let’s just pretend that we’re time travelers, and we’re going back to Monday’s post, to-day-ay-ay-ay-ay….

Why do we turn from page one to page two? Because we want to know what happens next. Therefore one of the worst sins a writer can commit is spoilering his own plot by telegraphing his plot punches.

If your hero’s wife, Daphne Camille Elizabeth, is a superficial and conniving shrew with no quality but beauty to recommend her, I know she will horribly betray the hero before the book ends. (And maybe he deserves it for being such an idiot as to marry her in the first place).

And yet, I will also know it won’t matter too much because it will free the hero to marry the equally beautiful young Mary Sue, introduced in Chapter Two, who is forthright, kind, fearless, and practically perfect in every way, just like that other Mary. (Except Mary Poppins is an arrogant commitment-phobe, which are the flaws that make her so delightful.)

Knowing what happens in advance of actually reading it sucks half the fun out of any given book. If I, the reader, can also figure out HOW Daphne Camille Elizabeth will betray the hero, so much the worse.

So how does this spoilering happen? For illustrative purposes, here is a short scene written two different ways, in which a powerful gentleman has just made an inappropriate proposal to an impoverished young lady:

 Figlips #1

“I say, my dear, no need to get your nose out of joint,” blustered Figlips, self-consciously adjusting his lavish wig. “Many young ladies like to ‘ride the ponies’. It’s a compliment to be asked, you know.” He smiled greasily, his rat-like eyes running slowly up and down her length. His ugly face screwed into a coarse, vulgar smile as he adjusted his belt, several sizes too tight for his unsightly girth. “I hope you do not tattle to Papa and sour our business venture. It would break his heart.”

 Figlips #2

“I say, my dear, no need to get your nose out of joint.” Figlips smiled, his mild brown eyes running over her. “Many young ladies like to ‘ride the ponies’. I only meant to pay you a compliment when I asked.” He bowed, his lavish wig tipping slightly to one side. “Forgive me, I beg. I meant no offense. You know I hold your family in the very highest of esteem; else I never would have aided your father in this perilous diamond venture. Please say all is well between us, it will break my heart if you don’t. ”

Don’t we all hate Figlips? But in that first example, we are being hammered over the head with hating Figlips. His threats are obvious and clumsy. He blusters, rather than speaking. We are shown he is vulgar and coarse, then told directly that he is vulgar and coarse. And there’s the use of ugliness and obesity to signal negative character traits (which, by the way, is lazy as hell.). This is just a short paragraph, imagine pages and pages of this mustachio-twirling. By the third chapter you just know he’s going to ruin Papa and try to rape our poor heroine for good measure. Why Papa is such a dumb-dumb as to get involved with an obvious monster like Figlips #1 instead of shooting him on sight is beyond me; certainly it lessens my sympathy for the beleaguered family.

In example two, Figlips is still creepy, but more ambiguous. Perhaps he really did mean well and is just socially awkward, but with a name like Figlips… probably not. Asking our unnamed heroine’s forgiveness also puts her in a bind; does she graciously accept his apology, with all its creepy implications, or does she spurn him, and appear a churl? Perhaps he will change for the better. Perhaps he will do something dastardly. Both seem possible… the author can take it either way, and I won’t feel betrayed. The truth is, I’m not sure what Figlips #2 is going to do next. I only know I don’t trust him.

So, how do we telegraph our plot punches, spoiler our plot, overplay our hand? By overusing adverbs and adjectives rather than relying on action and dialogue, drawing characters as caricatures, not people, and generally just not trusting the reader.  When you trust the reader, it frees you to be subtle, which in turn will keep the reader guessing as he turns those pages.

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!