Tag: Craft

How To Let Your Characters Grieve Well

Published on by Bryan

One of the keys to good writing, writing which pops off the page and carries the reader away, is depicting characters’ emotions realistically. If we can feel what they feel, if it moves us to laugh or get angry or cry, we are hooked on the characters and their needs become ours. So how do writers learn to write emotions? Much has been written on stages of emotions and descriptive language cues, etc. But what really makes them pop is using our own experience.

As per my previous posts, I have been going through a very difficult time dealing with my wife’s mental illness and now with our divorce. I have dealt with anger, dismay, exhaustion, frustration, sadness, etc. But ultimately, the mental illness destroyed who she was in ways that she has not recovered from. She insisted on a divorce and I knew we could not remain together. As much as I was ready for it at the time, as many times as I couldn’t wait for her to be gone, what I am left with now that she is gone is overwhelming grief.

People define them with slight variations but according to rec0ver-from-grief.com, these are the 7 Stages Of Grief:

1. SHOCK & DENIAL-
You will probably react to learning of the loss with numbed disbelief. You may deny the reality of the loss at some level, in order to avoid the pain. Shock provides emotional protection from being overwhelmed all at once. This may last for weeks.

2. PAIN & GUILT-
As the shock wears off, it is replaced with the suffering of unbelievable pain. Although excruciating and almost unbearable, it is important that you experience the pain fully, and not hide it, avoid it or escape from it with alcohol or drugs.

You may have guilty feelings or remorse over things you did or didn’t do with your loved one. Life feels chaotic and scary during this phase.

3. ANGER & BARGAINING-
Frustration gives way to anger, and you may lash out and lay unwarranted blame for the death on someone else. Please try to control this, as permanent damage to your relationships may result. This is a time for the release of bottled up emotion.

You may rail against fate, questioning “Why me?” You may also try to bargain in vain with the powers that be for a way out of your despair (“I will never drink again if you just bring him back”)

4. “DEPRESSION”, REFLECTION, LONELINESS-
Just when your friends may think you should be getting on with your life, a long period of sad reflection will likely overtake you. This is a normal stage of grief, so do not be “talked out of it” by well-meaning outsiders.Encouragement from others is not helpful to you during this stage of grieving.

During this time, you finally realize the true magnitude of your loss, and it depresses you. You may isolate yourself on purpose, reflect on things you did with your lost one, and focus on memories of the past. You may sense feelings of emptiness or despair.

5. THE UPWARD TURN-
As you start to adjust to life without your dear one, your life becomes a little calmer and more organized. Your physical symptoms lessen, and your “depression” begins to lift slightly.

6. RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH-
As you become more functional, your mind starts working again, and you will find yourself seeking realistic solutions to problems posed by life without your loved one. You will start to work on practical and financial problems and reconstructing yourself and your life without him or her.

7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE-
During this, the last of the seven stages in this grief model, you learn to accept and deal with the reality of your situation. Acceptance does not necessarily mean instant happiness. Given the pain and turmoil you have experienced, you can never return to the carefree, untroubled YOU that existed before this tragedy. But you will find a way forward.

The odd thing is the stages don’t actually progress in order necessarily. Sometimes you experience waves of them in mixed up order. It’s not just step one then on to step two, etc.

So where am I? I went through Stage 1 a lot during the whole medical crisis. Just feeling like “I don’t care if she’s gone” or “I can’t wait to be rid of her” or “I don’t love her anymore.” It was easy to do when she was telling me how much she hated me every day or verbally abusing me in other ways. It was easy to do because she was, in many ways, unrecognizable as the person I had once loved. Manic people are hard to love.

Stage 2 was a minor factor at first so I’ll skip it for now and address it more fully later because it’s where I am now.

I went through Stage 3 a lot as well, lashing out at her family for not telling me of her illness, for not making more effort to come and help me, and for being in denial of how difficult it was. Now that they’ve been here and dealt with her, they have a much better idea of the nightmare I was facing, but it was hard for me to communicate due to language barrier (they are Brazilians and speak mostly Portuguese) and cultural barrier. And because mental illness changed Bianca so much that you really had to see her to believe she was behaving that way.  When you’re in the midst of it though, you don’t have that logic. You just want them to empathize and act according to how you think they should act, period.

Stage 4 was a constant as well. I was in medical treatment for depression with meds and counseling. And it didn’t help that I had lost my job or that friends had turned their backs on us due to reasons I don’t full understand. Some of it was not knowing what to say or do to help us. Some of it was Bianca’s behavior. Some of it was my anger, too, I suppose. But I am left lonely, depressed, and reflecting on why and what went wrong and feeling abandoned. That makes it so much harder to deal with the other stages at the same time. You just have to tell yourself to breathe sometimes. You have to force yourself to leave the house and move just to remind yourself it actually feels good to get out and be alive.

Stages 5-7, I can’t even fathom right now, because I am stuck in the middle of Stage 2. The pain I feel is so constant and so overwhelming it almost chokes off my breath. It makes it hard to laugh or play or do anything joyful for more than a second or two. It makes it impossible to imagine a way out. Do I feel guilt? A little. Yeah. I didn’t express my love as well as I could. But then don’t all men fail at that or most? I also lashed out at her in anger. I regret so much those little instances, because her mania is not something she can control, but even knowing the person is not in their right mind is not enough to calm you when the stress and exhaustion overcome you. I spent months living with sleep deprivation and intense, constant stress. If you add to that my anger and depression, etc., it was a combination which led to me not loving her well sometimes. After all, as I said, the person I was dealing with was a manic person, not the woman I fell in love with. So now I feel guilt over that. Irrational? Maybe but it’s still there. Mostly, though I just feel pain.

I hurt because I feel like she died. The woman I waited so long for (see this post) died to me. I haven’t seen her since early this year. I have been dealing with someone else inhabiting her body and using her voice. And that person was impossible to live with and deal with–constantly out of control, constantly verbally abusive, selfish, childish. That person had no pleasant traits at all. Even her eyes looked wild and crazy, not at all the eyes I used to stare into and feel so loved. So I feel denied, robbed, assaulted. Fate, God, mental illness–choose one or all–stole my lover, my best friend, my companion, my wife. In a sense, they stole my life, my future, my happiness and my hope. And I feel so much pain and loss and anger and dismay, I couldn’t begin to describe it. Or can I? Maybe I have in this post. To make it all worse, I never really got closure. One day I left for Seattle on a writer’s retreat, and when I saw her again next, she was this manic person, not the woman I love. I never got to say “goodbye.”

In any case, I don’t know how my story will end, but I am sure I will continue to blog about it. I’m sure I will get to the last 3 stages at some point. Right now, I have to get through where I am. But why am I sharing all this? Why am I making this about me?

I am sharing it because this is real experience we can all draw from in our writing to make it better. Using our experiences and others helps us create real characters and empathetic ones and those are the ones which pop off the page. Yes, grief is but one emotion, yet it has stages involving many others. I am sharing this opening because I know there are things here writers can use to write well, and I want this blog to provide such information whenever it can. And all writing comes from our own experiences to some degree and the experiences of people we know or encounter.

So use it in your writing if you can. I know I will come back to it and do so. Right now the emotions are raw and fresh so that comes out in the words I use to describe them. If you deal with any situation calling for grief in your stories, read the stages, read what I’m experiencing and use it. It will make your characters and story come alive in ways that powerfully impact you and your readers. It will make your story/book memorable. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? To write something that people will carry with them forever after and remember?

So now take what I’ve written and think about your own life and experiences and those of people you’ve met. What resources do you find there for improving your writing? What stories can you tell? What emotional experiences can you include in your characters’ journeys to help readers connect with them? Make a list. Keep a spreadsheet.

For what it’s worth…

 


Lessons From Editing

Published on by Bryan

We finished the final edit on my debut novel The Worker Prince today. And while there’s still a road to publication, from sending out ARCS for reviews and blurbs, to racheting up marketing, to copyedits, artwork, etc., it’s a good feeling. This was my first time working through this process with an editor. And I put on hold writing the second book in the series to do it. Am I glad I did.

Amongst things my editors did, besides grammatical corrections and questioning passages for clarity, was to help me bring out nuances and aspects of the characters and story which I had glossed over or failed to exploit fully. This will make the novel richer and more meaningful overall, and it also had the bonus of helping me identify strains which can be exploited in the sequel. Their insights also went to worldbuilding, allowing me to exploit things like terraforming which are appropriate to my world but which I had not specifically touched on. Overall, I know the finished book is a lot stronger than it would have been without their help and I will be forever grateful to Randy Streu, Jen Ambrose and earlier editors Paul Conant and Darlene Oakley for their insights.

I continue to evolve in not just my craft but my approach to writing, and experiences like this only push me to self-examination and discovery of new ways to approach my work. For example, The Worker Prince being only my second novel, I have done more drafts of this book than I will of future novels, I suspect. In this case, my first draft was a basic concept of plot, characters and scenes. A lot of the gritty nuances and details came out in later drafts, where I sought ways to lend not only balance but connectivity throughout using various elements. For example, my protagonist has two names: his birth name, Davi (Dah-vee) Rhii, and his adopted legal name Xander Rhii. For much of his life, he goes by Davi, a name his adoptive mother liked because it was unique and non-stereotypical in their culture. But many of his colleagues and his uncle refer to him as Xander. As Davi seeks to come of age and discover who he is as a man, he really comes to own one name over the other. But the nuances of having some characters refer to him by one name over the other were important aspects of characterization and development of story I missed–which we discovered during editing.

There were also times I overstated things, either by repeating them too much or telling too much, which I could do better in showing or hinting at and letting the readers sort it out. Those are areas where my editors’ voices helped me find a wiser path for which I am grateful.

There were also little details, such as using more military-style language in battle and fight scenes, and setting up even minor characters as potential catalysts for action in the sequels, which came out in the editing. These things helped point me to a more focused understanding of what Book 2, The Returning, needs to be, and even to discover the arc of that story in a clear way I had failed to even as I’d started writing it. I typically write with a let the story unfold as it comes approach. But writing a three book series where the story has to flow from one to the next and the overall arc has to be well considered, this editing process on The Worker Prince helped me come to clearer understandings of the books to follow in ways that still allow some “letting the story come as it will” while also writing with a clearer plan. That will, no doubt, make those books stronger and better, and I am indebted to my editors for their assistance with that.

I don’t always get as detail oriented as I should in drafting stories. I tend to go back and add those things later, but learning to note little details and how they can be used throughout a story to bring out themes and deepen the world has been a great lesson for me.

So how does this help you?

1) Names/Language Matter–not only in the origins and meanings they may imply but in how they are employed by characters. How can you utilize the formality and informality with which characters address each other to not only reveal their relationships but deepen tension and characterization? How can you use terminology better in your story? Adding military language or creating formal language for various settings enriches the realism of your world for readers and adds a richness in texture to your story.

2) There Are No Little Things–little things like the necklace a character always wears, a notebook he/she always stops to write in, etc. can be employed to develop not only character but deepen the symbolism of the story. Do you employ any off these and are you using them to their fullest? Every little detail you include has the potential to be exploited for stronger nuance in the story. A few throwaways may exist but be careful to examine what you include and why and how they can be used to provide stronger meaning for readers.

3) Don’t overtell–We’ve all hear the warnings about Showing v. Telling but sometimes we feel the need to revisit plot aspects or character details we’ve already introduced because we fear the reader might not remember them. It’s a fine line to know when to do this and when not to but seeking specific feedback from betas and others on it can be of great help because this is one area where you can end up talking down to readers and nothing turns them off more than that.

4) Consider Future Stories–if you go in knowing you will be writing multiple books, spend time looking for ways you can exploit characters, props, and other details in the first book to set up things which will complicate or be expanded upon in later books. You may not be able to see it in the first draft or two, but as you move further in, you need to really look for this and develop those things well enough that readers will remember them by the time the sequels roll around.

Just a few lessons which I hope can help you on your writing path as they have helped me.

For what it’s worth…

Write Tip: 7 Tips For Being A Good Beta Reader

Published on by Bryan11 Comments

One of the things I’ve learned in the past year from working with editors and beta readers is how important a role these folks play in the creative success of any published product. Now there are good editors and bad editors, good beta readers and bad beta readers. I’ve been lucky with my editors so far but had a few beta readers who left things to be desired. (Actually my current crop are fantastic but took a while to find them.)

What you need to understand as a beta reader is that the author needs your focus and honesty to make a good book or story. In fact, without you, the story can’t be all it can be, so you’re actually participating in the creative process and can have huge influence over the final product. If it’s good–and even better because of your thoughtful attention–you can proudly brag about that, and I’m sure the author will credit you in the Acknowledgements as well.

So what does it take to be a good beta reader? Here’s Seven Tips:

1. Pay Attention. You need to read with focused care. Note everything that engenders a response in you. You don’t necessarily have to report them all in your notes, but pay attention, nonetheless, and analyze how that works as you assess the story. Because the author needs to know what works, what doesn’t, etc. This requires you to read with more effort and thought than you might be used to. So it may challenge you. But it will also enrich your reading life in later efforts by teaching you to look at things more deeply in ways you hadn’t imagined.

2. Ask Questions And Seek Answers. If you have unanswered questions or are confused, those are the first notes the author needs. Often we’re so wrapped up in our story with all its details, we don’t realize we’ve underexplained things or done so in a convoluted way. We desperately need you to point it out to us. And we’re thankful when you do. Sometimes what seems perfectly clear to us won’t be to you. This has happened many times editing my novel, and I’m always grateful for those chances to make it better.

3. If You Get Annoyed, Let Me Know. If I over explain or over foreshadow and ruin the surprise, I need to know. I need to know what bores or annoys you. You’re smart enough to realize when it was unintentional, so tell me, because I need to know.

4. Offer Me A Little Praise Too. I’m nervous and excited to put my work out into the world. I need to know the bad stuff, yes. But it’s also helpful to know what you liked. What made you laugh or smile? What surprised you in a good way? What made you want to shout and read it to someone else? Those things matter, and hey, the process is so long, I need the encouragement to keep going. Please let me know.

5. Don’t Be Afraid Of Hurting My Feelings. If I ask you to beta, I am giving you carte blanche to be honest. I need it to make my work all it can be. If I asked, you’re probably someone I trust or at least whose opinion I value enough to believe you can help. And although some of your notes may frustrate me, I won’t take it personally or hold it against you because I need your help. And in the long run, my writing will be better for it not just with this project, but every project to follow.

6. Take good notes. Either on the manuscript itself or via comments in Microsoft Word or on paper. Whatever the case note page and paragraph numbers and be as detailed as you can. The more you give the author, the more helpful your notes will be and the more impressed and grateful the author will be for your time and effort.

7. Check your political, religious and other opinions at the door. You should do this any time you read if you want to actually be informed by the experience. If you are only reading to reinforce existing opinions, your goal is not to grow. Being a beta reader is a challenge, growth is inherent for both you and the writer. It is liberating to set aside preconceived ideas and look at things in a new light, through someone else’s eyes. Reading it fairly doesn’t mean you have to agree or change your mind. But if you intend to help the author, you cannot operate under your own prejudices. Writers are human, our own biases do shape how we see the world and how we project it in our writing, no matter how hard we try to avoid it or how often some deny it. But it’s not your book. The beta reader’s responsibility is fair feedback, untouched by bias, to help the author make his or her book the best of theirs that it can be.

Well those are my seven. No list is perfect. But if you take my advice, you’ll have good success as a beta reader and probably get lots of chances to read stuff before anyone else. How cool is that?

For what it’s worth…

Space Opera: The Junction Between Worlds

Published on by Bryan3 Comments

Guest Post by John H. Ginsberg-Stevens

“But there was little sense, in criticism and reviewing of the fifties, of ‘space opera’ meaning anything other then ‘hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn’ SF stories of any kind” – Kathryn Cramer & David G. Hartwell, The Space Opera Renaissance (pp.11-12).
“Space Opera” always sounds so majestic when you first hear the term used. It conjures up a Wagnerian aesthetic, a vast, significant drama about to unfold. It evokes a grand canvas of interstellar wonders, of great empires and uncountable fleets clashing for the greatest prize: the galaxy itself! And then, you go to WIkipedia:
“Space opera is a subgenre of speculative fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities. The name has no relation to music; it is analogous to soap operas . . . . “- Wikipedia entry for “Space Opera.”
Well, heck. Space opera, while sometimes a magnificent, even ostentatious form of SF, is not the literary equivalent of “an extended, dramatic composition”(as dictionary.com puts it); in fact, its name signifies a past of pulpish adventures, base entertainments, and corny characters and ideas. 
But this is as much of a stereotype as the former idea. As Kramer and Hartwell also make clear, there is no widely-accepted idea of space opera. Like a lot of genres, it is something that we recognize, rather than delimit. Space operas may be “space fantasy,” but there can also have rigorous science behind them. Of course, even when grounded in science, space operas are rather fantastical. Even the most logical novum is overwhelmed by the combination of high and low drama that the stories contain. And, for me, the key element of space opera is drama, in space, of course. It is the transposition of two very human sorts of story, the epic and the romance (in the classical sense) into the vastness beyond our humble little planet.
The first SF book I ever read was space opera. When I was about 5 years old I was looking through some books at a yard sale, bored to death of Little Golden Books, Dick & Jane, and even Classics Illustrated comics (I had started reading when I was 3). I saw some paperbacks but they had pictures of swooning women, frowning men in suits, or bucolic scenes that were about as thrilling as watching a tree grow. But then, I found something that I had not seen before: a book with a rocket ship on the cover! It was expensive ($2!) but I convinced my father to buy it, and I brought it home and read it over the weekend, twice.
I have only two clear memories of the book: Jerry’s constant need to overcome a string of obstacles, and the small rock hitting their ship. But it inspired me to find more books like it. The adventure was a draw, but so was the combination of drama and different worlds. It was not just the future that was compelling, it was the place, the venturing out to unearthly realms. The aliens may not have been terribly alien, but the otherness of the setting made the adventures more consequential to me.
I eventually abandoned westerns and dove into SF. I soon found that I liked certain types of books: I favored Heinlein over Asimov, Burroughs over Smith, Reynolds over Clarke. The big ideas were cool, but what made the stories compelling to me were the effects on regular people. Heinlein’s juveniles were as much about coming-of-age and finding your way as they were about technology and galactic wonders. Burroughs’ books, while more planetary romance, and Reynolds more socially-oriented works wedded high and low drama together. That fusion was what drew me to space opera, the mixture of (sometimes bombastic) epicness and (sometimes melodramatic) prosaic in the stories. My heroes were Bill Lermer, Podkayne, Rex Bader, and Tars Tarkas.
A few years after discovering SF I was pulled away from it by my family. When I started high school years later I picked right up back and read more Heinlein, Niven, Cherryh, Poul Anderson. I exhausted my tiny school library’s resources, which turned out to be a good thing, because it pushed me out of my comfort zone and, with the assistance of an SF-loving teacher, I branched out and discovered the scope of not only SF, but all sorts of fantastika. But I still sought out stories like those I had looked for in space opera, what we nowadays call “character-driven” tales. I credit my early discovery of space opera with inculcating that proclivity in my reading habits, of the need to know how even the most cosmic,massive events affected regular folks.
That to me is the value of good space opera: thrusting average people into extraordinary situations in a world that might be possible someday. That fusion of spectacle and a good yarn was an excellent basis for becoming a good reader, and eventually a writer. Space opera taught me a few things about life, but more than that, it taught about how to look at life, to appreciate the great and the mundane and how they interacted with each other. Despite the roots of the word, space opera not only entertained me, but got me to appreciate the juncture between the marvels that could be and the people we are.
John H. Ginsberg-Stevens blogs at http://eruditeogre.blogspot.com/ is my writing blog. A frequent columnist for Apex, SF Signal and other sites, he’s a writer, husband, Da, ponderer, anthropologist, geek, bibliophile, bookmonger, anarchist, and generally cranky malcontent.


Can you really tell within a few paragraphs if something is good?

Published on by Bryan1 Comment
Guest post by Patty Jansen
Many people are surprised when agents and editors say that they often don’t need to read an entire story to know that they’ll reject it. Some writers are even insulted. But if you read five to ten story submissions a day, and you keep this up for a few years, you tend to develop an eye for picking the 10% or so of submissions that show reasonable promise to pass onto editors. How do you do it? Here is a quick checklist I use to weed out the stories that I’ll reject immediately from the ones I’ll continue reading—in the first few paragraphs (I usually do read a bit more, or skip to a different part of the story to see if the story redeems itself). I want to stress that this is my list, and that other people may well have different criteria. That said, the issues below will raise their ugly heads at some point in the selection process.
A decent magazine gets hundreds, or even thousands of submissions each year. They typically have a number of first-line slush readers. Those people will see hundreds of submissions. They don’t need to read an entire submission to know that they’re not going to pass it to the next level. Sometimes they don’t need more than the first sentence.
Why?
There is a myth in aspiring writer-land that grammar and style don’t matter all that much. That it’s the story’s content which determines its publishability, and that beautiful prose alone won’t sell your work.
Yes, yes, and yes.
That said, what sinks a lot of stories is a lack of what I’ll call natural flow in the text. It comes both from not listening to writing advice to taking it way too seriously. It comes from trying too hard to sound interesting and from lack of cohesion in the writing. It comes from tics every writer picks up somewhere along the line.
The most important reason a story gets rejected after a paragraph or two is that there are issues with the writing style and occasionally the grammar.
What do I mean by this, and what sets red flags?
Apart from the obvious (is the text grammatically correct and are there spelling mistakes?), an experienced slush reader will see:
If first few the sentences are unwieldy and trying too desperately to fit in too much ‘stuff’. Chances are that the rest of the story follows this pattern. Sure, this is fixable, but a lot of work for the editors, and a lot of communication with a writer who may not be ready for quite this much red ink. Too much effort. Reject.
The first few sentences contains odd word choices. The writer may be hanging onto the ‘no passive language’ or ‘use interesting verbs’ mantras too much. Again, this takes a lot of effort to fix because it will be insidious throughout the piece. Too much work. Reject.
The first sentence and the second sentence don’t follow one another. There needs to be a flow of logic in the text. If the first few sentences jump around like crickets in zero-gravity, chances are that the author has a problem expressing logic in a format readers can follow. This takes a huge amount of time to fix. Reject.
The first three sentences all start with the same word, usually a pronoun. A quick scan reveals that this continues through the text. Or the sentences start with some other repetitive pattern, like a participial clause (a clause containing the –ing form of a verb) or a prepositional clause, like: In the kitchen, there was…, or, After he did this, he… Writers often use these and participial clauses to avoid some other structure (never start a sentence with ‘There was…’ says the bogeyman), but the end result can become a repetitive mush of too-complicated sentences and death by ten thousand commas.
The story starts with an unnamed character and a quick scan reveals that there is no reason for the name of the character to be mentioned for the first time only on the third page. That by itself is not a great sin, but often, the lack of a character’s name will signal POV problems that may be more confusing.
The first few paragraphs contain words that are repeated several times, for example a four-sentence paragraph in which the word ‘door’ is used five times. Again, this is fixable, but if the writer hasn’t pick this up him or herself, it will likely occur throughout the story.
And an experienced slush reader will see these things even before he or she has started to take notice of the story’s plot or its central premise. The easiest way to make it past a first slush reader is to polish your style, and the best way to do that is by writing more and reading what you want to write. Meanwhile, try to volunteer as a slush reader some time. It’s a crash course in what works in fiction.
Besides a writer of crazy fantasy and hard Science Fiction, Patty Jansen is slush reader and editor at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. She blogs at http://pattyjansen.wordpress.com/, about writing, about science and about editing and slush piles. Patty is a winner of the second 2010 quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest and has published in the Universe Annex of the Grantville Gazette and has a story forthcoming with Redstone SF.

Writing my First Sequel

Published on by Bryan2 Comments

At the beginning of February, I started writing my first sequel novel, tentatively titled “The Returning,” which carries on the story of my forthcoming first novel “The Worker Prince.” An epic space opera series, the books tell the story of Davi Rhii, born a slave but raised a Prince, who helps his native people of birth win their freedom and full citizenship in the Borali Alliance.

Whereas the first book is a space opera coming of age story set against political intrigue and a revolution, the second book is more of a thriller/mystery with forces rising to try and upset the balance and restore the Alliance to its pre-revolution state with Rhii and his people enslaved again.

It’s an interesting experience to revisit a milieu you know so well. On the one hand, I feel very comfortable writing these characters and much world building is already in place. On the other,  I felt the need to start with a multi-chapter outline through Chapter 5. While I reserve the right to change the outline as I go along, and I have, the desire to connect the story and capture the feel of the first novel compelled me to do more planning than usual.

It’s interesting to work within the parameters I’ve already set forth with a different type of story.  On the one hand, banter between characters is fun and easy to write, and I am finding it easy to just drop in the back story in little chunks in trying to avoid the common mistake of sequels known as the info dump (I was criticized for this some on my first novel and endeavored to fix what I could). On the other hand, because I know it so well, I have no idea how much is too little or too much, and I find myself seeking beta readers who have not read the first book to better guage their sense of frustration at knowing too little or desire to know more and when. So far, the betas have not even mentioned this, so I may be doing okay, although I have asked them to write questions which occur to them and where in order to give me an idea if there are pressing questions readers need answered at certain points along the way.  


While it took me a bit to get back into the swing of things, so to speak, it’s delightful to write these characters knowing them so well because I can actually enjoy the scene as it unfolds almost like a reader would, much more so than the first time around. Of course, when I run into a new character that’s a bit different, but so far it’s mostly been the old regulars. I have dealt with mostly new settings however, and that allows me to introduce some new technologies (i.e. gadgets) and other ideas to build the world further. In some ways I think introducing new settings with familiar characters will make it easier for the reader. It provides them with familiar guides to lead them into the new parts, which keeps them still feeling like they’re with old friends rather than disjointed and on totally unfamiliar ground.


I also notice how my craft has evolved. Although I will still need many drafts to polish, I am adding more detail in this first draft than I did in the past and setting up story arcs, inner monologues, etc. much better. So far the beta reader who wrote back to me said “I’m not bored” implying he was intrigued and it challenged him to give notes as a result. I’ll call that a good sign that the book is on track.


Interestingly, I just finalized the contract on Book 1 at long last and will probably sign it officially this week. So we are off and running with a projected publication date in late Summer. Next week, I go to Rainforest Writer’s Village from Wednesday through Saturday to do nothing but write, so I hope to get two chapters done there. Since I just wrapped chapter 3 today and plan to do another before I travel, that would put me at seven, around half way. Exciting stuff. What have your experiences with sequels been like?



The Worker Prince Synopsis

Published on by Bryan1 Comment

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of telling stories and one of the stories I came up with was a Star Wars-type space opera with elements of the Moses story mixed with action and intrigue. Somewhere along the way I lost my notes, but three things stayed with me, the name Xalivar, the name Sol, and the opening lines of the novel.

Twenty-five years or so later, in August of 2009, I sat down to write the novel. It was my second attempt at  a novel, my first in science fiction. Sixteen months later, I am preparing to sign a publishing contract for that novel and have two sequels I need to write. I’ve gotten a lot of good reader response to this, and I’ve taken numerous drafts to hone and refine it. People frequently tell me I captured the feel of “Star Wars” very well. That’s exciting, because it means I accomplished exactly what I set out to do.

Now, I’d like to share the synopsis with you.

THE WORKER PRINCE

For as long as Davi Rhii can remember, the Boralians and Vertullians have been enemies. After years of fighting, they left Earth to colonize the stars. Who knew they’d wind up neighbors again. Now the Boralians have held the Vertullians as slaves for years, and Davi Rhii uncovers a secret. Although raised as a Prince, he was born a slave.

As he sets out to discover who he is, he comes into conflict with his family and friends. Then a tragedy occurs and he finds himself on the run. Aligning himself with an underground slave movement, soon he’s training slaves to pilot fighters as they prepare to launch a war for freedom.
In the midst of the revolution, he meets Tela, a beautiful pilot. Judging him as the typical cocky fighter jock, and an enemy to boot, she wants nothing to do with him. But Davi sets out to win her over, and they wind up falling in love.

While Davi learns more about the Vertullians’ culture and begins to think of himself as a slave, he struggles to win the acceptance of slaves who question his loyalty as well as the family and friends he left behind on Legallis.

The High Lord Councillor of the Borali Empire, Xalivar is used to people obeying his every word. Then his nephew, Davi, fresh out of the military academy, begins rebelling. He shows sympathy for the ancient enemy Vertullians, and worse, he starts spending more and more time with them.

Xalivar overhears his sister, Miri, confessing that she adopted Davi secretly. He was born a worker. Stung by the betrayal, Xalivar is torn between his love for the boy he raised as an heir and his hatred for the slaves. 
When Davi finds himself hunted, Xalivar sends him away to cover it up. Davi returns and begins helping the slaves, and Xalivar sends Davi’s old Academy rival to hunt him down.

As the Boralian Council and people begin to question the treatment of the workers, Xalivar prepares an army to take them down. When the slaves attack two starbases and escape with fighters, the war begins. Xalivar’s family honor and way of life are at stake, and he’s determined to win at all costs.

When even his sister begins to scheme against him, Xalivar does whatever it takes to bring the situation back under his control. Finally, the Council overrules him and forces a Peace Conference. But Xalivar initiates a secret plan to conquer the slaves and capture their leadership, including Davi, at the same time.

Xalivar mistakenly lets word slip out of his plan while taunting Miri and finds himself confronted from both sides–by both the Council and the slaves. He’s losing the battle and now he’s the one fighting to survive. 


(FYI, in the novel, the slaves are called “workers”, hence the title. But for ease of understanding I just refer to them as slaves here.)

Painting With Words: Imagery In Fiction

Published on by Bryan

I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to learn a foreign language, but believe me, English is one of the harder languages to learn. As the husband of an immigrant, I can attest to my wife’s continuous learning curve with our crazy language.It’s been eye opening for me as a writer, someone who’s always had a gift with English words, to watch this process. And what I’ve discovered is that one of the biggest challenges in learning English are some of my greatest tools as a writer: figures of speech.

The tropes otherwise known as “figures of speech” are expressions not intended to be taken literally but instead used to symbolize related things in some way. The five most common figures of speech are:

Metonymy – one thing is represented by another thing associated with it. Ex: “all the crowns of Europe” wherein crowns refers rather to “kings”

Synecdoche – a part stands for the whole. Ex: “all hands on deck,” with hands standing for men.

Personification – in which human characteristics are bestowed on nonhuman things. Ex: “the gentle breeze” or “the calming storm“

Metaphor – a comparison which assumes or states a comparison without acknowledging that it is a comparison. Ex: “the woman is a peach” or “the eye of a needle“

Simile – a comparison between two things using “like” or “as.” Ex: “the woman is like a peach“

Other common tropes are:

Hyperbole – extreme exaggeration. Ex: “when she smiles her cheeks fall off.”

Oxymoron – the linking of two contradictory words. Ex: “act naturally” or “random order“
Pun – a play on words using either different senses of the same word or similar senses/sounds of different words. Ex: “when it rains, it pours“

Imagine being a foreigner trying to sort all those out?
For fiction writers, the simile and the metaphor are our most vital tools for painting with words, i.e. creating imagery in our fiction. It’s the tension between the two compared items which holds the power of such statements to inspire pictures and images in our readers’ minds. How alike or different are they? Good metaphors and similes get readers’ brains working to imagine how the writer could come up with such a relationship. They are intriguing, inspiring, interesting, even surprising. They contain an abstraction or judgment but yet are brief, condensed. At their best, they make us look at things in a new way.
From childhood, we are taught to learn by comparison. By being told to “be careful” when we fall, we learn that “be careful” is a warning of impending harm, which we will then apply to other situations. Our past experience forms a basis by which we predict the future and soon we are using language so full of similes and metaphors that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
A pitfall of this phenomenon is clichés. “Her heart broke as he said it” is so overused it fails to have impact any more. “Her heart shattered like glass with the impact of his remark” is different altogether. Most writers spend a lot of time developing the craft of using these kinds of comparisons. Often one has to focus intensely on these aspects of his or her fiction. I know it’s something I continue to wrestle with. But when successful, metaphors and similes form the core of rich prose. 
So next time you laugh at a foreigner struggling with English, think about your own efforts to learn craft. Maybe you’ll understand better where their struggle comes from. You might even empathize.
For what it’s worth…

Tomorrow I’ll share some exercises on how to build up your skills with imagery.

Writer’s Tip: The Value of Receptivity

Published on by Bryan

A section I read in Jeff Vandermeer’s wonderful “Booklife” last night reminded me of one of the most important lessons I’ve learned through a decade of international travel and cross-cultural work: be receptive to other world views. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable it is for characterization and description to see the world through someone else’s eyes in as unbiased a manner as possible.

From a particular character’s point of view, you might write: “the crisp leaves sparkled in the sun, its rays accentuating the luscious green of their color.”

But what if you went inside the head of someone else who saw the same scene through different eyes. “The leaves’ sheen reflected the sun in blinding ways of blue-tinged light.”

There are people out there who see things very differently than you. And the more you know about how those people see the world, the richer your writing can be.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend in Ghana once, a student of one of my workshops, who insisted that God loves white people more than black people. Hearing a black African state that just blew my mind.

“Why would you think that?”

“Because white people are more blessed.  Look at their countries — wealth, power, success. Everything we wish we had and don’t.”

Another student once asked me what it was like to walk on streets of gold in America. And he literally believed the streets were paved with gold.

I visited an African coastal town once and was mobbed by children wanting to touch my skin. They rarely saw white people, our guide explained, you are like a god to them. Hearing that made me mad. I never wanted anyone holding me to that standard especially when it diminished the esteem which they held for themselves.

In Mexico once, I went to play with a friend’s daughters.  I love kids and playing with them delights me. But in this case I quickly noticed how everyone in the house kept a very close eye on me, and the older daughter kept her distance, only smiling occasionally but rarely actively participating in our game. Later, I was told that in the culture men are not expected to be able to control their natural sexual instincts, so they cannot be trusted with girls. I was horrified. I am no molester. I wouldn’t dream of it. Was that what they thought of me?

I bring these examples up (and I have many more) not to argue the merits or truth of the reasoning but to point out how different their view of the world is than someone from my background and culture.

The world is filled with such peoples of different views and by meeting them, interacting with them, and getting a glimpse of the world through their eyes, my world is richer. It doesn’t matter if their view of the world shocked or offended me. It doesn’t matter if it made me sad or angry. These examples inspired all four in me. What matters is that before I couldn’t imagine viewing the world through such lenses but now I can and as a result, I can now better write characters who view the world through lenses far different from my own.

Many of us meet people every day who see the world differently than we do. Those encounters are opportunities to expand our arsenal by engaging them in dialogue and trying to learn who they are and how they see things.  You don’t have to argue with them or agree with them to do that. In fact, I would urge you to avoid either. You’ll get a more honest perspective if you do. But what you can do is discover, through the powers of observation all writers are urged to cultivate and must to succeed, new ways of thinking and looking at things which can use to enrich your writing and your characters.

That’s why I love foreign films and stories and novels. I’m a much deeper, more well rounded person because of such encounters. And the box in which I place my world has grown much larger many times over as well. Grow your box. Build your arsenal and write better stories. The world will thank you for it…on many levels.

For what it’s worth…

Second Draft

Published on by Bryan

Preparing to revise my third novel, the first in a multi-part epic fantasy series.  It’s tentatively titled “Sandman,” for reasons obvious to the story. It took 9 months to write the first draft, and although I knew where it needed to go, I never really ended it completely.  I got most of the way there and burned out. I struggled for six weeks to write something and finally decided I’d do better to set it aside and then come back to it. There are a number of things I had already made a list of which needed to be addressed in the next draft and I really believe clarity on how to write the ending will come as I work those into the manuscript, so here I am.

I don’t know how others approach their revisions. For every writer, the approach tends to differ, so I can only write about my own process. In first drafts, I try and get the scenic structure, characters and plotlines down. I focus on the key conflicts and personalities and less on full character arcs and detailed descriptions. Some might call it a skeletal approach, but what I end up with is often a lot of stuff I can use but which needs editing to cut excess and then thickening to fill in the meat on the bones. I also make a lot of notes as I go about things I need to foreshadow, flesh out, etc. For example, as with “The Worker Prince,” I reached a point in the first draft of “Sandman” where I needed something to happen which I had not set up in the parameters of my world building. Rather than stop and go back, I just made it happen and made a note that I will need to set that up earlier to make it plausible for readers.  I also found character traits which I want to emphasize throughout and need to go back and add in. Character relationships developed which can be mined for humor and also character growth, but I need to set that up, too.  The biggest development was finally sorting out what secret there is about a central character everyone is fighting over. Now I have to go back and foreshadow the reveal earlier and revise scenes knowing many of the characters already have that knowledge and it will underscore their actions. Lastly, there are themes/motifs which have come forward as the first draft unfolded which I now need to also thread throughout.

This is a good thing. I know many writers who end their first draft thinking it’s crap and embarrassed for all the time they wasted. Me, I feel like I have a really good foundation but know that without the bricks, cement, shingles, glass, paint, etc. it isn’t ready to open. Those things can be added. And I won’t have to start from scratch. I’ll probably add a scene or two in various places. I may cut one or cut it down or take sections of it for elsewhere. But I have stuff I can move around, which is much easier for me to deal with than the initial blank page.

I also have research to do. I have a book called “English Through The Ages” which I will use to revise my prose to reflect the time period in which the book is set. It’s set on a colonized planet where the people live in medieval type times, so I don’t have to be 100% accurate but realistic enough to their Earth ancestry as I can manage. I will be working in some other research I’ve done on magic, dwarves, and things like wagons and cities to make it more realistic and alive.  This is the fun stuff though. Much easier to deal with when the basic structure is already there, and, despite the ending issues, the structure is there. Somewhere in this process I’ll also be sorting out where the story goes from here in the next book so I can set that up well, too. I have a rough idea, but I need to rough that out more, too.

I expect the second draft won’t take as long as the first. Anywhere from 2 to 5 months I’d expect. So from now until April, this will be my world. I have other projects waiting in the wings though as well, so if I have off days, I can work on those. After all, with “Worker Prince” coming out mid-2011, I do have a sequel to write for that. In any case, I’m excited about this book because it’s not based on another story, as “Worker Prince” was. It’s totally from my own mind, so it’s my first fully original speculative fiction book. It’s also my first fantasy. So that’s good career progress as well. Now, I just need to get this thing in shape for the betas.

Second draft. Beta readers. Third draft. Then out to querying agents. That’ll be the process.  Maybe this will break me into the mass house world. Either way, it’s good to have something positive to focus on which helps my career progress forward.

For what it’s worth…