Category: writing advice

state of the writer

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I really want to do something summing up 2014, but because of the usual ~holiday madness~ and also Desperately Trying to Read All the Things before it becomes 2015 it’s been hard to collect my thoughts.

So, when my good friend L.S. Mooney (follow her and check out her stuff–she is rad) tagged me in a thing, I figured it was a great opportunity to forever memorialize and otherwise less illustriously record where we’re at as a writer at the end of 2014.

1. What are you working on right now?

NA Urban Fantasy: Constantine, but if Diana Wynne Jones was writing it. It’s really fun! I’ve known all these wackadoo characters since like, high school? I wrote it once before in 2009, then edited that version in 2011, and then came to the slow but accurate realization that I needed more practice before a fresh attempt could be made early in 2013. Now it is 2014 and while we are not yet done slow-drafting this one, I am much more proud of it.

2. What is your preferred writing program/word processor/etc.?

Word. I have Scrivener on this machine, I know it works, I have actually typed words into it even, but I still gravitate back to Word. My fanfic background has taught me to just type words anywhere and has given me a special fondness for shoddy text boxes. I also used to type all my essays in Word during high school and college, so knowing that this derpy little page on my laptop could someday become a book makes me feel all kinds of nostalgia~

so yeah Word basically I am a dinosaur.

3. Are you a rule breaker? (AKA do you love or hate adverbs?)

I am an experimentalist. I believe that you should be breaking rules (because how else are you going to do Startling New Things) but that you should know damn well what you’re breaking before you break it.

Adverbs are usually crutch words– they’re ways for you to be lazy with a lexicon, for a writer to get away with using a weaker word when a stronger one is better. In a first draft, fo sho, adverb it up. It’s like writing margin notes to yourself–pushing but with more muchness! But in a final draft, it’s got to be– I am using this word for a specific purpose. Do I need to use one of my adverb flares here or can I do this better with a different construction? That’s when you cross out “walked awkwardly” and write “stumbled” or replace “touched gently” with “caressed.”

Some you keep, because wow yes some do just sound better with the adverb. And that’s cool. But you know this because you have tried damn hard to get the same feeling without the adverb and you can’t.

4. If you could write anywhere, where would it be?

A coffeeshop (because I like ambient chatter, the feeling of anonymity in a crowd, the City) with affordable but excellent drinks (and yes not so much coffee because I am Naturally Excitable but chocolate- or tea-based drinks are A+), where no one would steal my stuff when I got up (important) and my headphones never made my ears feel tired (because how can you write without hip tunes).

5. Share one of your favorite lines/scenes that you’ve ever written.

I am just one more Shibboleth heir in a dress shirt and slacks, and this lets them forget all the other things I am. (SEVEN DEADLY)

Shelley Summers was a city map he’d cut into himself, and if he ventures too far from shore the old lines slice open again. (SLINGS AND ARROWS)

6. Do you prefer writing from the 1st or 3rd POV?

I crave facility with both. Right now, 1st is the harder one for me so the project I’m currently working on is in 1st person. 3rd tends to be my strongest, since most of my fic in high school was in that.

7. When did you start writing?

I’ve been telling myself stories for ages. Like, probably the moment when I knew that I wanted to write long stuff (as opposed to shorter stories or essays) was when I started filling up this notebook with my own ~Pokemon Adventure~.

It pretty much was everything you could hope for from a nine-year-old with a box of colored pencils. All the Gym Leaders decided to chill with me and be my friends, except that Brock was my best friend, because I had a crush on him and also because he was awesome.

8. How do you feel about short stories?

They’re fun. I have written exactly one short story (“The first time he wore eyeliner…”) and then I think I eviscerated the correct draft and left the crappy one on my laptop, so it’s currently Not That Extant. But, I found the hard copy print-out I had of the good version on my desk a few weeks ago, so maybe I’ll look at it again.

9. What is your favorite thing about your life as a writer?

I like that it’s a sort of a secret thing, this Other Job that I do between math research and teaching classes. It’s like a changeover between the Narrator and Tyler Durden, like oh you’re feeling sleepy? sweet, bro, hand the reins over and let’s make some magic.

10. What are your top do’s and don’t’s of writing, for yourself and others?

Okay, settle yourselves in for a bit of an Answer because I am eating some peppermint bark and feeling evangelical.

Always be learning. This is my biggest one. It’s very easy to assume you know everything when you tend to be the most well-read individual in your group of friends/people you talk to regularly.

Come at things with the attitude of a beginner. Ask yourself how the book or manuscript you’re reading can help you learn– pay attention to how the author is making the characters interact versus how differently the story is going from what you’d do in their place. I guarantee you’ll learn more by being like “okay writer-bro, take the wheel I will ride with you and we’ll see where we go” versus nitpicking a story.

Most of all, be humble. Humble never hurts. Your notes don’t have to be pedantic, you don’t have to have solutions for every problem you spot. Part of being a professional is acknowledging that you do not know everything, and that this is okay. This is why you’re learning and why you sometimes ask for help.

You are not as good as you think you are. This sounds all kinds of rough and sad, but let me explain. There are days when I’m like THIS MANUSCRIPT IS THE SALT OF THE EARTH THE VERY SALT I TELL YOU and hearing back from people that yeah okay, it’s decent, holds together well, but here are some areas where improvement can happen, that sort of sucks.

Thinking like your whole manuscript is perfect as-is is dangerous. Because yes, agree, there are some parts of it that are perfect already.  They are probably the parts that made you think that the whole thing is great. But there are always parts that can be stronger, and thinking that the book is finished means that you’re cutting yourself off from those learning opportunities.

Give yourself a policy, like, okay, I’m going to read through this one more time before sending it. Chances are, you will find an area where you can tighten things up. After that, send.

But you’re also not as bad as you think. The fact that it hurts means you have skin in the game. You want this. You see the gap, as Ira Glass so excellently says, between the art you want to produce and the stuff you are producing.

The first thing that I ever got serious about was drawing. I had sketchbooks that I carried around with me everywhere in 7th grade through high school. The thing is that you really do have to make a lot of art before you start getting good. I have sketchbooks filled with really bad drawings and I’m like what even is this but it’s a solid foundation for my skillz now.

Maybe this is not the story that gets published, or the story that gets you an agent. Okay. There are still beautiful things in it. You are better as an artist for having created this piece. Never stop learning, never stop filling up notebooks with stories or typing words into docs. Stay humble, sure, but don’t run yourself into the ground.

You are getting better and you are making things. That’s all you need. Period, full stop.

See you in 2015.

rt14: diversity in YA

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Alright, time again for another RT panel recap! I missed doing this one yesterday, but here’s my notes from the Diversity in YA panel, probably one of my top three of the ones I sat in on. I’ll start off by listing the panelists and a book emblematic of their work (while they have often written more books, this is a good, if arbitrary, place to start).

Panelists:
Lydia Kang: CONTROL
Beth Revis: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
C. J. Omololu: TRANSCENDENCE
Malinda Lo: ASH

 

First and foremost, do your research. The goal is always to present a 3D view of a character, not a 2D one. Talk to people, get people to read your work, get into the community to stop yourself from making errors. It’s important to have your work vetted– your characters need to be personal and specific.

What’s more: you will offend people. This is unavoidable. The best you can do, through all this vetting and research, is to write a true story. Your diverse characters do not and should not have to be the only representative for an entire group.

A piece of advice I really liked from Malinda Lo on character creation was “don’t rub off their edges.” Get specific with what makes your character tick, why they are the way they are. Generalizing, esp. to group stereotypes undermines this specificity. Writing with a diverse character is less writing the story of a member of a group than it is writing a single character’s story regardless of their race/gender/orientation/faith/mental health, etc. We want lots of different representations of people out there, not just one.

What’s an easy way to get more diverse books out there/show publishers that books with diverse characters are worth signing on? Buy more books. Diversity in YA (the tumblr) has some really fab book lists to start with, and people recommend diverse reads on twitter all the time. Read books, buy books, talk about the books you love. It makes a difference.

Beth Revis suggested treating all characters like people, not token characters or an issue needing to be resolved. She also mentioned making the WASP the Other as a way to flip some perceptions, as she did in AtU, and said that there’s a big difference between having diverse characters be Othered and having diverse characters in a story and it not being a big deal.

Lydia Kang asked the audience to do uncomfortable things with our writing, to work out how we approach issues as authors and explore what we can do to write more authentically. Malinda Lo added that this is a process and that every book you write you should try to challenge yourself in a new way.

She also said that growing up with white everything, especially in media, makes it hard to do this. We need to look at the real world and make our books match up to that, while being careful not to include diverse characters as tokens.

Recommended reading: ANANSI BOYS by Neil Gaiman.
(Beth Revis rec’d this book because it also Othered the WASP and has interiority that fits diverse chars– e.g., seeing white as different and foreign, the tribe’s customs as the norm.)

Everyone agreed that hammering home messages or platitudes did not work– readers are smart and they’ll pick up on you being too general, which is why the panel suggested making your book as specific as possible, tailored to who your protagonist is rather that what diverse group(s) they belong to.

When asked what areas more diversity was needed in publishing, the panel had some great answers. Beth Revis wanted to see more body image and types in YA, as well as more handicapped characters. CJ Omololu suggested deaf parents with hearing children and mental illnesses, especially depression and anxiety since either of those diseases make the sufferer feel like they’re the only person in the world who feels that way.

Malinda Lo would like to see more books with gender diversity, especially books that present girls as not having to be feminine and boys not having to be masculine– showing gender as more of a spectrum. Lydia Kang commented that male teen characters in many ways are not like book guys, and she’d love to see more diversity there. She also mentioned more faith diversity, and CJ said that she personally was fascinated by Jewish families and would love to see more books on them.

Recommended reading: IF I EVER GET OUT OF HERE by Eric Ganworth (rec’d by Malinda Lo)
CHARM AND STRANGE by Steph Kuehn (rec’d by Beth Revis)
FOURTY-FIVE POUNDS (MORE OR LESS) by Kelly Barson (rec’d by Lydia Kang)
PROPHECY by Ellen Oh (Lydia)
WONDER by R. J. Palacio (Lydia)
GILDED by Christina Farley (Beth)
THE UNDERTAKING OF LILY CHEN by Danica Novgorodoff (Beth)
TRIGGER and GOING UNDERGROUND by Susan Vaught (rec’d by CJ Omololu)
FAR FROM YOU by Tess Sharpe (Malinda)
(and again, reminder that diversity in YA has a huge list of book recs, too)

The panel again stressed the importance of research. CJ suggested finding forums and websites for diverse groups and reaching out to the people who run them. It’s important to have one-on-one connections with people, as well as to get your work vetted by them. Malinda also said not to get discouraged if people don’t reply or are too busy– you can also read a ton of books at your library as well as talk to your librarian to help find connections with people who have background on what you’re writing about.

Lydia agreed and said to also go to the source material and to go on research trips. Beth mentioned reddit as a place that she used for her research– to find out details on a community she’d never lived in, Beth talked to people on that area’s reddit board, and asked questions of locals.

One of the last questions that the panel answered was about backlash. It was really interesting– everyone said that they never got hatemail from the teens they wrote for; it was always the parents.

Malinda Lo had a great strategy: don’t write defensively, write generously. Write from personal experience and be kind. These aren’t light issues, and people have intense feelings about them. Be respectful, and when you put kindness out there, you tend to get kindness in return.

Beth Revis referenced a diversity series she did on her blog and she had to ask herself– what right do I have to say anything? She invited other people to use her blog as a platform to have a dialogue about diversity.

An interesting point from Lydia Kang was not to assume that people know how to or feel comforting writing their own diversity; people only have their own ideas to go off of. CJ Omololu said again that this is why it’s most important to make your story personal and your characters well-rounded– no one person is the only representative for how their diverse community should act. Your goal should always be to create a full person, not defined solely by any of their traits.

Recommended reading: BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott. (Lydia)

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Previously in this series:
Violence in Thrillers

rt14: violence in thrillers

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One of the cool things I got to do this summer was go to RT14 in New Orleans  in May. I took notes on the panels I went to in my mad fly tarot-themed notebook (because why not) and now I’m sharing what I learned in this series of posts on my blog. Feel free to share/tweet/whatever these, but please do be courteous and include a link back to the source.

In some cases, the panels I was on recommended books to read and I’ll include links to those Amazon pages where I can.

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The panel opened by discussing chaos vs. order in thrillers– specifically, looking at Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Pretty much, when we discuss violence in thrillers, we’re also exploring our animal nature vs. civilized order.

Part of that means paying attention to what can hurt you, even if the threat seems remote. A lot of this is tapping back into the paranoia that the animal self feels but that the civilized self has been taught to ignore. The animal self still isn’t 100% comfortable and continues to express its distrust/wariness on a more subconscious scale (good/bad vibe, instinct, etc), which can make for some interesting juxtaposition when a character who appears to the civilized self logically good/okay elicits negative reactions from the animal self.

Recommended reading: Ann Rule’s THE STRANGER BESIDE ME.

One of the panelists shared an anecdote: she had an uncle who was super sweet, would play with her, and whom she loved. Later, she found out that that uncle had murdered a woman in a horrific way. She used this as an example to illustrate how easy it is for us to just not know all the sides of a person– how impossible it is for another human being to claim that they know everything about another human being.

Fear can keep you out of danger– while in many cases, defeating fear is the victory of the civilized self over the animal self, fear can also be seen as a way for the animal self to self-preserve. Fear is a vital instinct not always to be condemned– it’s a skill for survival.

Recommended reading: Gavin de Becker’s THE GIFT OF FEAR (thanks, Nicole!).

Violence as Release: sometimes the panel talked about violence as being cathartic, but most often we saw it as a release of the tension built up during the story. This is why it’s tricky to have a lot of violence at the start or middle of a story: after the violent scene is over, a lot of tension is gone– i.e., violence is cathartic for the reader in that they get to see the bad guys smashed (or someone smashed), and is a release of tension since an action happened, something definite occurred and we no longer have the conflict of not knowing what’s going to happen next.

This can be great, but it’s something you have to handle skillfully. The story’s action is always bringing us toward the inevitable confrontation, and for this to hit the reader hard, you need to always be upping the tension, not letting it all go halfway through the book. This is why a lot of suspense authors wait until their climactic scenes to introduce “on screen” violence.

On the other hand, the issue isn’t that violence can’t be shown: it’s that tension needs to be re-built in another arena as it is dissipated in one. Above all, you need to keep your reader buzzed enough to read on, not give them a convenient place to stop.

One of the best tricks for building tension in a story before the final showdown was off-screen violence. Leaving details to the reader’s imagination is almost always more haunting and forceful than describing everything. There’s only so much you can do with grit and visual clues– there’s a whole lot of terror in the unknown. Some panelists cited Alfred Hitchcock and the power of suggestion– allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks is sometimes more powerful than doing it yourself.

Recommended reading: Geoffery Household’s ROGUE MALE.

What I thought was neat was how the panel brought up the two selves competing for dominance again and said that there really can’t be a winner— that to have a winner would be a tragic fault. A person who gives in wholly to the animal self cannot live in society and often is the predator aspect made manifest. However, a person who annihilates their animal self kills their instincts. Basically, if there ever is a winner in this battle, something is wrong.

Loners as thriller heroes: part of what makes romancing them so fun is that you can never have them. Part of why a love interest is attracted to a loner hero is their loner quality– to have them be able to be with another person means changing their loner-ness, aka what the LI loves most about them/what the hero essentially is. (It is impossible.) So there’s this eternal chase, and a romance that can never be consummated (fully)– it’s what’s tragic about the relationship and also what keeps people coming back, because a loner character is a character you’ll never know everything about.

Why do we like violent heroes? All humans are a struggle between impulse and control. One of the panelists mentioned that there’s a “thin membrane between normalcy and pathology” and it’s not just something that our heroes and villains walk– it’s something that all human beings have to deal with. People have dangerous fantasies they never act on, and violence or violent tension can be the intoxication with over going the invisible line between okay and very not okay in your head.

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Hope this helped! Next panel I’ll have up is Diversity in YA, which was one of my favorites, so check back tomorrow for more RT14 shenans.