Posted in Culture, Writing, tagged quiet living, simplification, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips on 06 Aug 2012| Leave a Comment »
Frederick the Great is reputed to have said, “If you try to hold everything, you hold nothing.”
He was talking about focus, and applying your effort where it can do the best good, even if that meant you took a hit. This advice, though 200 years old and military in origin, can be applied directly to our lives today.
Yes, I’m talking about multitasking.
Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, dreams, lucid dreaming, novel writing, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips on 03 Aug 2012| Leave a Comment »
Ever have one of those dreams that is has a really great storyline? I don’t mean a cool (but wacko) storyline where you turn into a dolphin and swim to the Peloponnese where you meet Marisa Tomei and—damn, I love that dream…
No, I’m talking about a dream that has a cogent but wild plot, a good theme, and strong structure with rising action and conflict. Ever have one of those? Am I the only one who does a literary post-mortem on his dreams?
Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing, tagged creative writing, Dreams of the Desert Wind, Fallen Cloud Saga, FC:V, novel writing, novels, Ploughman Chronicles, publishing, Unraveling Time, Writing, writing tips on 01 Aug 2012| Leave a Comment »
Are there “rules” for genre fiction?
I’ve been called out by die-hard Alternate History readers for having “broken the rules” of the genre with my Fallen Cloud Saga. Charges that I “changed too much” or that “that’s not the way it was back then” were among the most common complaints. In response, I can only shrug. There are rules? I didn’t get any rulebook. What part of “alternate world history” is confusing these people?
When I sat down to outline the The Year the Cloud Fell (FC:I), I didn’t check to see what genre label it would sport. I had an idea, I worked on it, and I wrote the story I wanted to tell. My standalone novels, Dreams of the Desert Wind and Unraveling Time, are also good examples. Each one of those books blends elements of several genres: suspense, thriller, romance, time travel, adventure, historical fiction, etc. But I never set out to write a genre-bender. I set out to write a novel.
That’s because “genre,” as it’s used today, has nothing to do with writing, but it has everything to do with marketing.
Publishers want to make money; I can’t blame them for that, but in order to ensure the best return on their investment, they want to stack the odds in their favor. One way they do that is by giving books specific “genre” labels. Humor, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, plus sub-categories like Alternate History, Steampunk, Police Procedural…these are all genre labels and yes, the fans of these genres have expectations about what will be inside a book that bears a specific label. That’s what makes the product predictable, and helps the publisher maximize profits by targeting their budget where it will do the best work.
But it has nothing to do with writing.
The book you have in mind might tick all the boxes for one of these labels. Many books do, and publishers (and agents) love that type of book because it makes their job easier. Unfortunately, none of my books fit so neatly into one category. So, should I change what I write? Should I “write to the market”?
Writing to the market is like setting out to write a blockbuster. You’re aiming at a sly, wily, restlessly moving target. You’re having to guess, months in advance, what will pique the public’s interest, what will go viral, what will be trending upward on Twitter. In short, it’s a nearly impossible task, and if you succeed, it’ll be more luck than skill.
I write what I want to write. I build my characters, my worlds, my storylines specific to my needs, not the unwritten rules of bean-counters in marketing departments. Writing a novel is hard enough, without burdening myself with writing a book I’m not in love with.
k
Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing, tagged creative writing, Fallen Cloud Saga, FC:V, novel writing, novels, Writing, writing tips on 31 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »
Today was a good writing day.
Ilene and I have gotten into the habit of taking “rehearsing for retirement” mini-vacations. This weekend we took another, centered around our 29th wedding anniversary. We had plans of doing all sorts of things, going places, trying new restaurants, seeing a movie or two to see, but we ended up pretty much sticking around the house, reading, watching the Olympics, and (in my case) writing. I can barely wait until retirement.
I’ve been working on a critical section of FC:V (aka Beneath a Wounded Sky), and today I finally punched through to the other side. I know the Faithful Readers over on my Facebook page are sick of hearing about this “critical section” of the novel, but hey. It’s critical. It’s the difference between crying “Checkmate” in move 25 and making sure you have all the pieces in place so that it means something. That means a lot of work, and a lot of re-work. And then some re-re-work.
But it’s also been rewarding. Any time, in writing Book V, you can make a serious call-back to a scene in Book I, that’s a hell of a lot of fun. Challenging, too, though, primarily because nearly everyone in the chapter has conflicting emotions, and my POV character shifts emotional focus a couple/three times in the last scene alone. While it’s a simple matter to map the “top note” of each character’s main emotion, it’s a different kettle to ensure that all the underlying emotional content is logical as you move through the shifts each character experiences.
I feel particularly free, though, after today’s work. While this isn’t the emotional climax or the action climax, it’s the pivot. For those keeping count, I’m about 75% done. About another 100 pages to go in the main product, and the production work will be complete. Then I go into “post-production,” editing, reader feedback, re-editing, and then…well, you get the idea.
Believe me, though, “production” is the hardest part. When I get that done, pop the champers.
k
Posted in Television, Writing, tagged creative writing, Firefly, NBC, Revolution, screenwriting, Serenity, suspension of disbelief, television, world building, Writing, writing tips on 31 Jul 2012| 2 Comments »
I’ve just seen what is possibly the most ridiculous premise for a television show, ever.
It has long been a fact of life in my house that, if we like a show, it gets canceled. If a show is sharp and well-written, it will probably get the mid-season axe (Yes, shows like “Firefly,” and yes, I am a Browncoat, but let’s not even go there.)
Well-written shows are thin on the ground these days. Ironically, broadcast television and the major networks—once the movers and shakers of primetime—are sinking to new and totally unimpressive lows, scything back scripted shows like Death himself, while pumping the pabulum of competition and so-called “reality” shows into our living rooms like cut-rate meth. Basic cable is the new frontier, and it’s doing some great work, but examples are few and far between.
As a consumer of television fare, I’m a tough market, but I am willing to suspend my disbelief—a lot—if you give me a good plot, some good writing, and some good acting to carry me along. Shows like “Awake” and “Journeyman” (both defunct) came with the sort of setup that required a healthy suspension of disbelief, but they both paid great dividends in the writing and the intricate plots. The writers for these shows put some serious effort into building a basis for the shows, and as incredible and hard-to-believe as the premises were, they had a logic that was integral to the worlds they inhabited. They made sense, and you didn’t have to dump a trainload of fundamental truths in order to go along with them.
Every story, every novel, no matter how bizarre the setting, must have an internal logic. If it doesn’t make sense, we won’t buy it. You can have wizards and dragons and disc-shaped planets and time travel, you can break every rule of physics and change the course of history, but if you don’t explain it or worse, if you can’t explain it, your reader/viewer will be lost to you. If you don’t respect the reader enough to craft a believable plot, you just don’t respect the reader.
This weekend, while watching the Olympics, it was impossible to avoid the ad blitz for the new NBC show, “Revolution.” The JJ Abrams nametag was intriguing, as was Jon Favreau’s direction for the pilot, and post-apocalyptic setting (thankfully sans zombies) looked okay. But what was the premise? That suddenly all the electricity stopped working? No, seriously, what’s the premise?
I did a search to find out exactly what I was missing. I found that the show was set fifteen years after
…an unknown phenomenon permanently disabled all advanced technology on the planet, ranging from computers and electronics to car engines and jet turbines and batteries.
Oh my.
So, NBC has postulated a phenomenon that was somehow smart enough to know what it was going to disable (Batteries? Really?) I don’t know about you, but an old car engine isn’t “advanced technology.” The internal combustion engine is, essentially, just like, fire, you know? And not only is it smart enough to know what it’s going to disable, it’s completely undetectable, and the entire world is unable to figure out what it is or where it came from or how it did it. This big thing happens, and that’s it. Nothing else happens afterward; no alien invasion, no nano-technological Brownian machines ravage the world, no super-criminal demands a ransom. Nothing. So, this “lights out” moment is totally natural, totally unknown, and totally arbitrary.
But, it’ll probably be a hit because it’s got pretty people swinging swords.
k
Posted in Writing, tagged believable characters, books, Characters, novels, observation, research, Writing, writing novels, writing techniques, writing tips on 29 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »
For me, the most powerful tool in a writer’s toolbox is the power of observation. It not only helps me create believable characters, it also gives me the ability to fill my worlds with believable detail. Some examples…
I was in the office when the wind-up clock stopped. It didn’t go tick-tock—tick—-tock, slowing as it reached the end of its wind, but just went tick-tock-tick-tock—-, ending suddenly and abruptly like some metronomic cardiac arrest. Odd.
My stomach growled at me this morning, and it sounded for all the world like it said, “Hello, Chuckles.” My guts have never spoken to me so explicitly before, but I’m glad we’re on such friendly terms; that hasn’t always been the case.
For her 60th birthday, I gave my sister a vintage electric clock from the ’40s. It didn’t tick like a mechanical clock but hummed as it worked the sweep second hand around the dial. My sister liked this especially, as it matched her feeling of time as a continuum. I prefer the mechanical heartbeat of a tick-tock clock, as I like to think of time having a constant, measured passage.
These details of life and character are just the sort of things that inform my writing, providing snippets of description or personality. Observation is such a critical skill that it has actually become a pasttime for us.
We can play this game anywhere–at a restaurant, waiting at a stop light, anywhere–just by looking around at the people around us. (Coffee shops are perfect for this game.) I’ll pick someone or she might pick a couple, and we’ll start building backstories for them, weaving a tale of why they are there, what they’re doing, and what they are feeling. These aren’t just wild imaginings, though; we base our story on the subject’s dress, movement, and behavior. Couple on their third date? Construction worker doing the shopping for a sick wife? Woman contemplating divorce?
The key to the game is that the stories must be believable, and must tie into the person we observe. While my wife enjoys the game simply for the mental exercise, I find that it hones my skills and heightens my awareness. If you aren’t aware, you cannot observe, and if you aren’t observant, then you’re creating characters and descriptions in a vacuum.
Characters have to be believable, consistent, and comprehensible to the reader, even if the setting is as alien as a moon or the 9th century. In all the historical research and reading of memoirs I have done in preparation for my novels, the one thing I have learned is that we, as people, have not changed much. The world surrounding us has transformed, technologies have changed, but human behavior remains remarkably consistent.
So keep your eyes and ears open. Stay frosty. Inspiration may be standing ahead of you in the checkout line.
k
Posted in Writing, tagged amazon, Amazon Sales Rank, blogging, books, creative writing, novels, publishing, statistics, Writing, writing tips on 27 Jul 2012| 2 Comments »
Yesterday was an interesting day on the KRAG blog.
Being supremely new to blogging (Week 5), I’ve been watching the “Stats” page with interest. WordPress provides a nice collection of statistics which—depending on what you see—can be either fascinating or depressing. I’ve been watching the blog-stats bounce along: the number of daily views within easy reach of zero, fewer followers than eggs in a carton, most traffic sourced specifically from my “author” page over on Facebook.
Then, yesterday, a spike: I had views from India, Canada, the UK, Israel, and New Zealand; the number of views was more than double the average; and several folks took the time to leave comments. I asked myself: What the hell happened, and why?
And this reminded me of Amazon.com and their maddening “Sales Rank.”
Of course, I had been aware of Amazon’s “Sales Rank” for a long time, but it really meant nothing to me. I never buy a book because it’s a bestseller. I only buy books because they are recommended or because they just sound interesting. Sales Rank? Who cares? Pas moi.
But when my first novel went for sale up on Amazon, I did a complete 180. Suddenly, nothing was more important than that damned Sales Rank. I began tracking it, checking in on it hourly, in fact, entering what I found in a spreadsheet. I found websites devoted to the tracking of the Amazon Sales Rank. I watched my book’s ranking trend upward, break upward into the 6-digits, into 5-digits, back to six, up again, back again. It would change radically, without discernable logic, bouncing from a low rank of over 1 million up to under 60,000. Then, one day, as I repeatedly hit F5 to refresh my screen, it bounced up to around 1,400.
Number 1,400!! Out of millions! Boy-o-boy! I was on my way!!
When I hit refresh again, it was back at #90,000. What the hell happened? And why?
I did more research, found article upon article purporting to divine the math, method, and meaning behind these numbers. Taken in the aggregate, however, it quickly became clear that no one really knows how the Amazon Sales Ranks are calculated.
I stepped back, and thought again about what the Amazon Sales Rank meant to me as a reader. This arcane, inscrutable number meant nothing to me as a reader or purchaser of books, so it probably meant little to the public at large.
Of course, the stats associated with my blog have a little more meaning—each new reader is potentially a new person who might want to read one of my books—but should I spend time tracking the stats and trying to discern the reason they spiked or dipped? Shouldn’t I spend my time on more meaningful and productive efforts? Damned straight.
It comes back to why I do this: for the love of writing, and for the conversations it engenders. It doesn’t matter to me if this blog has 20 readers or 20,000; it’s the writing, the connection, and the interactions with readers and other writers that count most.
k
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 