David R Slayton

Aug32010

Writing to the Critic: Mr. Angry and the Workshop from Hell

I once took a writing workshop with an incredibly angry, aggressive man. His idea of poetry was a stream of expletives and rage. He’d start every class by loading himself up on sugar and caffeine before unleashing a wave of criticism in our workshop groups. There was quite literally a point or two when I worried about my safety. He was the exact personification of the reluctance I’d always had in taking a writing class.

Mr. Angry was eventually kicked out of the class, which was a relief to us all, but at the same time my writing suffered. Knowing I was going to face him every Tuesday and Thursday meant I’d been steeling my nerves, but I was also polishing my material. I began to adjust my short stories to withstand his critiques. I anticipated his attacks, and my writing was ready for him. How was such a negative presence in workshop helping me write better? I had given my internal editor a more aggressive face, a more bombastic personality, and a more critical eye. The supportive voices in class were helpful in some ways, but they never forced the same polish as Mr. Angry. I’ve since incorporated him as my internal critic and editor. He’s a frightening presence, not really a friend, and an important weapon in my arsenal in the battle for getting published.

To start writing we need a softer touch, a lot of encouragement, practice. We take baby steps into the craft, open our minds, discover our voice. Nurturing this stage of things is crucial, but if we’re going to publish we need a brutal reality check. Your mother might tell you she likes your work, but any critique that’s pure gush and not truly critical isn’t getting you where you need to be. So a crucial trick is knowing when to turn the internal Mr. Angry on and off. If he’s there from go you may never get a project started. He’s busy telling you that you suck, and listening may cost you your confidence. When you’re stuck, face down on the mat, you’ve got to shut that critic off or you won’t pull yourself up and get back to work. When you’re truly down is a good time to rely on your support network, get a little encouragement, go back to the well for some nurturing. Read a really good book, remember why you love a great read and why you want to contribute to the conversation. Get back to work.

But when the draft is done and you need to make your work into something that might actually sell, take Mr. Angry out of his box and start asking him questions. Let him pelt your writing with useful critique. Separate issues of confidence from issues of craft. In studying Philosophy you learn to counter argue, to question assumptions and keep digging until you break an argument. The person will invariably strengthen their position or abandon it. And sometimes you’ve got to abandon a bit of your writing. A story or worse, a novel, just isn’t publishable. It might be too derivative, too poorly written, or too predictable. A good way to avoid ending up with such a piece of writing is to critique it. Put it in front of Mr. Angry and let him rip. When he’s done, and you’ve plugged those holes, let him have another go. This is how counter-arguing works: you keep attacking the weak spots until they’re gone. When Mr. Angry is exhausted, and you’ve successfully revised away everything he spotted, get a critique group. Exchange your writing with other writers. Get their input. If you’ve honestly listened to your internal critic you’re going to find that you’ve hit the issues already. And if not, don’t despair, you need to refine your inner critic as well as your craft. He’ll grow as you do, adding new attacks as you add new techniques. The process will always be there, iterative, and evolving. Balance your inner editor/critic with the flow of your work. It can be tricky. You need to always improve, but you also need to always be working and striving. If Mr. Angry gets out of control and is stifling your work, kick him out for a while.

Aug12010

Book Club Review: Winterlong – I Can Feel the Cold

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

– Emily Dickinson

What makes a good science fiction or fantasy book is what makes any good book: conflict, character, and strong writing. Yet with science fiction in particular, I find the more compelling books need to do more. They have to draw me into an alien world, present a changed or future Earth. Sometimes, as in Star Trek, they offer us a more ideal version of ourselves. World peace is achieved, we’re reaching for the stars, and the conflict comes from our contact with alien societies. Sometimes, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, we look into a dystopian future where all is wrong with the world. We had it far better than we knew, and we let it slip away through greed or arrogance. Good fantasy sweeps me up in a world of magic. Good science fiction can chill me to the core.

Winterlong, the first book chosen for our book club, certainly puts a bit of ice in my spine. It’s as lush as a One Hundred Years of Solitude, but like that book, every garden holds a deadly human danger. Being a bit hopeful about our future, I tend to shy from post-apocalyptic novels, but Elizabeth Hand crafts a world so far removed from us that our past is jumbled together with the society’s idea of us: religion, history, sexuality, mythology, even our museums are transformed, often beautifully, often horrifically, but rarely in a way we’d truly recognize. Children, particularly, meet terrible fates in this book. Innocence is either anathema to survival in Winterlong’s world or it is the key to unlocking far more terrible horrors. Doorways are opened and things we’ve always carried inside us are let loose.

Not for the faint of heart, Winterlong could be further compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude in that it shares traits with magical realism, though Hand’s world has science and the acts of mankind as cause for the terrible changes that descend without warning onto the landscape. At the novel’s center is a fairytale trait, a “garden within a garden,” a mythic archetype lurking in the mutated flowers. Death haunts these characters, at first from without, then soon from within, the scariest place it can dwell. Two tangling point of views come together. Distinct shards of a broken society are deeply explored, and Hand lets her characters’ Todestrieb, their death-instinct, out to play in an already terrible world.

I choose Winterlong for our inaugural book because it’s long been on my list. I suspect it will haunt me far longer. It’s a book I will read again, without enjoyment, but with a desire to untangle its puzzles and revisit its warnings.

Aug12010

Some Characters are Timeless

Lately I’ve taken to examining television series, how they’re constructed, how they arc, and how so many writers and producers can keep track of a story and push it forward. Comic books are a great resource for such analysis: Superman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman have all been with us for years. Dozens of writers have touched their story, added to its framework, sometimes radically and sometimes by embracing the status quo. Supporting cast members get killed off. New characters arrive to offer a fresh point of view. At the heart of the lifelong series is the timeless character, someone we can relate to and touches us enough that new generations discover them and their appeal does not wane. But they can’t survive on nostalgia alone. That much is clear when an imprint tries to bring back a classic character without giving them enough connection to current times. A timeless character has to find relevance in the world of their audience.

As a kid, in Guthrie, Oklahoma, I’d try to wait up for my dad to get home. He’d make it in just after 10 pm, wake me, and we’d meet me in the living room to watch Doctor Who on PBS. That was my first timeless character, the first time my head filled with ideas about other worlds and histories long forgotten. Sure there was a lot of running and screaming, but there was a robot dog, and I came to love the series and stuck with it on public television through much of my childhood.

I’ve kept up with the current version, updated and straining to be more adult, but weighed down by sentiment and the vast history of the series. The acting could be very strong, with some good doses of just over the top. David Tennant and Catherine Tate especially brought a great interplay, but the sense of wonder had largely gone out of it for me. Still, I decided to follow the current season from the beginning, driven mostly by my affection for Steven Moffat.

I knew he’d written some of the strongest episodes of the last few years, and I knew he could write razor dialogue from his work on Coupling. I knew from his creation of River Song, that he could create strong characters who really embraced the concept of time travel and what it would entail for disjointed meetings and lost moments.

What I didn’t expect was to find him getting to the heart of the Doctor and his relationship to his companions and audience. In season five, Moffat takes the Doctor back into a childhood context, the place where I met him, and brings him forward into our adulthood. The companion this year, Amy Pond, acts as a surrogate for all of us who grew up with Doctor Who. Companions have always been a point of view character, a way for us to get our questions about the Doctor’s world answered and feel like we’re not the only ones looking into a strange new universe, but Amy meets the Doctor in her childhood. When he vanishes, she has to remember him anew, matching her fantasies to her reality.

A character with no sense of adventure gains it, a character running from the inevitability of growing up embraces it, and the Doctor begins to show an awareness of the vastness of his life. He starts to show a maturity and the uncertainty that comes with it as he learns that there are things even he does not know.

While Moffat reduces the show’s sentimentality, the weakest moments still come when it gets center stage (the third episode, with Winston Churchill, being the clearest example). The hints and nods to past continuity are for the most part, well placed Easter eggs that remind us of the show’s long history, but don’t bog us down in obscure lore. The plots work without a trip to Wikipedia, which isn’t always the case with long-standing comic book heroes.

I was deeply impressed by the finale, which moved me in ways I hadn’t expected. Doctor Who grew up a little and a childhood hero has managed to stay with me through the years.

Jul32010

Announcing the Fantasy and Fiction Book Club!

To write, you must read. Okay, sure, you’ve also got to write, and sometimes that seems like a serious uphill battle, but what are we churning out all this stuff for if there’s no audience? I read whenever I can, usually in desperate marathons of sleep deprived consumption, but then I get out of the regular habit and slack off again. Come to think of it, I have a very similar relationship to the gym.

After letting good books pile up around the house, I know they’re good because my friend Jo gave most of them to me, I’m starting a book club to motivate myself to keep a more regular schedule and share good books with friends.

I’ll post polls here so we vote on which book to read for which month. As I believe that writing takes a lot of diversity in reading, I’ll be keeping it open in regards to genre or age. Once we’ve moved through the unread stack on my desk I’ll start taking suggestions. Please invite anyone you think would like to join. Our first book will be Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand. It’s been on my list for a while and I’m excited to finally get to it. I should point out that the Rejectionist reminded me to read this book this week, and I’m grateful for the prod to get reading it. The goal is to have Winterlong read by August 1st.

Jul22010

Staring Into Space: the Work Before

There’s that weird aspect to writing, which isn’t writing. Writing is surgery, confidently wielding words and getting them out by pixel or pen. That’s the fun part, especially when you’re working on something new. I love virgin territory, diving into a new scene and bringing it to life. I love getting a bit of inspiration that helps me twist things around and surprise a reader. But before the fun part comes the planning, thinking things like plot and conflict through, sorting ideas, remembering a character’s motivations, and generally meditating on what I want to do in a scene. I call it the staring into space phase.

I usually write twice a day, once in the morning before work, and once at night, after. The times between can often stretch on depending on the stress level of the day job. I can lose the rhythm and tone of the work in progress. I try to leave myself on a cliffhanger with the scene, the moment before a big action or change. If time runs out I leave a little note for myself preceded by an asterisk. Carving out the time to write is simple for me: I force myself to commute by bus and it puts my butt in a chair without the distractions of home, Internet, or hungry cats. If I’m in a good spot when I get home I can sit down and stretch out the work (after the cats have had their dinner). It’s finding time to stare into space and contemplate that’s hard for me.

Part of that is the nature of thinking about the work. Like yoga or meditation, you have to discipline yourself to the task at hand. Driving out other thoughts, especially stressful concerns like “did I leave the gas on?” can be particularly tough. But putting it all aside and focusing on the work at hand is essential. Plot holes start to emerge as you counter argue the strengths of your story. New solutions and angles spring to mind to answer those arguments. Most importantly, you keep your story on the rails and avoid any crashes off track.

Failing to frame my writing and prepare for it can cost me valuable time. I’ll take a scene or section in the wrong direction. Then I’ve got to retrace my steps, possibly delete work, and start over. I’ve never been a solid outliner. I like to figure things out as I go, but I do strongly believe in milestones. Certain unalterable events have to happen in the plot for the story to function: villains have to show up, doors have to be opened, and changes have to occur. I don’t keep an outline but find a roadmap is handy. So I start my planning sessions with a quick review of my story’s path. Staring off into space, I try to put myself as closely in tune with the story as possible. I pour a cup of coffee and make sure the cats are fed. Then I get to work at staring into space.

Jun272010

“To the Man With a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail.”

Google attributes this quote to Mark Twain, but I first encountered it in regards to writing in my Introduction to Literary Studies course during my Literature BA. Dr. So was referring to semicolon usage, something he’d picked up on in our papers. Once we’d learned how to properly use a semicolon, we were putting them everywhere. The point he was making was that just because you have a tool doesn’t mean you always have to use it. It’s something to watch for in your writing, and it extends to many things, not just punctuation. When we write there’s a certain level of comfort with what we know. We might embrace certain stylistic constructs or punctuation uses because they’re familiar, and we risk overusing them and giving our prose a flat, repetitive quality.

Eastlight’s first draft contained an insane amount of nodding. I was overusing that beat constantly. That was a problem easily solved once it was picked up on, but other repetitions were subtler. My history degree trained me to write more academically, more passively, and I still cling to weak phrasing like seemed as in it seemed darker versus it grew darker. One of the biggest patterns I’ve faced is making my verbs more active, and that took investing into the Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus* and using it daily. It’s fortunate that I enjoy word-smithing, though it’s easy to get lost in the weeds if you’re not careful and while away precious writing hours by picking sentences apart. The old adage of putting a manuscript away for a while is crucial here. You often don’t recognize a repetitive pattern while you’re in the middle of performing it. A little distance is a good cure. Reading back through a manuscript a few months later will definitely help you spot patterns both good and bad. All of this thought on process is teaching me that multiple drafts are never going to fade away. When I set out to write my first novel, I knew there would be lots of drafts, and there were. But I thought Eastlight would have fewer. It didn’t. It had the same number. It all goes back to that continual process of improvement: you stop making some mistakes, but you learn you’re making others. You grow in your craft and take bolder risks, introducing new patterns you need to work on. Widen your toolbox and use everything you’ve got on hand.

*I recommend the investment, though don’t stop there. The Thesaurus is strong, but I’ve found it to be incomplete. I supplement a lot with www.dictionary.com’s thesaurus, and that resource is free.

Jun232010

Had to Share

Laura Miller’s Salon piece on self publishing. The section on slush was what I found the most interesting:

It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés — for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that’s almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy who said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver” might have had a point after all. Recovery is possible, but it’ll take a while (apply liberal doses of F. Scott Fitzgerald). In the meantime, instead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you’ll get.

I’m sure Miller’s article will be getting a lot of discussion on the publishing blogs, and I’m very interested in seeing how it’s received. I obviously have a stake in this matter, and I’m one of the partial. But I also know that my book under the bed was rightfully rejected. Does the query process truly act as quality control, or is it stiffing good books? All the reading I’m doing is beginning to hint to both.

Jun172010

Trick, Treat, and Maybe Twitter

I’ve always had a little taste for the macabre or the spooky. While I went through my Goth phase post high school and fell deeply in love with Anne Rice’s vampire series, I left the supernatural behind for a good while. Probably it was college. Entering an English Lit program drove me to read “serious” books, and I had to slake my thirst on the ghost scene in Hamlet or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While I didn’t really return to the supernatural until recently, my love for it was always there. I’ve especially always enjoyed a good intersection of epic fantasy and the paranormal.

In recent years I’ve been getting my fix through Gail Z. Martin’s Chronicles of the Necromancer. I’m excited to see where she takes the new arc. Gail has been kind enough to provide us with a sneak peek of her new book, The Sworn, coming in February next year:

As plague and famine scourge the winter kingdoms, a vast invasion force is mustering from beyond the northern seas. And at its heart, a dark spirit mage wields the blood magic of ancient, vanquished gods. Summoner-King Martris Drayke must attempt to meet this great threat, gathering an army from a country ravaged by civil war. Drayke must seek new allies from among the living – and the dead –- as an untested generation of rulers face their first battle. Then someone disturbs the legendary Dread as they rest in a millennia-long slumber beneath sacred barrows. Their warrior guardians, the Sworn, know the Dread could be pivotal as a force for great good or evil. But if it’s the latter, could even the Summoner-King’s sorcery prevail?

Gail Z. Martin is the author of The Summoner, The Blood King and Dark Haven in the Chronicles of the Necromancer series, published by Solaris Books. The Sworn marks her move to Orbit Books. The books have garnered praise from reviewers as well as strong sales and spots on several bestseller lists. Learn more at www.ChroniclesOfTheNecromancer.com

Gail might finally be the reason I get dragged onto Twitter, as she’s going to twitter the first chapter of The Sworn on June 21st (www.Twitter.com/GailZMartin). I’m hoping we’ll see more Tris’s power set, and see wider application of his summoning abilities.

One place Gail really shines is settings: she’s created a great religious division based on various aspects of a single goddess. With her exploring various kingdoms in the world of the Summoner, I’m anxious to see how the goddess takes to these vanquished gods infringing on her territory. Martin is upping the stakes, which can only be a good thing for a series. Hope you join us for the ride!

Jun142010

The Delicate Balance of Setting and Detail

It’s a rainy, humid weekend in Denver, which makes me a little homesick for Oklahoma. After my last post’s suggestion to slow down and listen, I wanted to focus on another bit of advice that got pushed to the side: which is to observe. Growing up in Oklahoma, I was certainly exposed to severe weather. The distinct flatness made you feel like the sky went on forever while the land just floated beneath the clouds. But these aren’t the only elements to Oklahoma as a setting. There’s the red mud, which smells a bit sulfurous and clings to everything, especially after an autumn rain has kicked it up to the car hoods or the middle trunk of the blackjack oaks. There are fields of switch grass, sometimes flooded, with dilapidated barns falling to bits, and catfish-infested lakes, blue and shining, but full of gritty water that becomes truly purple at sunset. The smells of Oklahoma are dusty, verdant, and always a little a damp in flavor. I remember a classic car, model T era, just lying on a ravine slope near a lake and rusting slowly to death. I recall miles of weathered cattle fencing often displaying rusted signs for stores and brands long out of business. Such imagery makes it easy to paint the poverty and decay I saw in Oklahoma growing up, but it also generalizes a setting which has malls, rock climbing gyms set in old grain silos, incredible botanic gardens, and a sprawling zoo. When I tell people I’m from Oklahoma I usually get a refrain from the musical or some question like “did you ride horses to school?”

It’s easy to reduce setting to a repetitive stereotype, and such generalizations occur to us because they are convenient. We use them to summarize someone or somewhere quickly and in doing so we often misconstrue. Yet a writer can go too far in the other direction: we can describe a setting to death. This is a particular pitfall in epic fantasy, where writers strive to bring a world alive. There’s a fine line between injecting realism and over-burdening or over-sharing. The less like our world the fantasy is, the harder the job of conveying the setting to the reader in a concise fashion. All of the Oklahoma details above are things I’ve pulled from memory, and I could easily continue in this vein for a long while, but it’s important to know when to pull back from setting. Setting is a character, an essential element to your story, and an important tool in your writing kit; but setting alone is devoid of purpose. The further I take my writing, the more I see it as systemic: each element is crucial and interrelated to the others. Setting must be connected to character, to plot, and conflict in order for it to purpose. No element of your work should be static unless its static quality drives the tension. For example, a small town kid who desperately wants a change in her life and feels strangled by the unchanging environment. As you observe the world around you and craft setting for your stories, it’s important to include details that bring the setting alive and surpass the easy stereotype. It is equally important that the characters inhabit the setting in a relatable way: engage all five senses with critical details. Balance this with the level of detail. Don’t overwhelm the reader with non-essential information but engage them. So much of writing is a delicate balancing act and learning to use your voice to walk the very fine line that’s right for your work.

Jun122010

Slow Down: Pace, Plot, and Observation

I used to take walks with my ex, before we were exes, wandering the city, street to street, alley to alley. I found it utterly boring. I needed a destination, somewhere to go, a point to it all. It’s one more thing I should apologize for. I’ve since learned to meander, ambulate, and drift. I’ll take turns down new streets because I like the house on the corner or into an alley based on the graffiti. This tactic is a great way to think, to plot, to turn ideas over and let them rise like bread. It’s not a bad method of warming up my brain and slipping into my character’s skin.

It’s also become one of my favorite ways of capturing unique details, images and snippets that I file away for later use. You observe more at the slower pace of walking. You hear more without the muting of car windows or the rush of the wind. Landscape and setting don’t pass you by. As I’m often reminded when a fox crosses my path in the park, cities are full of unexpected wildlife, people, and details. Things jump out at you more clearly, but most importantly you learn to slow your mind down. When I’m writing I tend to get very excited about ideas, many of which aren’t bad, but they don’t fit the scene or piece. It’s important to check ideas before I just start altering a work; and I often find the idea isn’t going to work and file it away for later. Rewriting a scene without thinking it through can be disastrous. A story is a tapestry. Once you start pulling threads or introducing new images you may create problems that ripple through the entire work. I realized in my latest edit that I was putting all of the revelations at the climax, and while this effectively brought the plot to a tightly written end, it created a desert of meaningful events in the preceding section. An edit later and I’ve moved things around a little. The pace of the novel is less like a sudden crescendo, where all of the secrets unravel at once, and more like a gradual ascent, with peaks and valleys of revelation until the most major secret stand exposed. You need little rests along the way, accomplishments, and respite from whatever is hounding you.

The trick to understanding that I needed to make the change was feeling the novel’s tempo and knowing where to speed up or slow down. When I looked at the points in the book where the story crawled I often found a lot of slack, extra writing that while not bad, didn’t contribute to moving the story forward. Cutting these pieces and repurposing their strongest lines at other points went a long ways to speeding the book up. I had to get go of a pre-determined word count and give the story what it needed most.

Each story has its own pace: a cross-country chase will feel very different than a cozy murder mystery. The best trick I’ve found for learning my story’s pace is to read it aloud to myself, which certainly earns me a few interesting glances on the bus. I’m fortunate that I studied poetry so long. It helps me a lot with understanding the iambic rhythms of English and if I’m lucky, avoiding staccato beats.

I guess if there’s any advice in this post it’s to listen: to your work, to your environment. Try to get a feel for the world around you with a pointless walk, unplugged from technology. Leave your phone behind, your iPod, and your laptop. Bring nothing but your eyes, your feet, a notebook and a pen. When you’ve got a story finished, take it with you. Find somewhere quiet to sit and read it aloud.

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