Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

Links and Things

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1) Chris Green Distills the Clarion Wisdom

I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there).

2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book

This amuses me in its accuracy.

3) Reviewage andPimpage

– My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco – and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf
– The Fix diggs my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens which appeared in Apex Magazine back in May
– The Internet Review of Science Fiction describes On the Destruction of Copenhage… as “mundane surrealism.”

4) Rewriting as an Animated Giff

A very short-but-interesting post from Elizabeth Bear on the re-writing process, showing the evolution of a paragraph through multiple layers of revision.

5) My Projects

Man, the last week has been all about the new projects. I started the new novel draft, started revision of another project, started preparing for the next draft of Claw, agreed to do some work for Gen Con Australia, and tentatively agreed to take on another project I cannot yet talk about. I also ticked another entry off the 80-point-plan of awesome, making my year 3.75% awesome. If you see me looking wild-eyed this week, it’s not because I’m stressed – I’m just learning to cope with an opportunity-rich environment again 🙂

6) Oh, hell, let’s cap it off with a youtube clip

Because I’m far to fascinated by this film-clip at the moment.

Some Ideas About Ideas

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So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer.

So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this:

Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one point, “other people’s ideas” at the second point, and “knowing how stories work” at the third. The ideas happen in the middle of the triangle,  because ideas are basically a combination of those three things. Sometimes I’ll lean towards one point more than than the other two, but all three are usually at work in some way.

I think it’s probably the “knowing how stories work” work part that makes the entire idea process so mysterious to non-writers. Ideas are actually pretty cheap and easy. Everyone has them, all the time. Hell, I’ve had three in the last five minutes [i]. You can take pretty much anything and use it as the hook for a story once you know the structure and techniques of telling one, so finding a good story idea is largely a matter of knowing the right processes to develop a small concept (say, I’m going to write a story about a guy with a clockwork arm) into a full-blown narrative.

The trick here is realising that the initial idea is almost never a full story – it’s just a hook to hang other things on while the story develops around it. Once you’ve stepped over that hurdle the ideas themselves are largely secondary. Or perhaps its in realising that stories are really lots of ideas, come up with over time. Either way, I think the whole story thing is important – an average idea can be turned into a competent story, but the absence of storytelling chops will kill even the coolest concept.

“Confluence” is borrowed from a short story by Neil Gaiman in his collection Smoke and Mirrors. Partially I use it because it’s a good explanation, partially because I like the word (and it’ll give me an excuse to use the word conflate later in this post, and conflates just one of those words, you know?). In Gaiman’s story the logic goes something like this: “Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra.” And sure, it may have been put forward by a fictional writer talking about the creation of the fictional story he’s written inside the story we’re reading, but if you can remember that one aspect of the pyramid then the other two tend to take care of themselves.

Basically we’re talking about two ore more seemingly random elements coming together, fusing in your minds eye and becoming the basis of a story. It doesn’t matter what those things are – experiences you’ve had, stories you’ve been told by friends, short descriptions of a place, stuff you’ve heard on the telly – once you find the right connection between them you’ve got the beginnings of a story. Sometimes this happens by coincidence, sometimes its’ an active process. Either way, it’s not terribly difficult – a lot of beginner writing exercises are based on this principle. Two examples, off the top of my head: pick a character, put them in a setting they obviously don’t belong in and write about how they got there; or pick three different places (say, a cemetery, a shopping mall, and a water-slide park) and figure out a story that uses one each as the setting for the opening scene, middle scene, and final scene.

There’s a great essay on imagination by Sean Williams where he posits that the imagination is like any other muscle, and it works better the more you get used to using it. Thus the easiest way to have ideas is to pay attention when you have them. It’s not like they’re things that happen uniquely to writers an artists – most people spend much of their everyday life making connections between things that are going on around them and other stuff floating through their head, so it’s just a matter of paying attention. It’s all about asking the right questions to get you started. For me, questions are less interesting than that moment of confluence. The way I write is all about finding the right combination of concepts, finding the tension when two things come together in an expected way. I like putting things at right angles and what develops, then asking the questions that’ll flesh it out into a story. The stories that start with big flashes of energy are almost always the result of two things that create a lot of awkward tension (say, unicorns and autopsies) that immediately link to one of my big narrative kinks (aka, the stuff I really exploring as a writer). This isn’t necessarily inspiration energy that comes from the muse – the combination above led to Horn, and they came out of some fairly dogged and conscious pursuit of a concept to pair up with “virgins and unicorns” that’d lead the story away from familiar territory.

As for the importance of other people’s ideas, well, you know how science is basically a process of one person coming up with a new theory based on a variation in someone else’s ideas? Writing works much the same way – people building new work on top of other people’s ideas, finding new twists and permeations that suit their own narrative kinks. Over time the continued repetition of certain ideas gave us the basics of narrative structure, which gradually led to the accretion of genre traits, which lead to movements within genres, and so forth. Things clump together sometimes, and those clumps become the basis of new ideas (after unicorns and autopsies, the real energy in Horn came when I conflated the big clump of tropes known as Noir into the mix. Ask people who were there when I wrote it what I was like, and I’m fairly sure the phrase giggling like a schoolgirl may come up).

Other people’s work is probably the only place that I really see inspiration at work in the writing process, because while I don’t buy into the mythology of the muse I do believe in responding to other people’s awesomeness. If someone does something utterly cool – and I mean utterly, enviously cool – then my natural inclination is to try and achieve something similar. Not necessarily replicate it, because imitation isn’t that much fun, but finding the new angle on the same technique, or idea, or setting. A new twist, a new tension. Interestingly, I also find a lot of inspiration in ideas that haven’t worked out – not just the merely bad stuff, but the stuff that starts with a good concept and fritters it away. These moments tend to come in more of a “oh god, that should’ve been so much cooler” kind of vibe. Because cool is relative (again, see my note on Narrative Kinks above) and the way I’d like to see an idea play out isn’t necessarily universal.

And that’s me and the idea process. I’m not sure how universal this is, but I’d be interested in hearing how it fits into other people’s processes. It certainly works as an explanation for my approach though – pick any story I’ve written and I’m pretty sure I can unpack the origin of it’s various components using these three vectors as a guide (and they probably would have been easier to explain with a specific story in mind, but it would have taken three or four blog-posts instead of one).

[i] if you’re really interested, they’re I should write a series of speculative fiction love stories set in a Laundromat, I should start a website called readings from a couch that features authors giving youtube readings of their work from a big red couch, and a story that starts with wet footsteps across the floor, leading towards the toilet and the family pet drowned within. Pretty ordinary ideas, and unlikely to get used for anything, but I could probably do something with them if I really wanted too. And before you ask, I know exactly where all of them come from.

Because PIL had it right

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I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am, essentially, a person that wavers between the frivolous and the downright irate (and even the source of my irritation is essentially frivolous, when you get right down to it). I realise this because a week ago I made the decision to stop being lazy, and part of this was making a list of all those things that I keep meaning to blog about without ever getting around too it. It’s a big list, too – over the last couple of years I’ve had a lot of ideas pass through that have captured my imagination and had me thinking “hell, yeah, I really should say something about that.” The net result of this is a half-dozen files on my computer which contain the beginning, and even the middle of posts, but never really catch the feeling of being something I’d put up on the interwebs.

So today I’m giving in and being frivolously ranty about two things that have annoyed me of late. I can do angry ranting; John Lydon had it right when he talked about anger and energy. Have at it:

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Frothing Rant One: I Am Not a Dear Reader

Over the last couple of days I’ve read a bunch of stuff – essays, blog posts, comments, whatever – that choose to believe that I am a dear reader. I know this, because they address me as such, just as they address every other person that stumbles across their prose. It’s right there in black and white: As you know, Dear Reader, blah blah blah. And godsfuckit, I get angry every time it happens. Most of the time I’ll stop reading right there; I’m not a dear reader. Nor am I a gentle reader, which may seem like the logical alternative to the phrase. What I am, when you get right down to it, is a bloody hostile reader full of piss, rage and vinegar. If, as a writer, you’ve made any kind of assumption that I’m on your side then I’m afraid you’re dreadfully mistaken.

Instead, big ol’ bitter meany that I am, I tend to start at the direct opposite of the spectrum from the kind of folks who use phrases like Dear Reader. I assume hostility and a willingness to put things down, a lack of sympathy on the reader’s part that says “engage me*, you bastard, or I’m walking off and reading one of the hundreds of other books/blogs on my list of things to do before I die.”

I’d like to say this has been startling revelation to me, but it basically confirms something that I’ve suspected for a long while – I’m not on the authors side, and I suspect this is so for the vast majority of readers.  This isn’t to say we don’t want to see the book succeed – heck, why start reading if that’s the case – but I have no problems walking off if it doesn’t do *something* to keep us there after the first few pages.

*engagement being, of course, very different to entertainment.

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Frothing Rant Two: Why I Hate Frame Stories  Self-Help Books

I mentioned my growing use (and anxiety about) of frame stories in current drafts last week, which prompted my old compadre villainous_mog to ask the following question on the LJ feed: “If I ask what a framing story is, will it provoke a hate-fueled rant of stabby words?” I tried to answer to question there, but as predicted there was a rant associated (albeit one devoid of hate and stabby words). Fortunately, thanks to the wikipedia entry, there is a short answer to be given on the matter: it’s basically a technique in which the opening of the narrative sets the stage for digressions into sub-narratives contained within the frame; in essence, a means of telling stories within a story. The most immediate fictive example that comes to mind is Neil Gaiman’s story October in the Chair, or collections like 1001 Arabian Nights and Canterbury Tales; cinematic examples would be films like The Princess Bride or Big Fish.

The problem with all those examples is, of course, that they don’t suck*. They’re examples of frame stories done right, or at least frame-stories forgiven for being frame-stories by virtue of historical importance. I’m wracking my brain trying to think of some examples that don’t suck outright, but it’s hard to do – partially, I think, because a smart editor isn’t going to put a crappy frame-story tale out into the world and partly because a frame story that goes wrong is far easier to disregard and ignore than a simple bad story.

Actually, no, I take that back – I can think of two widely-read examples that do suck, although it’s primarily because their use of the framing technique is particularly insidious rather than ineffective. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both come from the field of self-help; the first is Who Moved My Cheese and the second is a book called The One Minute Millionaire. I’ve been subjected to both of these – the former through job-search training many years ago, which may well have marked the official point that I gave up on employment services having anything worthwhile to teach me, and the second through an ex-girlfriend who believed heavily in self-help (not that I don’t, to be honest, but I believe strongly in discriminating and being critical of what you’re taking in).

The reason these two books strike me as insidious reflects the real reason I tend to have problems with frame stories. In Who Moved My Cheese the story primarily revolves one character telling another, whose down on his luck, the story of mice and little human beings trapped in a maze. The story is, of course, a metaphoric parable and it aids the down-on-his-luck story-tellee considerably, revolutionizing his life and sending him out into the world a different man. The reason this is evil is because the narrative is basically manipulative – the frame-story sets you up to believe that the advice you’re getting in the parable is actually useful because there’s someone right there, in the story, being transformed by it.

Bad self-help books love this technique because it’s easy to be drawn in by it, and because you can manipulate the reading and interpretation of your work. Smart readers will call you on your bullshit, obviously (and if you want to see this in action, I direct you to an old post by John Scalzi, who attacks the foibles of the text with considerable more aplomb than I do). My memory of the One Minute Millionaire is considerably less detailed than the first book – primarily because it’s longer, but also because there wasn’t anyone locking me in a room for two hours with the expectation that it’d take that long to finish reading a sixty-page book** – but I took an immediate dislike to the way it used a similar technique to make an argument about getting rich that flew in the face of my even my basic understanding of economic theory and the way the world works.

This does illustrate my basic concern with frame-stories though – it’s a technique that makes it very easy to guide meaning, but also to add the illusion of depth or meaning to a story that wouldn’t otherwise be there. Part of the seductive allure of the frame is that you can make things seem important even when they’re not, or make things work by adding in a particular reaction to something. That’s why I tend to look at it like a warning sign when I find myself writing frames for my stories – like my tendency towards fractured, fragment-driven narratives it’s a familiar technique that I fall back on rather heavily when I’m not sure how to make things work. This doesn’t always mean that I’m going to look askance at every story using said techniques, but I’m going to sit down and ask myself some serious questions about why I’m using it and whether it’s the best way to go.

In sitting down to write this I started wondering what it takes for me to enjoy a frame-story, and basically I think it’s a technique that’s at its best when there is a definite and meaningful tension between the two (or more) stories being told. In the aforementioned Big Fish, for example, the stories are driving the narrative within the larger frame, making overt changes that the primary protagonist wants to resist. It works because there’s a real resistance there – the real story we’re being told is about the relationship between the protagonist and his dead father, which is constantly informed by the tall-tales his father told. Interestingly, I think October in the Chair works because it goes in the opposite direction – the complete absence of a meaningful connection between frame-story and framed-story invites the reader in, basically triggering the sensawanda that drives most Gaiman fans to seek out his work and then enjoy the possible links they come up with (that said: I think it also works because I enjoy the frame story more than the framed one, which I’ve often skipped on re-reading). In a bad frame story the frame is at the service of the inner story, enhancing it; in a good one, the inner stories are there to enhance the outer.

*actually, if I’m honest, I could live without the outer frame story in The Princess Bride movie. And I could live without the framed story in October in the Chair, since the frame is generally the place where the really fantastical stuff happens and the story that’s being told has a strange disconnection from it.
**I was sufficiently bored that I read Who Moved My Cheese a couple of times, hoping like hell that I was missing something that’d make it worth the time. There wasn’t.