Being super drained after moving, I wanted something that I could sit and stare at for hours on end without thinking, so I started binge-watching this TV show that Netflix put into their Top 10 Shows We Know You Will Like. It’s called Revolution. After five minutes, I thought, “Oh God, seriously? Another post-apocalyptic, civilization-has-collapsed show? Like Jericho? Falling Skies? Under the Dome (kind of)? Um… all those other shows I can’t think of at this moment? And J.J. Abrams is involved? Hasn’t he done enough damage with Lost and Fringe?” I was thoroughly prepared to turn it off after five minutes and move on to something else, because I knew without a doubt it was going to suck, and it would be filled with stupid science and clichés put in by clueless TV executives.
But a funny thing happened. I was too tired to think, because of the aforementioned moving tiredness. So I kept staring at the screen. Ten minutes went by, then fifteen, then thirty. And, you know, I started to think that maybe, possibly, this show might not actually suck. Despite the fact that my brain is clearly addled from the moving tiredness. Still, there might be a possibility that I could enjoy this show even without moving-induced brain tiredness. After all, it’s got that super awesome bad guy from Breaking Bad in it. And that guy that I’ve seen before but I don’t know his name because he’s one of those actors that’s in a lot of sort of B-movie things but isn’t really a “star” or maybe some television doctor drama things on other channels that I never watch. Actually there’s two of them. And there’s that blonde-haired woman that I think was in Lost and some other stuff before that.
(It does have stupid science though. Electricity just stopped working? Really? Because physics changed? And somehow a flash drive makes it work again? Come on, people. Take a science class some time. I swear if they end up saying it’s because of quantum physics I’m going to throw the Kindle across the room.)
(But I know they will, because television writers always say that quantum physics explains everything, just like Gandalf’s magic.)
This book really grew on me. I almost stopped reading it at about 20%, but pressed onward, and I’m glad I did, because I feel like I learned something important about writing from this book. When I got to about 35% I was hooked, and when I got to about 40% I was riveted. I won’t spoil it but if you’ve read the book you probably know the events that caused the riveting. The book has a lot of religious themes after the 40% mark which are really interesting.
I said I learned something important about writing, and that was: People that give advice on how to write aren’t always right. Or perhaps I should say: Successful authors don’t always follow the rules. I knew that before, but this book really exemplified it. Fully the first 1/3 of the book is a prologue or preamble or backstory. The "inciting incident" that propelled the main character past the point of no return didn’t occur until precisely the 37% mark. That is *completely* contrary to the "in-late, out-early" formula drilled into every new writer’s head. By conventional new-writer wisdom, the "inciting incident" should occur at approximately the 0% mark, or possibly even a negative percentage mark and told in flashback, because we are told that you only have a sentence or a paragraph or maybe — if you’re very lucky — a page or two to hook new readers. Bujold threw that advice completely out the window. And the book was published in 2001, so it’s not like it’s an old book from the 60s when people had more attention spans.
(Granted, she had several award-winning and -nominated novels under her belt prior to writing this one, so she already had a fan base that would read no matter what. New writers don’t have that luxery.)
The book felt extremely epic, yet it was written with only one POV, defying the notion that you have to write a dozen different POV characters to write epic fantasy.
Almost no time was spent on traveling, despite the fact that the main character changed settings several times. To me, this was amazing, because I find myself mired in "road trip" chapters all too often. It’s nice to see that you can just skip over a long journey if you need to.
Another thing I found amazing was that *there was no action in this book.* I mean, there were no sword fights, no chases, no dungeons, no wars, no rope-swinging, no fist-fights, no hanging from ledges by a fingernail, no nothing. Well, okay, there was a little bit of sword-fighting toward the end, but it was almost an after-thought. It was 99% medieval court politics and human relationships and religious philosophy, and yet somehow those topics which sound insufferably boring on the surface were made tense and exciting. And it was elegantly written to boot, with a wide variety of interesting grammar and vocabulary.
I feel like describing Curse as a "classy" book, as opposed to something like a Game of Thrones which I might be tempted to call "crass" by comparison. Those aren’t very good words, but hopefully you know what I mean.
Just for posterity, here is a page of scribbling I did trying to block out what I thought would be the final 10,000 words or so of Airworld. What ended up happening is that I raised more questions than I answered, and all the answers started branching off into all these other fairly massive sub-plots. You may also notice there is a whole new, vitally important character in there that was introduced very late in the story. (Just in case I ever do finish the story, I blurred out some spoilers.)
(I’m not really sure if the page-of-scribbling technique actually works for me as a writer.)
For the last few days I’ve been researching the beginning of the Jamestown colony, because I’ve been tossing around the idea of basing a story around similar events. (I know, everyone else has done it — Disney, James Cameron — so why not me? It’s a freakin’ timeless story after all, even if you totally leave out the whole John Smith/Pocahontas angle.)
Actually “researching” is probably not the right word. “Voraciously obsessed with reading about” is probably more accurate. I can understand why it’s been a popular story for all these years. It’s the perfect storm of human drama, all rolled into a 5-10 year period.
If you’re curious about digging into the Jamestown story, I suggest you avoid Wikipedia for anything but a basic overview. It is disjointed and filled with inaccuracies and discrepencies when you look too closely. (The entry for Edward Wingfield is pure propaganda.) I recommend a book called _Love and Hate in Jamestown_ by David Price which essentially takes all of the data we have about Jamestown and compiles it into a very readable, if somewhat pro-John Smith, narrative. It does include some editorializing and speculation but for the most part it sticks with the facts as I’ve discovered them. I also recommend _The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 1605-1614_ by Ed Southern which contains (edited) first-hand accounts written by colonists. (In which you will learn that “divers” [diverse, or various] was an extremely popular word back then.)
I’m doing all of this, by the way, because borrowing from actual history is apparently a time-honored tradition among fantasy authors. _Game of Thrones_, as I’m sure you know, is based on the events of the War of the Roses. (Even the names of the Starks and Lannisters bear a striking resemblence to the Yorks and Lancasters.) _The Curse of Chalion_, which I was reading before I got sidetracked on Jamestown, is apparently based on the lives of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the unifiers of Spain.
Speaking of Spain, another interesting historical event that I’ve investigated for story material is the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). That research is probably what led me to set Airworld in roughly that time period.
What does “he had his liberty” mean? Say, in the early 17th century?
I came across it reading Edward Wingfield’s account of his removal from the first Council in Jamestown in 1607, in the book The Jamestown Adventure. (Edward Wingfield could be considered the first elected governor of Virginia. Or the first elected president of North America. Or something along those lines.)
“… Mister Kendall, taken from thence, had his liberty, but might not carry arms.”
I am not sure what that means. Does that mean George Kendall was set free or that he was executed? “Liberty” would sort of imply the former, but maybe it means, you know, liberty from this mortal coil. Or something Shakespearean like that. I am confused because I thought that Kendall was executed in Jamestown. Maybe it means he had a trial. Maybe it was a trial by dueling pistols, but they didn’t allow him to have a pistol (“but might not carry arms”).
I hate it when the Internet does not contain the knowledge I seek.
Oh, Wikipedia says George Kendall was executed by firing squad … but a year after Wingfield was removed, so that doesn’t really fit the above events. (Wikipedia, just so you know, is awful about the details of early Jamestown. Dates and names and places are all over the map.)
Wait, now I think I understand. Kendall was set free, but he was not allowed to carry a weapon afterward. Then, a year later, he did something else which got him executed. Maybe?
I started reading The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold … and this time, I actually *mean* reading, not listening to the audiobook. (There are people who insist that listening to an audiobook is the same as reading, but IMO they are very different media consumption experiences.) I picked it up because I saw that it was the next book in The Sword and Laser book club, so on impulse I got it. Not because I wanted to participate in The Sword and Laser, but because I’d wanted to read a Bujold book anyway because her name appears somewhat frequently on the Hugo award winner list.
Well, I’m now about 20% into this book, and I’m thinking about stopping. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with the book. It’s well-written and charming in its way, but I’m running into the same problem I have with a lot of books. I don’t know what the main character’s goal is. He doesn’t seem to have a mission. I really have a hard time getting into stories when the characters don’t have some kind of quest or conflict driving them.
Also, I believe this is the first book in a series, and I don’t really want to get into a long series that is just “okay.”
Well, well. I was looking up how many books were in the series and found it’s not really a series at all. It’s sequel is Paladin of Souls, which is a Hugo-award-winning book that I *do* want to read. So perhaps I will discard all of my biases and press onward. It’s a relatively fast read for a fantasy book anyway.
Someone at work recommended Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, so I got it from Audible with one of my credits. This same person also recommended Hunger Games, so my expectations were not very high. But as it turns out, Gone Girl is a pretty good psychological thriller/mystery.
Overall the book makes some pretty strong feminist statements, as well as having some brutal social commentary about the state of the media and judicial system. It had a pretty big twist about halfway through, which I did not see coming at all, so congratulations to the author for completely fooling me. I can’t elaborate without spoiling it, so if you haven’t read it, you might want to skip the rest of this.
[spoiler]The reader is subtley and not-so-subtley led to believe that one character is an unreliable narrator, but it turns out that the other character is really the unreliable one. It was a great example of surprising-but-inevitable. Once it’s revealed, you think, “Oh, of *course* it’s like that! I should have seen it.”[/spoiler]
The book is presented as two different first-person points of view, which is somewhat unusual. There were no issues figuring which one was which, because each chapter was labeled with the speaker. I believe most of it was in present tense, though I think there was some past tense as well. I’d have to go back and check on that. Present tense seems to be really in vogue these days.
One thing I did not like was that at one point a character broke the fourth wall and more-or-less directly addressed the reader. I found it unnecessary. It only happened for one chapter, which made it especially odd.
Iconic image of a funeral pyre.. you know the movie, right?
I think it’s dead. Airworld, that is.
It’s been almost a year since Naobi strode from her Orderhouse without looking back, determined to move forward. It was an opening sentence that was carefully crafted to show that the character had autonomy right from the very beginning, taking action instead of reacting, physically moving through space. All the things that we aspiring writers are told will make readers more likely to keep reading.
But somewhere along the way, the story fell apart. Well, not somewhere. One specific, exact moment. (The moment when Naobi stands trial in Leavon, fyi.) All at once the characters lost their control over events and turned into victims. I know precisely what the problem is. I know precisely what to do to fix it: The characters need to take charge and get out of trouble themselves, rather than wait for someone else to help (or hurt) them.
But now that I know what to do, I don’t know how to go about doing it. How is Naobi supposed to escape from a cell and evade an entire town? How is Cheton supposed to help her when he’s beaten up and unconscious? Where are they even supposed to go? I have no idea. So when I sit down to write, I stare at a blank editor for a while, then close it and do something else.
This is not good. When you’re looking at a blank editor screen, re-working a novel more-or-less from scratch sounds like a lot of hard work. It sounds incredibly daunting – a giant mountain peak that I can’t get over by jumping or any other means.
I’ve tried skipping the part where I’m stuck to write some other parts later in the story. But somehow it never felt quite right. I’ve tried writing a detailed outline with extensive worldbuilding to plot out all these new characters and their interactions and backgrounds, and come up with a war with three factions. Then I realized that all of that stuff takes the story far, far away from the simple adventure it started out to be, and it would be silly to introduce such complexity over halfway through the book anyway. My latest assessment is that the events that occur in Leavon need to fundamentally change to make the rest of the story work.
Now, almost a year later, I need to decide: Should I put more work into recessitating Airworld, or just let it die?
Well, I’ve decided. It’s dead. Into the stack of unfinished ideas it goes. It doesn’t even deserve to go into the stack of finished-but-needs-work pile with Neofuel and Kubak and Tel.
It’s time to reset and start something new.
Here’s one lesson I can take from this.
When I’m writing a first draft, I spend too much time and effort trying to come up with solutions that are realistic and make sense. Ones that people can’t point to and say, “Wait a minute, how can he pick that lock when you never said he was a skilled locksmith?” Or, “Wait a minute, how did they cross fifty miles of mountain terrain on foot in two days?” Those are the kinds of things that saavy readers will notice, and SFF readers tend to be pretty saavy.
But in the first draft, accuracy doesn’t matter. In the first draft, the solution to every unexpected problem should be magical faery dust. He picked that lock by blowing on it and concentrating really hard. They moved fifty miles in two days because they jumped right over the top of those peaks like Superman.
I feel like this was a major problem with Airworld. In real life, Naobi and Cheton would not be able to escape from a 17th century cell. There’s no sensible way to get them out of there. Leave a key hanging on the wall? No, why would anyone do that? It’s a movie cliche! Squeeze through a window? No, there wouldn’t be any windows in a 17th century cell. Break open the lock? No, give me a break. They don’t have any hammers anyway. Bend the bars? No way, it’s solid steel. They are stuck. At the mercy of their captors. In real life, their quest would probably end there.
In the future, if I have my characters locked up in an inescapable prison, and my outline says they need to escape, then they need to escape by any means necessary. “Later that day, they escaped.” That’s what the draft will say, with some kind of marking to indicate that I should probably expand upon that later. I might be tempted to say something like, “A man came along and helped them escape,” because obviously in real life they would *need* help to escape an inescapable prison. But for the purposes of storytelling it is much better for the characters to act on their own.
So, I need to keep that in mind. It’s surprisingly easy to forget that accuracy in the first draft doesn’t matter.
(This unpublished gem has been sitting in my drafts since April 16, 2012.)
Stolen image of The Hunger Games’s book cover from Amazon.com.
Okay, I have figured out the magical formula for making a hit Young Adult book. It’s really quite easy.
The story elements in The Hunger Games:
A smart and tough, but emotionally vulnerable hero.
A love triangle with a bunch of confused feelings.
A personal vendetta against a villain.
A villain that singles out the hero for humiliation.
A powerful government regime oppressing the rights of the people.
An underdog rebel force fighting for freedom.
A last-man-standing fight to the death that the hero must survive.
A series of deadly tricks and traps for the hero(s) to overcome.
A caricature or exaggeration of modern American society.
The writing style in The Hunger Games:
First person, present tense.
Very concise, easy-to-read prose.
Cliffhanger chapter endings.
Sparse descriptions.
Very few adverbs.
Taboos in The Hunger Games:
I don’t know if this is true of all Young Adult books, and now I’m pretty curious to find out, but I found it amusing to note that, apparently, the subject matter of a Young Adult novel is very specific about what must be censored. What I mean is this: You can put kids into an arena and have them kill each other with swords and spears and bows, in extremely gory detail. You can drop bombs on groups of kids, then have people rush in to help them, then drop more bombs on the helpers. You can burn people, you can decapitate people, you can dismember people.
But you cannot swear, ever. And you absolutely positively MUST NOT mention anything more sexual than a kiss.
I just finished the audiobook for Ender’s Game, which I have never read before. I’ve missed quite a few science fiction classics over the years, so I’m trying to make up for it with my Audible credits. The audiobook, by the way, was very well read.
I don’t know what I would have thought if I’d read this book when I was younger, but now, I found it to be a tragically depressing story. Basically it’s about the military using a child to commit genocide on an alien race.
I think the reason this book has been so well-received over the years is that it’s not a typical science-fiction book. Most SF books tend to be about the science, and the characters and story are pretty secondary. For example, I listened to The Mote in God’s Eye about a year ago – a brilliant, classic SF book – but I couldn’t tell you the name of any of the the characters or anything about their personalities or any of the problems they faced. But I could tell you a fair amount about the Moties and their culture and their evolution, because that was the main focus of the book. The story was just a vehicle to write about an interesting alien species.
But in Ender’s Game, the science takes a back seat. The science is almost non-existent, actually. We are never told exactly *how* Ender interacts with his games, for example. It could be a keyboard, a touch screen, telepathy, switches and levers, or anything in between. It doesn’t really matter. The book is all about Ender the boy and his interactions with other boys and girls. If it had been *just* Ender and his struggles with not wanting to kill people yet being trained to kill people, that would have been pretty dull, because that story has been done to death. But with the addition of his mean older brother and his compassionate older sister, it turned into a kind of touching family story.
As I was reading, I noticed there was very little set description in it. Most of it took place in the proverbial white fog, which is somewhat unusual I think for science fiction. I don’t remember any descriptions of the Battle School, or the Command School. I had no real sense of what any of the "games" looked like. Maybe that is another reason the book made such an impact. It gives me hope because I don’t feel like I’m very good at describing settings.
