Inkpunks

Several of the Inkpunks recently returned from the amazing Rainforest Writers Village Retreat. This was my third year attending and I cannot say enough good things about it. It takes place at the The Rain Forest Resort Village, situated on Lake Quinault in the Pacific Northwest Pennisula. It’s not only a gorgeous setting which inspires you to write, there’s limited cell phone reception and internet, and given it rains most of the time, you’re pretty much forced to write! When you’re not writing, there are two optional sessions put on by pro authors each day and whenever you take a break from writing for a meal there are dozens of other fabulous authors to talk to. I already want to go back!

This year I wanted to share a few things I learned at the Rainforest retreat:

1. When I listen to music while I write, I head bang a lot (not a problem in private, but in public, little embarrassing).

2. I often tilt my head back and forth while I type. Also embarrassing in public.

3. I stare off into space or at people when I’m not typing.

4. It’s not just me who does the prairie dog stare….and it can be awkward when you make eye contact with another writer as they’re doing the same thing

5. When I’m really tired, my spelling is atrocious. (Oh, look! Got that one, I must be caught up on sleep now)

6. From Amy Sundberg’s talk on Social Media: despite my doubts and fears of “if I write it no one will come,” I CAN blog and attract an audience. She suggested trying themed days of the week, so for me, Monday and Friday I might blog about writing, whle Wednesday I could write about martial arts and fitness related things. Most importantly, Amy said, was to solidify your voice, then readers will go along with you on other topics.  She also says you have to be consistent and focus on quality versus quantity, so even if you blog less (but on a regular schedule) make them good posts that will be compelling to someone.

7. Amy also told us her theory of the four pillar system to support your social media. The first should be a website or blog and the other three can be any you choose. The important thing is to choose ones you like and will use consistently, but have at least one of those that you will do no matter how crazy life gets. Most importantly, don’t forget that your writing is always first. You can check out Amy’s blog here: The Practical Free Spirit.

8. Mark Teppo convinced us that you don’t need to have Nuns with Guns show up in your story to save it. When you feel stuck, or that you’re forcing the story, go back and see where it fell apart. There’s something driving you to write this story, instinctively there’s a difference between a tough scene to write and when the scene is wrong. Think about whether you’re asking yourself the right questions. What are you trying to achieve in the scene? Mark sums it up well, “Don’t write any sh*t you don’t want to read.”

9. Mae Empson gave an impromptu talk about submitting to themed anthologies. She gave us so much good advice, but what really stood out for me was to pick two anthologies with different themes and write your story for both at the same time! Combine the two themes. You’ll be original to both themes and if it doesn’t sell to the first one, you can send it off to the second one.

10. Daryl Gregory gave a great talk called Acting Like A Writer, encouraging us to figure out what your character wants, moment by moment and to remember that every scene is an action scene. If you do the emotional work for your reader, it’s off putting but if you underplay it, the audience will fill it in. Give them the physical responses (chest tight, hands cold) and we’re evolved to respond that same way, we’ll feel what they’re feeling. I could write an entire blog post on Daryl’s talk and I think that’s exactly what I’ll do. Another time.

11. Nancy Kress taught us about Characterization and again it was the kind of talk that could fit an entire blog post. Most importantly, Nancy told us three things make a strong character: They’re an Individual, They’re Plausible and They’re Active.

12. The talk on Agents, Contracts and Deals with Mark Teppo, Daryl Gregory, Jack Skillingstead and Ted Kosmatka taught me that while the journey to publication may not be easy, it can happen in any number of ways if you don’t give up on writing. They all had different stories about how they found their agents and became published. None of the stories were instant, “easy” successes. They fought through low times and didn’t give up. The important lesson I took away was never stop trying and never stop writing.

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I’ve had this conversation several times lately:

Friend: “Hey, what cons are you going to this year? Will you be at [ComicCon? Rainforest? IMC? Norwescon? WHC? IlluxCon? WFC?… etc]”

Me: “No, i’m not going to that one either…”

It usually feels a bit like this:

Let’s face it. Conventions and workshops are great for networking with those in your field, pitching project ideas, promoting yourself, getting immersed in your craft etc etc. But also, cons are this magical alternate reality in which your scattered tribe, who you usually connect with only via the Internets, will all converge in one geographic location and have a good time!

Selecting conventions which will help you professionally, then figuring out how to attend them on a shoestring budget is all well and good, but sometimes it’s just not gonna work. Because of extenuating circumstances (finances, health, job, family, the like) you’ll be staying at home when everyone else hops on a plane . So this post is just a few things you can do to keep from sitting in the dark, drowning your sorrows in booze. (Though that is a totally viable option.)

• Following the buzz via twitter may be therapeutic or may just induce more booze drinking, but also keep your eyes open for virtual cons* such as DragonCant,  WriteOnCon, and BitterCon. Lots of people aren’t able to be in attendance at *the event* but that doesn’t keep them from having the conversation.

• Use a google hangout (or other such platform) to organize a virtual get together and/or workshop.** I know of illustrators and writers who do this on a weekly basis to catch up and socialize as well as to work on their craft.

• Look for local events and conventions that can get you rubbing elbows with humans. This weekend in my home town I can enjoy the Festival of Books and the Wild Wild West Steampunk convention. My town also hosts a modest but energetic comic convention, anime convention, and weekly Drink and Draw event. Plenty of things to get me out of the house.

• Organize your own retreat with a member of your tribe where you can select a date and a location that works better for your budget and life needs. A cheap plane ticket and the comfy couch of a friend has more than once provided me with a rejuvenating creative escape at a fraction of the cost of going to a convention.

But seriously, when all your friends are at a convention and you are not, sitting at home alone with a drink is also perfectly acceptable. And for that occasion I turned to our resident booze nerd, Andy Romine. “Nothing says drinking alone like whiskey,” he opines, and recommends….

The Whiskey Sour.

2 oz. bourbon, rye or Tennessee whiskey
3/4 oz. fresh lemon juice
3/4 oz. simple syrup (1:1)
Egg white, optional (pasteurized if you like)***
Tools: shaker, strainer
Glass: cocktail
Garnish: cherry and orange slice

Shake all ingredients, strain into a chilled glass and garnish. Enjoy.

(Hey, It could always be worse….)

So there you go. Some tips and a cocktail recipe to get you through whatever life circumstance happened to keep you from going to that cool thing that everyone is going too.

Have any survival tricks or cocktail recipes of your own? Please share!

And now some baby otters. To cheer you up.

* Thank you thank you thank you to Sandra Wickham and Adam Israel for the tips about virtual cons

** Hugs and kisses forever to Wendy Wagner for sharing that online writer retreat.

*** Regarding the Whiskey Sour, Andy notes “forgo the egg white… this is not a drink you want to fuss with.” I, however, am intrigued by attempting put an egg white in a drink, so I may fuss just a bit.

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cocktail recipes, cocktails, Community, conventions, creative life, otters

I don’t talk much about my day job on this blog. This is partly due to a desire to compartmentalize Andrew Penn Romine, the budding author from Andy Romine, the visual effects & animation artist – two careers that have, in my mind, always been separate and distinct. Two creative paths with their own trajectories and goals. My work is very technical, but with a sort of artistry quite different from the writing I do. To talk about it here might be a distraction (or worse, bragging). And then there are the NDAs.

But it’s no great secret right now that the Visual Effects Industry is in turmoil. I’m facing a layoff myself, in fact. (I had a good run and several prospects are on the horizon. I’ll be fine). This is not a post about my job hunt or the deplorable state of the vfx biz, though it is a post about the uncertain situation I’m tumbling into. The uncertain situations that we all tumble into.

Somehow, in the midst of the bad news, I managed to write and submit a short story. I’m not really sure how. Maybe I needed the distraction. But since then, I’ve been listless, exhausted by events and pretty much unable to form a coherent thought beyond, “What’s playing on Netflix tonight?” or “Ooo, Plants vs Zombies is free this week?!”

I’ve discussed things you can do when you’re not writing, but this time it’s a little different for me. I’m not merely looking for a little recharge, but am facing an upheaval of routine and stability — and the loss of a great job that made it possible for me to not sweat the day to day and focus on my love of story telling. I realize I’ve been very lucky in this regard, and it’s given me the perspective that a day job can be an asset and not an obstacle to a writing career. Again, like all writing advice, your mileage may vary.

So, to my point.

Give yourself permission to take a break. This is hard for creatives to do isn’t it? Especially when you’re “breaking into” writing, or vfx or whatever, there’s that voice in your head that tells you that if you slow down even for a moment, you’ll fall behind and never catch up to the rest of the pack. It’s that same voice that tells you that X writer is five times the writer you’ll ever be, and Y writer will get all the book deals so they’ll be none left for you. Yeah, tell that voice to shut the fuck up.

I learned early on in my vfx career to embrace that period of joblessness between gigs. I don’t stop looking for work or close my mind off to opportunities. But I do step back, take a deep breath, and ask myself if it’s time to let myself off the hook a little. Do you?

This isn’t an approach that works for everyone. Some of you may even stay busy to keep your momentum going during the rough patches. I’m envious. I can only do that to a point before I slam into the giant wall of burnout. Which is where I am now.

So I spend some of my time doing those things I’ve talked about. Reading, writing, exercise. I find me again and give myself permission to adjust to the new situation, calibrate my expectations. Let opportunities slip that I know I don’t have the energy to pursue well. Spend more time with those friends and family I haven’t seen when I’m busy. Unhook the guilt machine. Watch the entire season of “House of Cards” while I rest.

How does taking a break work for you? How do you keep your momentum going through the rough patches? I’d love to discuss it with you below.

I”ll get back to work soon. Already I can feel the words pushing up like new teeth in sore gums.

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I’m super-excited to share this guest post with you guys–Garrett and I were college buddies who reconnected years later through Twitter and a shared love for spec fiction. He has a brand new novel coming out March 5th called Dreamwielder–check it out!

Novels with multiple viewpoint characters are common enough, but for some reason you don’t see a lot of discussions or guides on how to write them. So, when Wendy kindly asked me to write a guest post here at Ink Punks, I figured it was a fantastic topic to explore. You see,  the multiple viewpoint character is sort of becoming “my thing.” My new novel, Dreamwielder, has five main viewpoint characters and a slew of secondary viewpoint characters. My portion of the mosaic fantasy novel, The Roads to Baldairn Motte, co-written with Craig Comer and Ahimsa Kerp, has three viewpoint characters. And hell, even my newest piece of short fiction, a novelette titled “Page Fault,” has four viewpoint characters. It wasn’t a deliberate authorial direction I made, but the trend is there, and I suppose there are worse “things” to be known for.

Handling multiple viewpoints isn’t easy (and not even desirable in some stories), but it gives you more narratorial flexibility and lends itself well to sprawling, epic tales. If that’s what you’re after—and if you’re willing to give me the levity to make up words like narratorial—then let’s jump into it.

Thinking Cinematically

I was six when Return of the Jedi came out, and the climatic sequence—where Luke and Vader are duking it out at the same time Han and Leia are leading the Ewok attack on Endor and Lando is leading the space attack against the Imperial fleet—left an indelible impression on me. I was blown away by how the movie shifted seamlessly back and forth from three different battle scenes. Several years later, I was similarly awed reading The Return of the King for the first time, specifically the three chapters “The Siege of Gondor,” “The Ride of the Rohirrim,” and “The Battle of Pelennor Fields.” I was completely entranced by how Tolkien navigated the battlefield, shifting back and forth from a half dozen or more viewpoint characters. It doesn’t get more epic than that.

So how does this help us? No one will ever write a story like Tolkien did, and writing fiction is a far cry from writing a movie script.

The answer is in thinking cinematically. If you have a story with a complex external plot or a sprawling milieu, then utilizing multiple viewpoint characters and thinking of your story as a sequence of scenes gives you much more flexibility and power as the storyteller. You can skip across time and space, from one character to another, just as in a movie. This concept is sometimes enviously called “bestseller POV,” but I think that’s a bunch of BS. In the early days of cinema, movies were little more than stage plays on film, more or less shot on a single set with little in the way of editing. Filmmakers began to figure out how to effectively utilize their medium though, and now no one complains when a well-crafted movie uses scene breaks and multiple settings to weave a compelling narrative. Why should it be any different with fiction? Sure, you probably don’t want to be the Michael Bay of fiction, where the scene cuts are there solely for the purpose of bombarding the reader with gratuitous explosions and T&A shots (or maybe you do—I’d trade my paycheck with Bay’s in a heartbeat), but the fact of the matter is you actually can write a story with complex characters and a meaningful plot using cinematic techniques.

Using Chapter and Section Breaks

Modern readers and editors are accustomed to stories with close and tight viewpoint narratives. Flip through any novel or short story mag that’s come out in the last couple of decades and you’ll find that this is almost universally the case. Having a close and tight viewpoint has many advantages, namely that it keeps the story focused on what one particular character is experiencing at any given moment, and simultaneously gives the reader access to that character’s thoughts and feelings, thereby coloring the narrative with the character’s voice.

The way most authors maintain this close and tight viewpoint when handling multiple viewpoint characters is by utilizing chapter breaks and section breaks, just like a screenwriter utilizes scene breaks in a movie. Essentially, each chapter or section is told through a single character’s viewpoint. A great example of this is George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which is renowned for how each chapter is from a specific character’s viewpoint. In Martin’s expert hands, this technique builds a sprawling world of conflict and intrigue along with a complex cast of characters who blur the boundaries between good and evil. There are limitations to Martin’s self-imposed restrictions though. In a lecture he gave last year to students at the Orange County School of the Arts where I teach creative writing, he said that he’s often stuck having to summarize an important plot sequence through dialogue and hearsay because he has not established a viewpoint character who was part of the event firsthand. In addition, I find limiting your viewpoint switches to chapter breaks minimizes your ability to speed up the pacing and build tension at the climax of your story.

If we’re really thinking cinematically and want to get those quick scene changes at the climax of our story, we simply utilize a section break—an extra line space between paragraphs (with the number symbol (#) centered on the blank line for layout purposes when you’re typing up your manuscript). This section break is a visual cue to the reader that we’re making a jump, either a jump ahead in time, to a different place, or to a different viewpoint character. Indeed, this is how Tolkien handles the battle of Gondor. Take a look at the chapters I mentioned and you’ll see how he uses section breaks to build up the pacing and tension as the battle plays out to a climatic end.

Establish the Pattern Early On and Build Momentum

One of the big problems I see with stories that utilize multiple viewpoints is that the author doesn’t establish early on in the story that there are multiple viewpoints. Lynn Flewelling’s first book in The Nightrunner series, Luck in the Shadows, suffers from this. Chapter 1 has multiple section breaks, yet stays in young Alec’s viewpoint the entire time. Chapter 2 begins in the very same viewpoint and by this point a clear pattern is established: Alec is our sole viewpoint character and protagonist. But then all of a sudden we have a section break and the story is in Serigil’s point of view. What the hell!?

In this particular case, it wasn’t a deal breaker for me (the story was good enough to keep me reading), but it definitely pulled me out of the story for a moment and doing that to your reader can be the death knell of your story. If you’re going to utilize multiple viewpoints, establish the pattern early on, preferably in chapter 1, certainly no later than the beginning of chapter 2. If we’re talking about a short story, I recommend that your first section break take us to your second viewpoint character.

Your second task is to slowly establish all the viewpoint characters as the story unfolds. It’s a balancing act. Bombard the reader with too many characters too soon and it’ll be overwhelming. Take your sweet time and you might find yourself with the Martin dilemma, sitting at a plot turn where you haven’t established a viewpoint character to show the scene through. It’s not easy, particularly considering you also have to paint each of your viewpoint characters in a realistic light. They don’t all have to be dynamic, rounded characters, but they do need to have clear motivations and each of them should act like they are the most important person in the story. My advice is to start by alternating between your protagonist and one more main viewpoint character who is integral to the inciting incident, and then after the reader has gotten a chance to know and like those characters, start filtering in the rest of your viewpoint characters.

As you near the end of your story and the climax, you’ll want to build tension and increase the pacing. To do this, utilize shorter sections and jump cuts to go back and forth between the different viewpoints more rapidly. If everything lines up well, you end up with one of those epic endings a la Return of the Jedi or Return of the King. Again, it’s no easy task. I’m not always a proponent of outlining stories beforehand, but if you’re going to write a multiple viewpoint story, you really should at least map out the major plot points and which characters you’ll be using to narrate each of the major sequences.

A lot of accomplished authors do this well, I think, and this is exactly how I handle multiple viewpoints in my short work, including the aforementioned “Page Fault.” There are still limitations to this method though. Utilize this method of alternating viewpoints and you’re often left with an awkward decision: whose viewpoint do you choose to tell a scene from when you have two or more viewpoint characters interacting? The default answer is to go with your protagonist, but even doing this sometimes results in wonky scenes where our favorite characters are seen in a skewed light thanks to our protagonist’s limited perspective. The only way to address this issue is to write a truly omniscient narrative.

Going Old School Omniscient On Your Ass

It’s a bit of rarity these days to find a true omniscient narrative. Because most readers and editors expect those tight, close viewpoints, most authors utilize the technique I described above of alternating viewpoints via chapter and section breaks. Outside of children’s books, you almost never see a modern novel or story with an omniscient narrator that weaves a tale by seamlessly switching viewpoints as the action unfolds. Indeed, when preparing myself to write Dreamwielder, I had to look to children’s books to figure out my game plan. I must’ve read through at least a dozen books doing my research, but the ones that stood out were C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong.

The techniques Lewis and McCaffrey utilize are nothing remarkable. They do little more than “pass the POV baton” as I like to call it. No, the most important characteristic of these omniscient narratives is the narrative voice—a strong narratorial presence that’s captivating and in charge, one that makes the reader never question why we’re switching from one viewpoint to the next.

“Show, don’t tell,” is an overused mantra amongst writing teachers, a mantra that is flat out misleading. It should be, “Mostly show, and when you need to tell, tell in a captivating way.” As I described in the previous section, most modern fiction relies on the viewpoint characters to color the narrative and give it a “voice.” A true omniscient narrative has its own voice, in tune with the characters, yes, but apart from them. It comes from the author, of course, but is unique and organic to the specific story. It’s a bit hard to explain I’m realizing. It’s like explaining what it means to have soul in blues music. You either feel it or you don’t. As a reader, I find myself drawn to authors who have soul, and it’s not just in speculative fiction. I’m indifferent about Hemingway, for example, because all he does is show in his distanced dramatic point of view. I adore Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolf though, because they know how to balance the act of dramatizing with artful telling—providing the perfect explanation or insight that only an omniscient narrator could provide. If you don’t believe me, read Wolf’s “Bullet in the Brain” and try to tell me the narrator isn’t in complete control as we replay the protagonist’s entire life story as he gets shot in the head during a bank heist.

The point of my digression is that if you want to tell an omniscient narrative, you need to have a strong, engaging narrative voice independent of your characters. Otherwise there will be no continuity to hold everything together as we switch from viewpoint to viewpoint. Authors of kids books succeed in this largely by adopting an old time story-teller feel. Lewis’s Narnia series starts out that way from page 1: “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them…”

With adult fiction, you need to be more subtle than that. Your narrative voice needs to be sophisticated and balanced, and it needs to resemble that close, tight narrative feel modern readers are used to. You can’t get by with what children’s authors do. I don’t think you could even get by with trying to emulate Tolkien’s omniscient voice in Lord of the Rings—it would feel too antiquated. Instead, you have to be a magician of sorts, narrating action at one moment, revealing a character’s thoughts and feelings the next, then seamlessly shifting to another character’s viewpoint and slipping in choice pieces of exposition along the way, never getting caught because the language is so good and the story so captivating.

Hardly amateurish stuff, and hardly something that can be prescribed. Still, here’s a few tips that worked for me with Dreamwielder (at least I hope they worked!):

Start with setting – Chapter 1 of Dreamwielder begins, “Far from the soot-blackened walls and towers of Col Sargoth and the Sea of Gathol, south of the Forrest Weorcan and east of the sea-dwelling city of Kal Pyrthin, on a peninsula jutting out into the turbulent Esterian Ocean, sat a lone farmstead.” Where is this description coming from? Not from one of the characters, because we haven’t met any yet. It comes from the narrator and it establishes to the reader right from the start that this is a tale set in a fantastical world. It’s a gamble, for sure. I’m banking on the imagery and voice keeping the reader going until we meet Makarria in the next paragraph, which very well might not work for some readers, but it’s a gamble I had to take to establish my voice and tell the story the way I felt it needed to be told.

Pass the baton – This is the technique we use to shift viewpoint seamlessly without having to use scene breaks. It’s as simple as passing a baton in a relay race: you’re giving us the internal viewpoint of one character and then when that character interacts with another character you shift to that new character without fanfare. It’s no different than writing dialogue. Start a new paragraph when you switch POV and tag the new thoughts/feelings just like you’d tag dialogue, but with a verb that indicates thinking or feeling as opposed to speaking.

Trickle in exposition and narratorial statements – Not every bit of information or every opinion needs to be filtered through your characters. Just like with setting description, if you have something to say as the narrator, say it. It can be exposition where you explain something about your world or backstory, or it can be a narratorial statement of fact (e.g. Natarios Rhodas was greedy, but at the same time too lazy to do anything about it.) Just don’t linger too long. Info dumps and long narratorial asides will take the reader right of the story.

Utilize chapter and section breaks to your advantage – Combine these techniques with the cinematic techniques we discussed earlier. If you’re switching to a new setting or skipping ahead in time, then use a section break or chapter break. This gives you full narratorial power to weave a tale with both a strong voice and a cinematic build up to that epic finale.

Garrett Calcaterra is an author of dark speculative fiction. He teaches writing at Chapman University and the Orange County School of the Arts, and has written on the craft of writing in Writers’ Journal and MagicalWords.net. His newest novel is an epic fantasy novel forthcoming from Diversion Books on March 5, 2013 called Dreamwielder. You can learn more at www.garrettcalcaterra.com

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Garett Calcaterra, guest post, multiple POV, omniscient POV

My brother Jak surprised the heck out of me the other day. We were taking a break from some gaming (Arkham Horror, if you’re interested) and readying some dinner. I was in a hurry, so I pulled out two boxes of instant mashed potatoes.

“Do you want fake potatoes and gravy or flavored fake potatoes?”

“Honestly,” Jak said, “I’m not a big fan of gravy.”

My husband dropped a plate on the floor. And I’m still reeling.

You see, Jak is a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. He avoids vegetables if at all possible (and considering he’s an expert marksman, weapons enthusiast, all-around tough guy and absolute wise ass, he pretty much gets his way all the time), and he’s openly admitted he’s not the biggest fan of ethnic foods. He puts cheese or bacon on most main dishes. A guy like that, even his own sister expects to like gravy.

But because Jak is an actual person and not a cardboard cut-out, he doesn’t. And neither should your characters.

Oh, hey, they can like gravy if they want to. But they shouldn’t like gravy just because your average hot-blooded American male likes gravy. Your characters need one-a-kind details that fill them out.

The same goes for your worldbuilding. The year before last, Jak and my little family unit drove up to visit my parents in Edge-of-Nowhere, WA. The weather turned nice and we all itched for some outdoor time, so I decided we all should go exploring an oddity I’d seen on local signposts: the Odessa Craters. They sounded majestic, exciting, and otherworldly.

They looked like dents in the ground.

Sure, they were beautiful, in a dirty, rocky, sagebrush-y kind of way. And after I read just what kind of crater they were (in case you didn’t follow the link, they’re depressions caused by erosion during the Missoula Floods), I started thinking they were more interesting than I did when I first looked at them. But they certainly weren’t the kind of crater I expected when I set out to find them. However, someone in the area put up signs and helped me see them in a new way. Those heaps of rock stood out not just for their own beauty, but because of the way people engaged with it.

Your worldbuilding should be like that. It should have a connection to the greater structures and peoples of your world, and it should contain some little unexpected feature that makes it unique.

Did I lose you?

What I’m trying to say here is that my brother is a unique individual with surprising quirks, and that the Odessa Craters are a unique geological feature that’s not quite like the other craters you see in the world. And because of that, they’re treasures. They make memories that are indelible. As a reader, you know how important that is. What characters do you remember best from your favorite stories?

Here are some of my mine:

Silk–the rogueish thief of Eddings’ Belgariad series, who is not only a celebrated spy and businessman, but a man of honor and a surprisingly fine friend;

Samwise–an ordinary loyal servant who is surprisingly mean to Gollum (giving The Lord of the Rings its finest line: “Poe-tay-toes!”);

Alanna–a tough girl working hard to be a tough knight, with an unexpected power to heal (Alanna, by Tamora Pierce;

John–a doofus with no luck at all who never once described Amy as “the girl with one hand” in John Dies at the End.

Those characters are great because they are true to a certain archetype, but also remain themselves. Their one or two unexpected characteristics elevate them into a level of awesomeness normal characters never achieve. (This is why Barney is the best character on How I Met Your Mother and why Chris, Ed and Marilyn ruled Northern Exposure.)

Your worldbuilding can work the same way. Too many high fantasy adventures fall into worlds made out of pseudo-European features that are about as unique as Lego bricks. Take a page from Neil Gaiman, who wrote American towns so interesting I want to hop on a train and visit them. Give your world its own Odessa Craters–maybe they’re just ordinary divots in the landscape, but someone noticed that they were beautiful and gave them a sign and a story that made them stand out. Your unique landscape elements in your writing will come alive because your characters will engage with them in a special way.

Could those possibly be … craters?

If you want your writing to stand out, don’t just focus on your epic plot line and your fantastic themes. Give it a little twist. Give it … craters and gravy.

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As a writer, “style” is a thing we’re supposed to find. It will define us, they say; set us apart as a distinct, creative voice in a vast field of creative voices. It’s our brand. It’s the thing—our “signature”—that marks each of our stories or novels as uniquely ours no matter how different in subject matter each work may be.

Literary masters are known as much for their individual styles as they are for their big ideas or themes. According to the New York Times Ernest Hemingway writes, “lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.” The Quill and Quire proclaims Margaret Atwood‘s work to be, “unadorned, sardonic, [and] plainspoken.” Neil Gaiman‘s style is, “rich in nightmarish imagery and ironic wit,” according to sfreviews.net. These writers serve as style benchmarks, against which other writers are compared and judged.

While most of us will never achieve such heights, it seems developing a style is necessary. But, it seems to me, this quest is fraught with potential difficulties.

First of all, finding a style is, well, hard. As newer writers we struggle with this, often falling back on clichéd or generic language and imagery, because that’s what comes easiest. My early writing (and, let’s be honest, some of my current writing), features its fair share of fluttering hearts, unnamed inns or pubs in unnamed towns or cities, piercing blue eyes, eleven archers, whole strings of sentences starting with “he” or “she” or “the” etc.

That said, the early days can also be a time of heady experimentation. A literary story written in first person, present-tense might be followed by a high fantasy story in distant third person. We write flash pieces, and novellas, and portions of novels. We’re not yet constrained by our style, because we don’t have one.

Once we move beyond this stage, into what might be considered a “style” of our own, other problems can arise. Maybe all of our writing sounds the same—and not in a good way. Maybe it’s not as distinct as we’d like, reading as a pale imitation as an author we admire, or as only competent but lacking in pizzaz. Maybe we start all of our sentences the same way, and repeat the same sentence structure over and over. All of this can be a “style,” and if it’s working—great!—but it can also become a trap.

So, whether you’re working to find a style, or feel stuck in a rut, I offer a few exercises below that I hope help you to make a breakthrough.

Exercise 1:

We all have habitual ways of constructing sentences and paragraphs, and it can be tough to get away from this. Sometimes our critiquers will even notice and comment on our patterns: “Twelve paragraphs in a row start with ‘he’!” Ideally readers should not notice our sentence structure, unless it is to admire an especially well-crafted sentence (but even then…we want them rooted in the story, not focusing on our prose).

One of my creative writing instructors suggested the following exercise, which I found helpful: jot down sentences from authors you admire—preferably sentences you could never see yourself writing—then write a sentence emulating the structure and perhaps tone of the original sentence. If your sentence is relevant to a work-in-progress—even better! It’s not that we should try to just copy our favorite author’s style, because this won’t work and is not exactly a desirable goal. But sometimes the mere act of forcing ourselves outside of our comfort zones can open up new possibilities in our own writing.

Here are some sample sentences to try: (If I were braver I would have recorded my attempts. But…not brave.)

“That was the camp all right and it was a good camp.” Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat dried in the clothing (acrid and gray the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed-off lather of horse sweat), of the men at the table, that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream.” Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Like the flag of an unknown country, seen for an instant above a curve of hill, it could mean attack, it could mean parley, it could mean the edge of something, a territory.” Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“To be a man, watched by women.” Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Kansas was the cheerless gray of lonesome clouds, empty windows, and lost hearts.” Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her.” Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Exercise 2:

Make a list of non-dialogue sentence starters and refer to it while writing. You may never start a sentence with “just” or with a noun, for example, but give it a try. Why not? The way you begin a sentence will alter its structure and give a different feel to your writing.

My non-exhaustive list:*
[Proper name: e.g. Mary, Paul]
[Regular noun: e.g. Life, Death, Cabbages]
[Adjective: e.g. Three, Hot]
[Adverb: e.g. Soundlessly, Listlessly]
He/she
I
We
They
Their
Our
My
The
A
To
It
If
And
In
So
Who
What
Where
When
Why
Are
Do
Just
One
Once
Several
Never
Always
There
Another
Between
Not
No
That
Now
Everything
Nothing
Like
Unlike
Only
With
During
All
Rather
After
Yet
Because
Still
As
Until
Ahead
From
Possibly
Impossibly

Exercise 3:

Try writing a paragraph or story in a style different from what you typically write, using the appropriate tone, language, and imagery. If you normally write flowery high fantasy, for example, try writing a hard-boiled, noir detective, or factual science fiction piece. You may discover a hidden talent, or at least a sense of freedom and fun. Writing in an unfamiliar style can force us to think harder about voice, and sometimes this leads to a stronger story.

Do you have thoughts on style? Other exercises or tools to try? I’d love to hear from you.

* As this post is about style and not grammar or “writing rules,” I will make no comment on the wisdom of starting a sentence with these words. Any of them can work, if handled well. And, if not, well…that’s what editing is for.

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I’m an IT project manager by day. For the past couple of months, I’ve started applying to my creative life some of the productivity techniques and principles I use at work. I thought I’d share some of my successes, with the hope that at least one of you may find them helpful. Please feel free to share your own tips, tricks and techniques as well.

My background: I’m basically paid to help some people meet goals, and to manage other folks’ expectations. My boss and I try hard to keep protect each member of our team’s work-life balance. Burning out one of our developers is not an acceptable cost of meeting a deadline. I’m applying the same ideals to myself. I want to be productive over the long term, while still having time and energy left to  to maintain physical and emotional well-being, and to be a good employee.

And creative success for me, right now, means the sale of short stories to professional and/or reputable specfic markets.

1. Work your schedule strengths. And weaknesses.

This manifests in a variety of ways in the office. Let’s take personal alertness. Because I’m a morning person, I try to tackle the priority tasks that take serious focus in the morning. I prefer to schedule meetings and email cleanup in the afternoon, when I’m less energetic.

In my writing life, this means my imagination is hyper and I’m magically verbose in the mornings, even before coffee. I generally get up before 6am and try to make writing the first thing I do every day.

Alternately, I feel pretty wiped out after work, so I save my reading and research for the evenings. As my morning writing time becomes more productive, I’ve started to protect and expand it by moving showers, lunch prep, social media, and email to the evenings. In a break with habit, I’m even composing this post in the evening–I have a story draft I hope to finish tomorrow morning.

2. Begin your writing session with writing.

I start my work day by writing my three most important priorities for that day. I try to get started on them before I open my email. Email is the productivity-killer!

So when I sit down to write, I try really hard to not start by checking my email or social media. Yesterday morning, I logged on to twitter to post “#amwriting” and didn’t close tweetdeck until 45 minutes later. One trick: when I do have to periodically check email (for urgent work or family communications), I use my phone instead of my laptop so that I’m less likely to get sucked in by less pressing messages.

3. Set well-defined goals for your sessions.

As I mentioned above, I start my work day by setting goals. I find that if I don’t set such goals, the meetings, phone calls, and urgent emails take my initiative away from me.

When I’m in the middle of a story, my goals are usually implied: “continue this scene, or move on to the next one”. But if I find myself staring at the screen, I find it helpful to set bite-sized, well-defined goals for my session. Examples:

• “I will write the first half of the scene where Javert confronts the werewolf about the quality of its baked goods.”
• “I will line edit three pages in the next 45 minutes.”
• “I will spend 30 minutes sketching Ursula Gaiman’s past history, and another 30 minutes exploring with her voice.”

4. Finish things.

At my day job, projects often get bogged down in the transition between phases, or right before delivery to our customers. I have spreadsheets and kanban-style virtual boards to help me keep projects moving from phase to phase and finally to the customer.

The same seems to be true with my short stories, so I use a tool called kanbanpad to make sure that I’m moving each story from seed to sale, and not letting it get bogged down in revision or stalled submissions (I wrote a post about using kanbanpad and phases of writing last year). And duotrope is a great tool in many ways, but there’s nothing like the “Sent Past 12 Months” count (or a “Pending Submissions” of zero) to spur me into submitting more.

5. Learn to estimate.

Each programmer has their own pace. I work with the developers to record the time they spend on each component, measuring these against their initial estimates. Better estimates mean that we can set realistic goals, and that we are less likely to miss deadlines or to burn out and produce sloppy work trying to meet one.

I track my daily word count obsessively. While this might also be a personal problem, awareness of my writing pace helps me to set realistic goals, which in turn reduces my frustration considerably. Between work, family and health commitments, I currently write about 500 first draft words per day. Also, I know that I need about two weeks for new ideas to percolate before I can start cranking out a draft at that pace. Finally, it takes me a week or two to revise and edit. If I include a week or two for someone to critique a story, I’m looking at a baseline of 6-8 weeks for me to complete a story without  without any major sacrifice (or asking someone to turn a critique around faster). I use this information to estimate which anthology or theme issue deadlines to shoot for, and how many to take on.

My word count for the last desperate half of NaNoWriMo 2009. Scene descriptions don’t perfectly line up with word totals.

I present this all to you with that great inkpunk qualification: YMMV*. These are techniques and principles that have boosted my recent productivity and reduced my usual frustration. I’m excited enough about them to want to share them with you all. I’d also love to hear what works for you!

* Your Mileage May Vary.

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gtd

I live with a character flaw that I cope with on a daily basis. It drags me down, sometimes to the edge of despair, like a lead weight tied around my waist. I know I’m not alone; most of my writers friends suffer from the same ailment. There is solidarity in our struggle — an empathy that we share — when we try to express ourselves as artists. Is this work we create the best that we can do? Is it good enough to share with the world? Would it be better hidden away from sight, or worse, abandoned before it’s complete?

Self-doubt: a potentially crippling shortcoming, if we allow the space to breath.

Boiled down, self-doubt is fear. That fear is different for everyone, for different reasons. For me, this is a fear of failing, of mediocrity, of disappointment. These anxieties press me every time I sit down to write words that I intend to publish, crushing me, stealing away my breath as easily as it does my confidence, and replacing it with something bitter and cruel.

I know there is a way. Through dark clouds I have seen glimpses of hope. Signs and portents, showing me what must be done so I soldier forward, one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. In the words of a very wise character, “Just keep swimming.”

Writing for yourself — the stories you would want to read —  is like cutting open a vein and bleeding onto the page. It can produce the most brilliant stories but it also opens us to rejection that feels too personal, too painful, like being rejected as a person. That’s not true, of course, but tell that to our monkey brain flooding us with the feels.

Rationalization only goes so far. I’ve heard and made the arguments. “They’re not rejecting me, they’re rejecting the story.” Absolutely true, but that doesn’t make that mountain any easier to climb. So what is there to do?

Every fear has a talisman that can destroy it. I used to think writer’s block didn’t exist because, hey, my journals are filled with words. The blocks manifest themselves in different ways, though. Figuring out your fear is just the first step.

I’ve been slogging through my first serious attempt at a novel since late 2010, when I wrote the first twenty-five thousand words and came to a screeching halt when I realized that the story was broken. I had the barest idea of what it’s structure was and what I saw in my head felt flat when I put the words on the page.

I’d worked myself up into a tightly wound ball of nerves, trying to make every word pack a punch. I wrote with an economy of words, carefully chosen, to be near perfect on the first draft. That crutch worked for short stories but I fell flat on my face in the long form.

There are tricks, once you realize what is standing in your way, of getting past the block. Simple things that seem so obvious when you realize them. Everyone’s heard Steinbeck’s famous mantra, “The first draft is always shit.” I mimicked the words but I didn’t believe it applied to me. I didn’t have what it takes, I thought, if I couldn’t get it right on the first try.

I had to figure out a deeper truth. The most important thing to writing a first draft is to get the ideas onto the page. Like working with clay, you have to start with a rough form before you can shape it into something beautiful. Revision is the potters wheel, spinning and spinning until the prose sings a song that brings tears to our eyes.

Now, I write almost every day. I tackle each challenge as it comes along, tracking my daily success and failures in a spreadsheet, using an egg timer in fifteen minute increments to push myself to write when I feel like there simply isn’t enough time in the day. Forty thousand words later, anytime I feel like I just can’t do it, I’m just not good enough, I take an honest look at myself to figure out where the doubt is coming from so I can work through it. One word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time.

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Last year at a writer’s retreat a late-night talk with a friend turned to the the subject of authenticity, and the struggles inherent in creativity and learning our craft. She shared with me a lesson that I was only beginning to understand on my own, advice that she had been given by one of her Clarion instructors: She could keep writing what she was writing, the instructor said, and she would be a perfectly good writer. And that was fine, if good was what she wanted to be. But if she wanted to be great, she needed to start writing what was real, what mattered to her. And if she did, if she could be that brave, there would be no stopping her.

I remember the first time I put something real in a story. It was the smell of my ex-boyfriend’s leather jacket, the way it smelled at 2:00 a.m. on a park bench in a seaside college town as we watched a Jerusalem cricket slowly amble by in the sodium glow of the streetlight. I don’t remember which story it went into–something trunked long ago, I’m sure. But I remember how embarrassed I was as I wrote the words, writing this real thing that had actually happened, this moment that existed in time and perhaps in someone else’s memory, too. I felt exposed, and like I might be misunderstood–like someone might find out, and then think that the rest of the story was about that ex-boyfriend, or that time. It wasn’t–I just needed that smell, and that’s where I found it in my memory.

That was the first time I understood the phrase “write what you know” to mean something other than what I had previously thought it meant. I had only scratched the surface in that moment, and it still terrified me.

The second time I wrote something real, I hid it deep inside another story. I took the end result of an unhappy relationship and hid it in the story of two other people I made up, in a situation that bore no resemblance to mine, but had the same outcome. I was getting closer, I could tell by the personal rejections and the several times it was held for second looks, but it still wasn’t good enough. Today I wonder whether it failed because I hid what was real too deep for authenticity. Readers are smart that way.

A couple more years of collecting rejections and eventually I was able to dig a little deeper, peer into my own heart and see what mattered to me. It will probably surprise no one to learn that what I found there were books.

When I was a kid I had this set of books of fairy tales from the 1920s that my grandmother had given me. I read the stories in them over and over: “Gigi and the Magic Ring.” “The Girl Who Used Her Wits.” “The Romance of Hine Moa.” “Miska and the Man-With-the-Iron-Head.” “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon.” I escaped into those stories and wished I could stay there. I wanted Gigi’s ring, and Seven-League boots, and to be friends with the fairy whose hair became a waterfall. What if I could? What if I were a character from a fairy tale, and those people were my friends, living in the shared world of that book?

My first sale came from writing about those books and my childhood wish to be part of them, and how those fairy tales had written their language into me through endless rereading. It was a little abstract, maybe–just a feeling and a childhood daydream, paired with the existence of a set of books, but it was real. It mattered to me, and I guess it showed.

A year later I drew on what I knew about being a kid with a dying parent and a lot of questions, observing very early that life is not fucking fair, and having the platitudes of my elders offer no answers and bring me no peace. “The Three Feats of Agani” was a difficult story to write from a technical perspective, but I felt like I was on to something (though I wasn’t quite sure what) and that feeling was quickly validated when it sold.

Some time later I picked up Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones for the first time in years. I had never been comfortable with her suggested exercise of “filling the pages” with the memories of my life. My life makes me damned uncomfortable at times, and there are whole chunks of it I’m nowhere close to ready to revisit. But I decided to try it. One session produced a page on why I had declined to view my mother’s body after she died. That page became a story, predictably called “My Mother’s Body,” and it, too, sold quickly, most of it exactly as I wrote it in my notebook originally. I am a notoriously slow writer–some stories have taken me years to finish. But I wrote that one in two sittings, and with very little revision. I almost felt like I had cheated.

I was starting to get it. When I wrote what was real, it wasn’t just truer–it was easier, and it was better.

There are layers to “what we know.” What you know may be the smell of a lemon grove, or the sounds in the vet’s office after your dog was hit by a car. It may be the stickiness of a Florida summer, or the way neon light reflects in puddles of spilled beer at midnight on Bourbon Street. Or what it’s like to be the child of a preacher, or the grandmother of a kid with special needs. Sometimes what you know are the details, and sometimes they’re the whole story. The stuff that you know is what makes a story authentic and convincing.

It’s hard at times to tap into that stuff, and it’s scary, not knowing what we might find. But I’m starting to understand that the stories I need to tell are the ones just waiting for me to ask the question. They just want me to put pen to paper and remember, and they’ll come. For all the years I’ve put in so far (10 and counting) I’m still only at the beginning of this journey. I need to continually ask myself:

What do I know?

What’s real to me?

And what do I want to be–good, or great?

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