Tag: games writers play

Amusements for the Coming Solstice

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I could have saved this for posting a bit closer to the day, but by that time we’re going to have a house full of people and I’ll be lucky to get up a few sentences griping about punctuation trivia.  That being the case, herewith a few of my favorite winter-holiday stories and characters from both written and visual media:

  • The visit from Saint Nicholas at Christmas in Nazi-occupied Holland in Hilda Van Stockum’s The Winged Watchman — I read this one when I was a kid, and it helped start me off on my ongoing fascination with history and the people who were part of it.
  • Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, whose arrival with gifts for the Pevensie children signals the end in Narnia of “always winter and never Christmas.”
  • The New Year’s feast at Camelot that kicks off Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  For those who feel up to tackling the thorny Middle English dialect of the original, there’s a text on-line here. My co-author and I liked it so much, in fact, we wrote our own short story about the events of that particular Arthurian feast, “Holly and Ivy.”
  • The third-season Christmas episode of Supernatural, for the way that it combines the Winchester brothers’ childhood memories of The Worst Christmas Ever (everybody has at least one of those in their memory book) with the sense of impending doom that hung over all the episodes of that particular season, and still manages to finish up the episode on a warm, if bittersweet, note.
  • The first Die Hard movie.  (Of the others in the franchise, we will not speak, except to say that I’m happy Bruce Willis has a long-running franchise to keep his own Christmas stocking full.)  Underneath all the blood and explosions, it’s a romantic comedy for the Christmas season . . . how often, after all, do you get a rom-com where the hero is literally willing to walk barefoot over broken glass for the sake of his one true love?

Creative Calisthenics

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So the question comes up, from the earnest student in the front row of the lecture hall:  “Are there specific things that I, as a writer, can do — in terms of practice exercises and the like – to improve the quality of my work?”

And the answer is, yes, there are a few.

Here’s one for starters: Try writing things that are further out toward the edges of your comfort zone, whether in terms of form and style, or in terms of content.

For example, if you don’t like writing in first person (or in second person present tense, or in third person objective, or whatever), you can make a point of writing a short piece or two that way.  Likewise, you can try writing angst-ridden noir if you normally turn out lighter pieces; or comforting fluff if you normally go for the 88%-cacao-dark; or a tightly-plotted caper story if your usual product is loosely-plotted character-driven vignettes.

You may surprise yourself and get something publishable out of the exercise.  And even if you don’t, you’ll have exercised some new writing muscles.

A Few Things a Writer Should Probably Do at Least Once

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At least if he or she is working in the fields of the historical or fantastic:

  • Fire a rifle or handgun.   If you don’t have the sort of friends who own firearms and back pastures where they can set up tin cans on fence posts, visit a shooting range.  (But the effect of a bullet on a full tin can of dubious green beans or corned beef hash is a lot more impressive than holes in a paper target.)  If you’re working on stuff set in the black-powder era, see if you can find a black-powder enthusiast for a demonstration.
  • Build a fire starting with tinder and matches.  Starting with flint and steel, or with even more basic gear, is rather more hard core than necessary, though if you happen to know a Boy Scout or a historical recreationist who’s into that sort of thing, you should take the opportunity to observe the process if you can.  It explains, among other things, why so many fictional wizards keep a handy firestarting spell in their back pockets, and why the ancient Romans were so big on keeping a fire burning in the Temple of Vesta.
  • Try on some armor and a helmet.  Cultivating the acquaintance of some historical recreationists, again, is good for this.  You’ll most likely end up in chain mail, because plate armor is a lot more size-specific.  But the narrowed field of view and dampened sound inside a closed helm are certainly instructive.
  • Wear the clothing of another era, for insight into how movement and demeanor are affected by it.  What can and can’t you do in hoop skirt and corset, for example; or in high heels, a powdered wig, and a sword?
  • Cook and eat a meal from the same era.  Bonus points for doing it over the fire you started with tinder and matches.
  • Get far enough away from major urban areas to see the night sky unaffected by the glow of city lights, and hear the world without the background rumble of machinery and hum of electricity, and smell the world without the overlay of internal combustion engines and industrial processes.  You don’t have to stay there; just visit it for a few hours, or a day or so.

And that’s just for starters.  Not all research is done in books.

The Better Part of Valor

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As a matter of principle, I believe that a writer should be free to pick his or her subject matter from the entire range of human experience — even when the premise in question is such that, if it were an objective in one of the tabletop Squad Leader games I used to play, it would be one that a smart player wouldn’t even think of attempting without at least six to one odds in favor, not to mention a +8 leader counter and a couple of Sherman tanks. And possibly off-board artillery and some close air support.

As a matter of practicality, on the other hand . . . at some point in the process, there needs to be somebody who’s clear-eyed enough to look at the project and say, “Sweetie, it would take the second coming of Truman Capote to pull this one off, with William Faulkner riding shotgun and Quentin Tarantino bringing up the rear with a video camera — and frankly, my dear, you’re nowhere in that league.”

And everybody concerned is going to be happier if the verdict is delivered before the project goes to press, rather than after.

Finding Story

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Sometimes, in this writing game, you get lucky.  A story idea doesn’t so much come up and whisper in your ear as leap out of the bushes in front of you and demand your attention.  Stories like that don’t get written so much as they get exorcised — writing them down is the only way to get them out of your head so that you can get on with whatever it was you were supposed to be writing instead.

(It’s one of the sad truths of writing:  The story that you’re supposed to be writing is never quite as attractive as the one that you’re cheating on it with.)

Other times, though, you have a pressing need to write a story — you’ve promised something to an anthology, or you’ve got a class assignment, or you’ve committed yourself to producing a piece of handmade original fiction as a birthday present for a dear friend — but you haven’t the foggiest idea what you should be writing a story about.  You’re suffering, in this case, from the problem of too much choice.  Given the whole vast and varied universe to pull a story idea from, your muse takes a hard look at all that vastness and variety and goes off and hides in a corner whimpering.

What you can do, at that point, is start setting up boundaries and making requirements, so that your agoraphobic muse isn’t forced to either contemplate infinity or hide.  So you decide that you’re not going to write anything longer than 5000 or 50,000 or 150,000 words (depending upon just how big a story you need); and you’re not going to include self-aware robots, or an in-depth exploration of employer-employee relations in mid-twentieth century Chicago, or time travel.  At the same time, you decide that your story will include certain things.†  You can derive these included things any way you like.  You can pull random nouns out of a dictionary, or random objects out of your household junk drawer; you can draw cards out of a Tarot deck; you can go to any of the various online plot generators.

It doesn’t matter what method you choose, because the whole point is the imposition of random constraints.  The self-imposed boundaries and required inclusions give you some fixed points on which to hang a story, and they reduce a universe of infinite possibilities to something that even the most timid of muses can contemplate without coming unanchored and floating off, storyless, into the void.

†Such as, for example, self-aware robots, an in-depth exploration of employer-employee relations in mid-twentieth century Chicago, and time travel.

When Life Gives You Zucchini

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You make zucchini bread.

We all know how it is with zucchini.  Somebody in the neighborhood has a garden, and they have a zucchini plant.  Maybe even they have two (if they’ve never grown zucchini before.)  And the zucchini does as zucchini plants do, and sometime around the end of summer everybody in the neighborhood is receiving gifts of abundant zucchini, because the alternative is seeing their neighbor’s kitchen fill up with zucchini and possibly even explode.

And there’s only so much zucchini you can steam or saute or stir-fry before you start to bring out the recipe books.  And you think about Zucchini Lasagna, but not for very long, because the voice in your head that says “lasagna” also says, “That isn’t lasagna, that’s a vegetable casserole,” and your stomach says, “If you’re making lasagna, I want the real thing or nothing.”  And you think about zucchini pickles, but not for very long, because you don’t want to get involved in the whole pickling and canning thing.

And besides, zucchini bread isn’t imitation anything else, it’s real zucchini bread; and it doesn’t require specialized equipment and messing around with vats of boiling water and worrying about lids and seals; and you already know that everybody in the house will eat it.  And if they don’t, that’s okay, too, because you happen to like zucchini bread just fine.

Sometimes story ideas are like that.  You’ll get a story idea that comes out of nowhere like a gift of random zucchini, and it’s not your usual sort of story . . . maybe it’s a little over-the-top for your normal style, maybe it’s not your usual subject matter, maybe it has a bit too much of the guilty pleasure about it for your artistic peace of mind.

When something like that happens, you can try to make zucchini lasagna out of your story idea — slice it up and sauce it up and generally try to turn it into something more like your usual thing — but unless you really truly like zucchini lasagna, your readers are going to see what you did and know that your heart wasn’t in it.  Or you can go the pickling-and-canning route, taking that story idea and using all your hard-won tools and techniques to make it into something you can point to and call art.  And the critics may praise what you’ve done to elevate zucchini into something better and longer-lasting, but the voice in your head that doesn’t shut up is going to say, “And why does zucchini need elevation, anyhow?”

So you might as well make zucchini bread.  Don’t try to make that story idea into an imitation of something else, and don’t try to make it into something fancy and difficult just to please the critics.  Make it into good honest zucchini bread, and serve it to the people who will like it that way.

And don’t worry.  Eventually the frost comes, and the zucchini flood will dry up until next summer.

Presented for Your Amusement

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Revision:  The Game!

Welcome to REVISION: THE GAME!
You are in a WRITER’S ROOM.
There is a desk here.
There is a chair here.
Exits are W and E.
What do you do?

One of those humorous pieces with a lot of  good advice buried inside it.

This next one is at least tangentially writing-related, but mostly I’m linking to it because it’s funny, and because at various times in my life I too have been trapped in Paper-Grading Hell.

And Then I Was Eaten by a Grue

>read essay
With trepidation, you lift aside the cover sheet. Suddenly, the world around you seems to melt away…

Hell
You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike. The path ahead of you is littered with sentence fragments, left broken and twitching at your feet as their pathetic spaniel eyes implore you to put them out of their misery. Dangling modifiers loop happily through the branches overhead. In the distance, that sound of undergraduate feet has turned into a heavy, erratic thwump – swoop – THWUMP you recognise immediately – it’s a badly-indented long quotation, and it’s coming closer.

>run
You wish.

Look What the Postman Brought

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One of the small pleasures of a writer’s life is the arrival of author’s comp copies in the mail.  The new-book smell, the solid heft of the real and physical object, the gratifying appearance of one’s name and words in crisp black type . . . there’s nothing quite like it, and it never really gets old.

Today’s mail included our comp copies of the Thomas Easton and Judith K. Dial anthology Impossible Futures, which contains our short story, “According to the Rule.”  We think the anthology looks nifty-keen, especially the cover art:

(This has been a shameless plug.  Buy one; better still, buy a dozen.  They’re just the right thickness to shim up that short table leg that’s been driving you crazy for months now . . . .)

More from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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As an addendum to my post the other day on outlines and cover letters, there’s this (from romance novelist Linda Conrad via Terri-Lynne DeFino): a handy-dandy basic two-sentence “elevator pitch” generator:

(TITLE) is a (GENRE) about (Heroine/Hero), a (backstory/identity) who, after (inner conflict) wants (goal). But when (turning point) happens, he/she has to (external goal), which seems impossible because (external conflict).

Looked at in skeletal form, it resembles nothing so much as MadLibs For Authors, but it works.

Thought for the Day

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Advice on writing — if it hopes to be at all honest — really needs to have a sign posted over it in flashing letters of bright red neon:

THIS IS STRICTLY MY PERSONAL OPINION.

IT’S WHAT WORKS FOR ME.

And that definitely goes for anything that may be posted here.

(I will admit that I’m vain enough to think that my personal opinions are generally valid, at least for fairly large subsets of the writing population.  But I’m not so vain as to think that they are, or ought to be, universal.  One size definitely doesn’t fit all, in this business.)