Swan Tower

This is as much for my own records as anything else, but it might be useful to others, so I'm posting it here.

When preparing a list of names and terms to send your copy-editor, it helps a lot to do the following.

• Open the file in a different word processor from the one you normally use. Doesn't matter which one; it just needs to be a program that will flag every word it doesn't recognize. (If you aren't the sort of person who normally teaches your usual program all the major names, you can skip this step.)
  
• Start skimming, looking for those flags. When you find a name or term specific to your novel, check the spelling, put it in a list for the CE (helps to sort by characters, locations, world terms, etc.), then add that word to the program's dictionary so the flags go away. Note that you'll probably have to add it again for the possessive, though the CE list won't need that specified. (Plurals, however, might need to be mentioned on the CE list.)
  
• If that word shows up again, it might be misspelled, or your program might do things like say "ACK THERE'S PUNCTUATION AFTER IT NOW IS THAT A NEW WORD???" If it's spelled correctly, add it to the dictionary again so the program will stop yelling at you. Over time, this will mean that the number of flags you have to scan for goes way down.
  
• When you encounter things that aren't novel-specific terms, like compound words or variant spellings, add them to the CE list if you definitely want them a certain way (you'll change my strong preterites over my dead body); otherwise, add them to the program's dictionary so you won't have to look at them again, and leave finessing things like hyphens to the CE and their style guide.
  
• By the way, you'll also catch a lot of typos.
  
• Finish going through the manuscript. Hey presto, you have now -- probably -- found all the words you need to list for your CE.
  
• Might also do your CE a favor by adding notes about who people are, what they look like, where in the city certain buildings are located, and other basic details of continuity. This doubles as a favor to yourself later on, if you're writing a series!
  

If you are writing a series:

• For book two, open your CE list from book one. Add a 1 in front of every term, then search on the non-obvious ones to see if they're used again in book two. If so, add a 2 as well, so you get things like "1,2 Ren -- half-Vraszenian con artist" (etc).
  
• Save this as your master CE list for the series.
  
• Repeat the above process for adding to the program dictionary and CE list. Anything new goes in with a 2 in front of it, e.g. "2 Mede Galbiondi -- suitor with a strong arm."
  
• Save a new copy as your CE list for book two. Then delete every item that has only a 1, i.e. doesn't appear in book two.
  
• Delete the numbers from in front of your remaining items so your CE doesn't wonder what the heck those are for.
  
• Rinse and repeat for book 3 et sequelae, starting with the master list and searching to see which existing names and terms show up again.
  

I learned at the CE stage of The Liar's Knot to create the master list. I learned at the CE stage of Labyrinth's Heart that I should have been numbering all the items so I'd know whether a lack of numbers meant that it showed up in both of the first two books, or that it got introduced for the first time in book two. (That part probably isn't necessary, but my brain wants it.)

You could probably just inflict the whole master list on your copy-editor each time around, but given how much these names and terms pile up, I feel like it's better to give them only the relevant selection, without cruft leftover from previous books.

Or, I mean -- you don't even have to make a list. I didn't for my first I don't know how many novels, until I heard this was a helpful thing to do. It's especially useful to you as a writer when you're writing more than one book, because of how it can double as a minimalist series bible. And if you're going to make such a list, this workflow minimizes the amount of mental effort that goes into finding all the names and terms. It's still time-consuming, but it isn't hard.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/FQ5Zy3)

Years ago I wrote an essay for my site called "Writer's Block(s)," wherein I said I don't find the term "writer's block" to be helpful.

I stand by that, even though I've now gone through a period where, if I were inclined to use that term, that's what I would have called it.

In 2020 I was hugely productive. Some writers found it very difficult to write last year, but I was in the camp that took refuge from the world by escaping into ones of my own creation. I wrote two novels (The Liar's Knot with Alyc, and Night Parade on my own), plus ten short stories, three flash, one fanfic, one short story for L5R, various short adventures for Sea of Legends, and my ongoing Patreon essays.

Given that, it wasn't surprising that after I rounded the corner into 2021, things slacked off. I'd been working really hard, after all, and you can't do that nonstop forever. I'd already decided to slow my roll on short fiction because I was writing it faster than I could sell it, so taking a break from that wasn't a problem. Besides, I had The Mask of Mirrors out in January and Night Parade two weeks later, so there was a stretch of literal months where I was doing promotional events every week, usually two or three of them. That eats brain and energy and I know it, so giving myself time off from producing something new was good self-care.

But.

Round about late February, I realized my ability to brain creatively was not regenerating. I'd taken two months off and I still had no more energy for writing than I had before; if anything, I had less. I'd written my final L5R story and a couple of pieces of flash, but for the former I had the benefit of all the existing story momentum and the latter were . . . not impressive. More importantly, I had a story due to an anthology, and I was having the worst time getting it done.

Well, there could be multiple reasons for that. And I knew perfectly well that I had a plot problem in the story which I hadn't yet solved -- so naturally I couldn't move forward on it. I made myself sit down and I figured out a way around that problem, which let me write a little more . . . but then I ran into a new problem, which slammed me into a second wall.

And then I reached a point where even trying to make myself think about the problem induced a flinch reaction in my brain: god, no, please don't make me.

This was . . . not good.

If you saw the day in mid-March where I asked on Twitter for cute cat pics and the like, that was the day I realized I wasn't simply tired, and I wasn't simply stuck on a bit of plot and everything would be fine once I sorted that out. Something had gone wrong in my head, that merely sitting back and waiting wasn't going to fix.

But the gist of that original essay is that calling the issue "writer's block" accomplishes nothing. It's a description of symptoms, not a diagnosis of cause, much less a cure. I had to figure out why my head had gone wrong, on a global level that went well beyond being in a plot corner with a single story.

I mean, pandemic. That was a pretty obvious culprit. But "pandemic" wasn't really an answer, either, because there was a pandemic before and I still wrote, and also what exactly about the pandemic was the bit stabbed into my brain? There's been discussions about the lack of novelty involved in being locked down, which can be particularly deadly to creative work; that seemed like a good angle to investigate. My first-line response was to spend a whole day doing things like working on a jigsaw puzzle, playing piano, and otherwise engaging in activities I hadn't done in ages, which definitely helped to lift my immediate mood, even if it didn't fix everything.

What about environmental factors? I figured winter had something to do with it -- I've known for decades that I don't respond well to a lack of sunlight -- but merely rounding the corner into daylight saving time hadn't brought the improvement I hoped for, so I got more aggressive about seeking out light. We recently got a swing for our back patio, and the weather was nice enough for me to sit out there, so I started making a point of doing that every day (light + a new place to sit, i.e. novelty). In fact, the trainer I see has a list of elements that play into good health -- things like nutrition, sleep, and so forth -- and sunlight is on that list, so my "homework" from him for a while was not to lift weights or anything like that, but to get at least twenty minutes on the patio each day.

I also started taking a vitamin D supplement, on the theory that a deficiency in that nutrient has caused sluggishness in multiple people of my acquaintance, and overdosing on the stuff basically requires you to down a whole bottle in one go, so why not supplement for a while and see if that helped.

And that story I was stuck on? Well, I had a deadline, so I did have to push through, rather than just shelving it until I felt better. But I talked to Alyc, who not only helped me work out the problem I'd been stuck on, but made a suggestion for another detail that wound up fixing a problem I hadn't even gotten to yet. Which unclogged the brain ducts enough for me to get the story done, with a small extension from the editor that gave me time enough away to revise the draft as it needed. So yes, "fix the story" was part of the solution, along with other things. (Full disclosure: I held off on making this post until I heard back from the editor with revisions, because a part of me was afraid that I'd turned in something visibly sub-par. But he's delighted with it, so I feel much more comfortable publicly discussing the problems I had along the way.)

So here we are, roughly two months after I started trying to figure out what was off in my head and how to fix it. How are things going? Well, in April I finally rewrote a story I'd drafted in 2019 and had meant to redo ever since then (the idea was solid, but the execution was meh at best). And I also popped out a piece of flash I'm quite pleased with. And I started revising another story whose polishing I've been putting off. More pertinently, one evening recently I decided I'd done plenty of work during the day and sat down to read . . . only to wind up scribbling notes and even writing material for a side project I've got going on. In other words, I was excited enough about that project to spontaneously generate ideas for it when I wasn't trying to extract them.

That's what my brain looks like when it's working right.

Now, I will be the first in line to say that I'm lucky: this problem wound up being relatively quick to resolve. I do not appear to have developed major depressive disorder or anything else that would require medical intervention to fix. My home remedies sufficed, at least for now, and they sufficed in a fairly short time -- call it a few weeks before I started feeling like I was on my way out of the pit, and a bit over a month before I felt like I was back on my feet. Not everybody has that easy a time of it.

But I stand by what I said before. If I were to rewrite "Writer's Block(s)" today (which I may do), it would be to change the presentation of the points there, not the points themselves. I had to dig past the surface of "I'm having trouble writing" and even the surface of "well, pandemic" to get to the potential causes and the changes that might help mitigate them. My first attempted solution (taking time off) didn't work; okay, what should I try next? If it isn't just low-grade burnout, if it isn't all the promotional stuff taking my time and energy, then what is it? What path might get me back to where I want to be?

We have to ask ourselves these questions. Simply waiting and hoping the problem will go away on its own will only fix a minor subset of the possible causes; some of the others may get worse, as the failure to produce exacerbates the stress. Sometimes you need to crack the whip over your own head, and sometimes that will only drive you deeper into the hole. Sometimes you won't know what works and what doesn't until you try.

But you can try, and eventually -- hopefully -- find your way back out again.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/E1Yarp)

I have a confession to make: I grew up in suburban Dallas, and I simply Do Not Grok Nature.

On the metric of effort-to-result, putting details about nature into my stories is probably one of the most labor-intensive things I do. And I don't even mean long, rapturous passages of lyrical description about fog creeping over a pond at dawn or something like that; I mean that unless I make a conscious decision to go do some research, my characters walk through forests of Generic Trees, listening to Generic Birds make Generic Noises. When I do the research, it winds up being half an hour of effort for half a sentence of result.

I'm making an effort to improve at this, and having discussed it with some writers, I think a large chunk of what I need is simply better resources for the information, or better ways of finding the resources. Field guides are helpful, but even more helpful are books or websites that talk holistically about a specific landscape, so that I get integrated information like "down by a watercourse you'll see these trees and these birds and these flowers," rather than separated lists of all the trees found in a region, and all the birds, and so forth. I feel like this is relatively findable for the United States, but much harder for other parts of the world, especially non-Anglophone parts. Any recs for such things? I mostly use this for secondary-world purposes rather than this world, but I'd love to be able to have characters ride across grasslands that look more like Mongolia than Nebraska, or cope with environments like tropical jungles that we mostly don't have here. Could be formal field guide-type stuff, or just somebody writing with really evocative specificity about not just the mood of a place, but the specific flora and fauna to be found there and how they behave.

(I know one bit of advice is "get out there in the naturez yourself!," but that would mostly only help me learn to write about the northern California landscape. I do get out in the naturez, but I can't just go hang out in Mongolia whenever I want.)

(This is the third post in a series about the craft consideration that goes into deciding where to put breaks between units of your story. Part I, Part II, Part IV.)

The second post of this series looked at the ideas of attention and focus, and how those apply to the structure of a paragraph. Now let’s turn those same lenses onto scenes.

First, the notion that a unit asks you to sustain your attention until its over. Scenes don’t require the same degree of concentration from the reader as a paragraph; if you put a book down in the middle of a scene to go refill your water glass, you probably won’t have to start over at the beginning because you don’t remember where you left off. But ideally, a scene should hold the reader’s attention without pause, and not let them up for air until it’s done.

One of the ways it can do this is through unity. We no longer hold to Aristotle’s <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/classical_unities>classical unities as such, but in some ways the concept is still alive today at the scene level: we do generally expect unity of viewpoint, as I mentioned before, and we have a tendency to default to unity of location and time as well. When the characters shift location or a lot of time passes, we often insert a scene break to signal the transition and skip over the intervening gap.

But that isn’t the only way to handle those shifts. You can also use the narration itself to signal movement or the passage of time. How do you know which approach is better in a given situation?

( Read more... )

A discussion among my fellow writers of chapter length and where to break (or not) got me reflecting on how little writing advice there is for thinking about this -- and then from there I fell down a rabbit hole of realizing how even less advice there is for the sub-units below the chapter, the scene and the paragraph. (Or the higher-level units, the part or the book in a series . . . but that’s going to have to be a separate bit of pondering.)

This is stuff we’re apparently expected to learn by trial and error. You write stuff, and you notice -- somehow -- that breaking in certain places works better than others, and so you improve. Nobody ever really taught me how to think about these issues, beyond a few very basic mechanical points, and so as a consequence I’m not even sure how to articulate what it is that I do, even though I’m relatively pleased with how I’m doing it. This is the first in a series of posts that constitute an attempt to figure that out by talking through it out loud (so to speak), and I hope it will be of use to other people.

Note: what I have to say here is geared toward fiction writing, but certain aspects of it would apply to nonfiction as well, whether that be a blog post or an academic article.

Organizing it is a little bit hard, though, because I want to talk about all three of paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, and some of the points apply to all of them, but some don’t. Which means it’s not ideal to separate them, but it also isn’t ideal to tackle them all at once. I’m going to do a little from Column A, a little from Column B; I’ll start out with talking about the aspects where they’re the closely related, then break it up for where they diverge. Which also means this is going to be a multi-part discussion -- four parts in total, with one being posted each day. (Edited to add: Part II, Part III, Part IV.)

So with that context out of the way . . . in thinking about this, I’ve come around to the opinion that there are three major factors at play in how we decide to break up the units of our tale. Those are: mechanics, pacing, and attention. And of those three, I think attention is both the most subtle and the most important.

( Read more... )

One of the things that makes a writing career difficult is that all your payoffs are deferred.

Let’s say you’re writing a novel. Each day, or whatever schedule you work on, you add some more to the pile of words. Go you! But if you’re not someone who lets people read the draft in progress (I’m usually not, though there have been exceptions), then you do that work in a void. And it’s a long, long road to having a completed draft, so you’re in that void for quite a while.

Then you finish your draft. Go you! Now maybe you let somebody read it. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that this isn’t the end of anything; it’s just an intermediate stage. There’s revision, and that’s before the novel even heads out into the wide wide world.

Ah, but surely you get payoff when you sell the novel, right? Go you! Except . . . what “selling a novel” actually looks like is generally that your agent sends you an email saying “here’s what they’re offering,” and you say “that sounds great, let’s do it!” Whereupon your agent haggles for a while, because that’s their job. Or maybe this is the next book in a multi-book contract you already signed, at which point this stage doesn’t even really happen, because it happened years ago.

Assuming it’s a new deal, eventually somebody sends you a contract to sign. This comes probably weeks after the offer you said yes to, if not months. Is this the payoff? It doesn’t feel much like a payoff. On the one hand, you kinda sorta sold the book a while ago; on the other hand, you haven’t been paid yet, much less seen your book in print.

Some number of days or weeks after you signed the contract, money shows up. This used to be in the form of an actual check, but these days lots of people use direct deposit instead. So instead of a Real Live Check, you get an email saying “hey, we’ve deposited this money in your account.” Is that the payoff? Literally, yes; emotionally, no.

Edits.

Copy-edits.

Page proofs.

Somewhere in here, you get a cover. Awesome! It mostly has nothing to do with you, since at best you got to offer some ideas that your publisher may or may not have listened to, but at least it’s shiny! Meanwhile you’re busy with something else.

And then, one day, FINALLY, months after you got paid, months after you sold it, months or maybe even years after you wrote the book . . . it’s on the shelves! Everybody is so excited!

Except for you. I mean, sure, you’re happy. I’m not trying to say that it isn’t cool to hold your very own book in your hands and see your name on the cover. But . . . as a payoff for the long marathon of writing the thing, it isn’t much, because it comes way too late. By the time it arrives, you’re already doing something else. You’re in the void of a different book, probably, and when people talk about “your new book,” you have to remind yourself which one they’re talking about. To them, the one that matters is the one they can buy. But that’s not the one eating your time and attention anymore. And psychologically speaking, a reward that’s massively deferred from the behavior that earned it is pretty much useless.

This is why I’m coming around to the opinion that it is hugely important to set up some kind of ritual for yourself — in whatever form works for you — that celebrates the milestones. Two years may go by between finishing the rough draft and seeing the result on a shelf, but if you’ve done something meaningful to mark the achievement of that draft, or the other landmarks along the way, then you won’t run as much risk of the job starting to feel meaningless. If the way the circumstances work isn’t going to reward you in a timely manner, then you’ve got to do it yourself.

Temporarily, at least. 🙂

I’m currently slated to do two teaching stints in 2020. The first is coming up soon: Pen, Paper, Action!, a one-day workshop at Clarion West in Seattle on February 8th. There I’ll be covering not just fight scenes in specific, but action more generally.

The second is later this year, during the Sirens Studio that takes place before the main conference. I’ll be teaching a writing intensive on creating religions for fantasy worlds — going beyond deciding who the gods are, and delving into how beliefs can be integrated into the daily lives of the characters. Sirens is a beautiful event focusing on women in fantasy; I haven’t been to the Studio before, but I was one of the Guests of Honor at the conference in its second year, and had an amazing time.

Registration for both of these things is limited, so if you’re interested, sign up soon!

There are a lot of TV shows I try and just sort of drift away from, because they aren’t doing enough to hold my attention. The latest in this series is Black Lightning, which surprised me, because there are a number of things I like about its characters and its story. But in the end, its dialogue doesn’t have much of a particular element for which I can find no better term than “zing.”

Thanks, brain. “Zing.” That’s a real helpful way of describing it. >_<

Zing is not the same thing as witty banter — though many shows have mistaken the one for the other, and fill their scripts with dialogue that’s absolutely leaden in its attempt to be light. You can have zing in a deadly serious conversation (as Game of Thrones has proved). It’s a cousin, I think, of Mark Twain’s comment about the difference between the right word and the almost-right word being the difference between lightning and a lightning bug: it’s the lightning lines, the ones that leap off the page or the screen, the ones that don’t just get you from Narrative Point A to Narrative Point B but make the journey between them memorable. You see it in The Lion in Winter, which along with Twelve Angry Men made me wonder if this is a quality especially possessed by older stage plays — I haven’t seen enough older stage plays to be sure. At its apex, it’s the feeling that no line has been wasted or allowed to do the bare minimum of work. Think of The Princess Bride, and how many lines from that movie are quotable. It isn’t just because the lines themselves are good; it’s because there’s almost no flab in the script, every word simultaneously developing character and furthering the plot while also being entertaining.

Zing gets my attention, in a TV show or a movie or a book. Without it, my attention wanders a bit; I scrape a general sense of the story out of the mass of words used to tell it, but don’t engage on a moment-to-moment level. With it, I lose track of the world around me because I don’t want to miss anything in the tale. Zing makes me decide, before I’m two scenes into the first episode of a show, that I’ll give the second one a shot. Zing is what makes me plow through thousands of pages of Neal Stephenson making an utter hash of his plot, because he can describe a room in above a tavern on the seventeenth-century London Bridge in such riveting terms that I wind up reading it out loud twice, once to my husband and once to my sister.

I think this is what some people, when teaching the craft of writing, describe as “voice.” I’ve been known to rant about how I find that term completely unhelpful . . . but, well, here I am talking about “zing,” because my alternative is to wave my hands around in the air and make inarticulate noises. That thing. Over there. Do you see?

These days I’m reaching for it more in my own work, especially in one of the things I’m noodling around with right now. A character is hiding in a palace full of baroque decorations and complaining about the discomfort. There’s something jabbing into my back. No. There’s a carving jabbing into my back. No. There’s a gilded carving grinding into my kidney. Better. There’s a gilded figure of the South Wind imprinting itself on my left kidney. Better still.

Doing that for every sentence is exhausting. I have no idea how Stephenson keeps it up, especially while writing books that could double as foundation stones. But I suspect that, like many things in writing, after you’ve pushed at it for a while some parts of it just settle in as habit. I hope so, anyway, because I’m going to keep trying.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

I've lost my ability to concentrate.

I think a lot of us have. We live with countless electronic devices that are constantly demanding our attention, beeping alerts and notifications and even without that there's a little niggling part of our minds that wonders if we have any new email or anybody has posted something to that forum or surely we ought to take a look at Twitter, don't pay attention to that thing, pay attention to me. But only in bite-size doses, because there are a hundred other things you could be checking and probably should.

Even without that, we've got a society that encourages multi-tasking -- despite the mounting pile of evidence that it isn't good. Multi-tasking does not, contrary to what we've been told, make us more productive. It makes us less so, because we're devoting less of our attention to each thing, and we pay a cognitive cost every time we switch our focus. And part of that cognitive cost is that not switching gets harder, even as it drains us.

(True fact: just now, my phone rang a soft little alert. It's taking effort not to look and see what that was for.)

I can tell this is taking a toll on me because I can feel it in my work. Writing is not, in its ideal conditions, something you do for five minutes here and ten minutes there. It benefits from sustained attention, from getting myself into the state psychologists refer to as "flow," where I stop thinking about the world around me and instead sink into the zone for an extended period of time. I can't get there if I'm tabbing over to look at my email every time I pause to consider my next sentence, if I'm keeping a portion of my mind attached to the discussion I'm having on a forum or whatever and breaking away to update that. It's an exaggeration to say I've lost my ability to concentrate . . . but I know it has declined, and substantially so.

That's why I'm taking steps to fix it.

My steps are twofold, at least so far. The first is to get back to meditating: I got into the habit of doing that for a while in 2015 (true fact again: I made myself just drop some square brackets there and check the year after I finished typing this post, because I needed to check my email to find out which year it was, and that threatened to distract me from this), but I fell out of it after a while, and now I'm working to make it regular practice again. Meditation, mindfulness, learning to let go of all the little dancing monkey thoughts that want my attention NOW NOW NOW -- that helps.

The other, weirdly, is to watch TV.

TV as a tool of concentration? Yes -- when you put it in the context of what I was doing before. See, I've gotten into the bad habit of only really listening to TV, while I play solitaire or sudoku or something on my tablet. The result is that I only give the show maybe half my attention.

But when I started watching the Chinese drama Nirvana in Fire, the combination of subtitles + intricate politics meant I couldn't get away with that. If I tried to focus on something else at the same time, glancing up to catch the subtitles as they skittered past, I wound up not even knowing who half the people were and what was going on. The only way to understand that show, let alone appreciate it, was to put things down and devote my full attention to the screen.

Subtitled shows are great for this, but I'm managing to extend that habit to English-language TV, as well. And you know what?

I'm enjoying it more.

And it's getting easier to leave the tablet closed.

What other tricks do you all have for encouraging yourself to pay attention to one thing at a time? What helps you keep your ability to concentrate? I know some people shut down their internet connection entirely while writing, and there are lots of programs out there which exist to block other programs so you can work, but I'm also interested in the non-technological tricks -- the things that are just about structuring your life in ways that help you focus.

Those of you who were at Borderlands on Saturday already heard this; now I reveal it to the rest of the world.

Many people have pleaded for the Memoirs of Lady Trent to continue. I have always responded by saying the series was planned to be five books from the start, that I had a set arc in mind that I wanted to tell, and that having brought that to a close, I am done.

That’s still true.

. . . but it doesn’t preclude other stories in that world.

I don’t have a good working title for this yet, but my next novel will be the story of Isabella’s granddaughter, rapacious private art collectors, black market antiquities smugglers, and the translation of a lost epic from the Draconean civilization. The book will be structured like a mosaic novel, interspersing segments of the epic with the lives of the people translating it, as recorded in diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and more. So it will once again have the intellectual rigor of Lady Trent’s memoirs (this time aimed in a predominantly linguistic direction), the pulpy adventure of its time period (the antiquities market is a lot more colorful than you might think), and the meta-textual setup that lets the heroine’s voice come through so clearly. Plus, the epic will let me put on my folklorist hat with full panoply of ribbons and bells and run cackling down the streets make good use of my folklore background: my research right now consists of reading or re-reading the Mahabharata, Epic of Gilgamesh, Popol Vuh, and more.

This idea is literally less than two months old. At the Tucson Festival of Books in early March, someone asked me a question about other books set in the world of the Memoirs, and inspiration mugged me out of nowhere. Over the next couple of days it morphed around a bit until it arrived in this form, at which point I pitched it to my editor, saying, “I really think this is what I ought to be doing next.” She agreed, so here we are: setting a personal record for shortest time elapsed from “huh, there’s an idea” to “okay, let’s do this!”

So now you know. And now I need to go read the world’s collection of epics to gather material. 😀

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.