Living the Fictional Dream

I’ve been reading a series recently that, despite having intriguing characteres and a well-drawn fantasy world, repeatedly commits what I consider a big sin for an author — leaving emotional moments out of the story.

The author has such an engaging voice and conceives such good characters, I don’t know why she keeps making this misstep. I’ll be reading along in the story, and she’ll start building up a dramatic moment or event. In the most recent book, basically one of the main female characters had to participate in a magic spell. The spell would kill her — something that had to be done to achieve the end result they needed — but someone would be standing by with another spell to (hopefully) revive her afterwards.

You can probably tell just by my description that such a moment should have been pivotal. It’s the potential death of a major character — talk about a moment rife with drama. The idea of this spell was mentioned in the second-to-last book of the series, and when the character’s husband heard about it, he lashed out at the messenger and then nearly died himself because the messenger had a magic mirror that reflected the blow back on the caster. For the rest of that book and the beginning of the last book, the other characters utilize all this effort convincing the husband that there is no other choice and this risk is their only option. Either his wife is killed to save the rest of them and possibly revived, or all eight brothers and their wives die.

Finally, the husband is convinced. Then we spend pages getting more detail than I personally needed about the mechanics of the magic involved and what would happen. Then there is a scene break, and the beginning of the next scene starts after the spell has been cast and the wife has been revived without a single hitch.

… WTF? …

Talk about feeling cheated! I endured all that set up — some interesting, but some, frankly, a little boring — and then I don’t even get to see the moment of truth? What happened? How did the husband react when his wife was dead? Was there any moment when it seemed as if she would not be revived in time?

And this is not the only time that this author has committed this sin of omission. She doesn’t do it with every emotion-packed moment, but several times throughout the series she had the chance to write a very impactful scene, a scene that she’d been building up to for a while, and then just doesn’t write it. Instead, she skips over it to the happy conclusion and moves on to the next plot point.

As a reader, I feel cheated. As a writer, it amazes me that the author of this series is willing to skip these moments. The climax may be a challenge to write, but it’s the big pay out. It’s why we’re all there? Why would you ever want to skip it, when that’s the moment that affects your characters the most?

Perhaps its an offshoot of a problem that I sometimes have in my writing — being too easy on my characters. My characters are my babies — I created them out of nothing and I want the best for them. Sometimes it’s hard to hurt them and so I wuss out (when I do, though, my sister and my writing group mates always call me on it!). Maybe this author has the same problem and just can’t always manage to write about the dramatic/bad/hard stuff that happens to her characters?

In this instance, I enjoyed the world enough that I was a forgiving reader and kept going, despite my dissatisfaction with this tendency. However, if I’d been busier at the time or had other books that I wanted to read, I would have been more likely to drop this series and move on to the next one.

As a writer, you can’t guarantee that readers are going to forgive such a faux pas. Instead, the writer needs to do their utmost to keep the reader immersed in the fictional dream — don’t let them escape until you’re done with your story, and you have a much better chance that the readers will keep coming back for more.

Last night, I woke up several times (not unusual — pregnancy is heck on the middle of the night bathroom runs — preparation for midnight feedings, perhaps?), and as I crawled back into bed and tried to coax sleep back into the room, I started imagining a story. The opening scene is there, fully formed, in my mind. I was too tired to get up and type it out last night (plus, my laptop battery was low), but I still remember it in detail this morning.

I will have to work on it on my lunch break today or maybe tonight when I get home. I need to get that opening written down before it eludes me.

Of course, once the opening is written, then I’ll actually have to figure out a plot for this story. I have a character, a setting, and a genre, but I’m not sure why in the world this girl is doing what she’s doing.

Isn’t writing fun?

I recently sat down with my husband and watched all of the Lost episodes that have aired this season. This show is quite the conundrum — both from a viewer’s perspective and from a writing perspective.

A lot of people gave up on the show in seasons 2 and 3, when it had a bit of a downturn. I still thought the episodes were good, but (to me) it just started to feel like the writers didn’t know where the heck they were going. However, I still enjoyed watching, so I stuck with it and was rewarded by the second (and longer) half of season 3 and all of season 4, which I thought were excellent. To me, season 5, so far, has lived up to its promise. I think that the secret was the creators of the show making a deal with the network so they knew in advance how many seasons/episodes they were going to make. Ever since that point the show seems to have purpose and direction.

Lost is, of course, fairly famous for ponderous plot twists that seem to go nowhere. Look at the tailies from season 2 — we spent all this time with them, and now all of them are dead except for Bernard. What was the point, then?

And look at Walt. In season 1, he was quite a fixture, and the way that his mind seemed to control the world around him was fascinating (OMGWTFPolarBear, anyone?). And then he disappeared, only to be briefly seen in cameos hence forth (luckily, the show is now 3 years later than it was, so in this season’s cameo, it was OK that the kid is tall now). And there were other things, too. I won’t go to the trouble of listing them all out here.

I think the point that a writer should take away from all this is that you have to be careful of rabbit trails and loose ends. They just frustrate the reader/viewer and turn them off of your concept. I think if the Lost writers had had a clearer vision of the end game from the beginning, we would have had a much more satisfying journey through their world, sans loose ends. From a novel perspective, these are the kinds of things that happen in a first draft — then you get people to critique your work and weed all the unnecessary stuff out on the second draft.

I also know some people who feel like Lost has gone too far out there. They were OK with smoke monsters and random polar bears, but huge initiatives with compounds on the island and time travel? That was too much for them. Personally, I’m a genre nut to the core, so I can suspend my disbelief. I haven’t been bothered on that account.

Whatever your criticisms about Lost, they do a lot of things right, too. Their story-telling is compelling and the whole story is so detailed that it amazes me. You see an actor who had one or two lines in season 1 and he comes back in season 5 with a mysterious agenda. Characters who seem unrelated turn out to cross paths in many mysterious ways. A throw-away line of dialog in one episode, turns out to be of great importance later on.

And then there are the characters. Sure, the show isn’t all perfect (I still hate how they maligned poor Charlie!), but other characters are written spot on. And I love the story-telling technique that uses flash backs and flash forwards to flesh out the character while giving impact to whatever plot is currently going on in the present day.

As a writer, some of the lessons I take away from the good elements of Lost are (1) give characters a detailed backstory and use what you can to enhance the story (but don’t over use — just because you know what your character ate for lunch every day in middle school, don’t tell us unless it affects the current story), (2) pay close attention to your plots — an intricately plotted story that works is much more fascinating that a story with a lack of plot or plot details that contradict each other, and (3) following on number 2, be consistent — know those small details and bring them back to make the world feel more real and distinct.

As a viewer, though, there is one worry that I have regarding Lost. I want the ending to be worth it. After all these years of build up, wrong turns, recoveries, and plot twists, the ending pretty much has to be spectacular to satisfy the viewers and to pull the story together. Now, I don’t want the writers to simply pander to viewers — I want them to stay true to their vision and give us the real story. But, after all this, expectations are high, so it has to be spot on. And that can be a problem in the land of television. No one can please everyone — but, keep in mind, that just because you’re not pleased or it wasn’t what you wanted, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good story.

The problem is, if the ending doesn’t work, then it will basically cast everything that came before in a negative light. We’ll all be thinking, “Why did I invest six years in this show and put up with all the twists and turns if this is what I got for it?”

Hopefully, though, we will at least be able to remember that, no matter what, Lost was a fun, exciting ride. And the journey is the thing — especially in television.

While on vacation in Sedona, I read two novels by Karen Macinerney — her “tales of an urban werewolf,” Howling at the Moon and On the Prowl. This series is about a werewolf named Sophie Garou who lives in Austin, Texas. Sophie has lived all of her life trying to keep her “hairy problem” a secret from everyone she knows, and juggling her normal life as an auditor with wolfsbane tea and a mother who owns a magic shop and is a little psychic.

Overall, I enjoyed these books (thanks to writing group mate Sandra who loaned them to me!). They are fun urban fantasies with a strong female character. There are also charsimatic male characters (including a male werewolf named Tom and Sophie’s human boyfriend, Heath), and interesting supporting cast, like Sophie’s witch mom and her best friend Lindsey.

One facet of these novels is a mystery that has to be solved by the end of the installment. I wouldn’t call them mystery novels — the urban fantasy is much stronger with these stories as far as genre goes — but the mystery is there as a supporting element. Especially in the first book of the series.

In Howling at the Moon, Sophie’s mother is accused of murder, and she has to figure out who really did the dastardly deed. By the end of the novel, we have a suspect in hand, thanks to Sophie and Lindsey’s sleuthing, so it should be case closed. And it is, as far as the mystery goes.

However, at the end of the novel, I was unsatisfied with the conclusion of said mystery. We did meet the murderer earlier in the story, so it wasn’t completely out of nowhere, but said murderer was never on the list of possible suspects. Not even a tiny blip on the suspect radar. The only reason Sophie is tipped in the right direction was because she stumbled upon something magical, and her mother, who didn’t use that kind  of magic, sent Sophie to a different magic shop to find information. It just randomly happened that the magic shop Sophie visited happened to be run by a relative of the murderer.

The whole thing felt very random and happenstance. If Sophie had gone to any other magic shop in the whole city, she wouldn’t have been able to solve the mystery.

I think the mystery would have had a more satisfying conclusion if the muderer had been on the short list of suspects in the first place. As it was, Sophie spends a lot of time running about after suspects who are all red herrings, and even when the murder victim gives them a clue from his ghostly state, the clue turns out to be bunk — unrelated to his actual death.

I don’t want to be too harsh on the books, because I thought they were an enjoyable read, but my issues with the mystery in book one started me thinking about how mysteries are not a plot element that you can toss into a story willy-nilly. To make a mystery truly satisfying to the reader, you have to do the work. A twist ending is only awesome if, once you get the twist, it shows the whole rest of the novel in another light. All the clues have to be in place. A mystery is not satisfying if it comes out of left field.

I’m sure that question has been plaguing all my loyal readers. Assuming I have any left!

Between holiday house guests, crazy vacation schedules, too many big work projects, and one of those colds that burrows into your lungs and refuses to leave, writing has not been high on my to-do list lately. I think my muse went to Aruba for the winter, and took all my good ideas with her!

However, at today’s Writer’s Ink meeting, I signed up to submit a story for critique at the next meeting, so hopefully that will spur something remotely resembling fiction out of me. Our annual collection theme this year is “Genre Collision,” so we all have to write a story this year that combines or somehow smooshes at least two genres — or as many genres as we want, really.

I have a story I’ve been tinkering with for a while. It’s set in my sci-fi universe where there are five self-sustaining human colonies on the moon. I tried to write this story back when the “Return to Luna” anthology was soliciting, but I couldn’t get the plot to turn out right. I tried two different moon colony stories, and while I really liked the world that I built, I had issues with the plot in both stories. However, I hope that I have reached a turning point with one of them. And if not, heck, I’ll send it into my writing group any way — they are great at helping ferret out a problem with a story and brainstorming ideas on how to fix it!

As far as colliding genres go, I hope that this story will end up as a space western. We’ll see. Thus far, the western elements are a lot lighter than the sci-fi elements, but there’s a wandering stranger, a woman who seems helpless, a dog, a farm… I see a bit of western in all that.

Hopefully, now that the holiday obligations are over and the walking crud is slowly but surely releasing its death grip on my lungs, I’ll be able to resume my more regular posting schedule. I actually have a few topics in mind that I’ve wanted to write about lately, which is a step in the right direction! I got a thought-provoking rejection letter the other day, and I’m interested to know what other people think of it. Maybe that will be my next post!

I hope all of y’all out there in blog land are doing well. I will try to resume my normal blog reading soon, too. If I could comment on Blogger blogs from the office, I would even start that today. Sadly, I’ll have to wait on that until I get home.

Oh, and something else to leave you with — my flash piece, “The Care and Feeding of Your Sleeping Knight,” will be up on Every Day Fiction later this week. I’ll post here when it’s live! I’m looking forward to that.

I am cursed with stories that have good beginnings but never go anywhere. This happens to me all the time. I will get an idea for a character, a background scenario, a setting, or a combination thereof, and I’ll sit down to write. The first scene will come out beautifully — the situation seems interesting, the characters intriguing, hints of dire things to come — but the middle and end turn out flat. The plot doesn’t hold up, and the whole thing crashes and burns.

Sometimes, I can go back and salvage the ending with a lot of work. And sometimes, my muse takes a holiday and nothing ever comes of it.

One of my biggest failings, which falls into this larger issue of good beginnings and bad endings, is that many times my characters are reactive instead of proactive. They may have a larger goal, but the things that happen to them aren’t necessarily about that goal — at least not on a personal level. Instead, stuff happens to them that isn’t of their own choosing, and they react to it.

Once I wrote a story about a girl who met a sea dragon. She had a companion who was a sand wolf. I really liked these three characters. There was a whole adventure where they tried to sail to an island, and the sea dragon saved them from a sea monster. It was very exciting. But, in the end, there wasn’t really a theme to the piece. Stuff happened, people reacted, and then the story was over. I’ve fiddled with that story several times since, but I never can figure out what the main character’s motivation is, what it is she has to do.

I’ve been trying to work on the reactive/proactive thing. I think I’ve gotten better just because now I realize that tendency in my writing and work to eliminate it, but sometimes my characters fall back into their old reactive ways.

I’ve finally felt like writing again now that NaNo and that big work project are over. I’ve had a few ideas glimmering in the back of my mind, but they are more concepts than plots, and no good plots have come along for the ride.

This morning, I pulled out a story that I wrote for my writing group’s “Story Every Day” contest last summer. My goal had been to write something sci-fi that I could submit to the “Return to Luna” anthology, but this story fell into that same trap — the beginning was good, the characters interesting, but the plot fell apart at the end. It was cliched and somewhat trite.

Now I’m working on this story again, and the beginning has polished up really nicely. I just have to get some work done on the actual plot. I have to figure out what bad thing my protagonist did or will do and how it will affect him and the woman who’s helping him out. Seems like a tall order, but it’s been fun to get back into a story again (one that’s not in the ‘verse of my NaNo novel!).

So, what about you writer’s out there? Do you ever have this problem? Do you keep fiddling and fiddling with that great beginning until it becomes something marketable, or do you toss it down and look for the next good idea, which will hopefully have a better plot. What do you think about making characters proactive?

In other news, I got my copy of the EDF anthology in the mail last night. The hardback edition is really gorgeous!

The NaNoing is still going well. I’ve actually been on quota or ahead for most of this week. It’s been a new and crazy feeling for me. I’m usually behind all month, and then pull it out with 7K weekends/holidays at the end of the month. It’s been fairly exciting to be ahead of the game. It sure would be nice to win one of those gift cards my writing group is awarding to the first two members to 25K.

Today I am slightly behind quota again. Wednesdays just are not conducive to writing time, what with watching kids in the church nursery. I don’t get home until way after 9 p.m. most Wednesdays, and I’m way too tired to do much more than watch TV or read. However, with today’s double-header write-ins (lunch and dinner), I think I’ll have no trouble catching back up, or at least getting close.

I’m still liking where my novel is going, but I’ve hit another rough patch. There are plot elements that I know need to happen, but we need some character development between here and there. For some reason, that has been difficult to push through. I’m not sure my characters are ringing quite true enough… But that’s what revisions are for! It’s weird, though — usually I’m all about character development and not about plot. This is a switch.

I’m also coming to terms with the fact that I don’t really write polished first drafts. I wish I did. Some people really do, which makes me jealous. I’ve critted a lot of first drafts that, while still needing a light polish, are really well put together. I have to get the whole glut of words down on the page, work the story down that way. When I’m in the midst of the flush of muse, I can’t stop to worry about if I used the word “looked” when I could have used something more interesting like “glared” or “glanced,” if I told instead of showed, etc. If I stop to do all that, I’ll never finish the story. The stories I send to my writing group are usually at least the second draft, if not the third.

But, all writers are different, and I do like my finished product — it’s starting to make sense to me why I’ve not yet completed a novel revision, though. With such a lengthy revision process, it’s so much more satisfying to stick to the short stories. I can actually get them finished in a timely fashion.

My hope is, though, that this novel won’t require a total rewrite like my other two do. If the plot works and all it needs is good smoothing out, maybe actually finishing novel revisions is something I can do this time!

I think that the line between a story that’s cliche and a story that breathes new life into an old trope can be very fine indeed. Sometimes, I think that the line is more in the head of the reader than anything else. Of course, the writer has to do his or her part. You’ve got to give that old idea new trappings, new characters and settings to make it interesting again. A new twist on the plot, if you can think of one, is good, too.

But, sometimes, there’s nary a new twist to be found. After all, there are a finite number of plots out there — depending on who you listen to, it’s 10 or 12 or maybe 36. You can boil so many radically different stories down to “man vs. man” or “man vs. machine,” etc. The thing that makes them stand out is how the writer told the story.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because of two stories that I submitted to Every Day Fiction. One was a ghost story, and it was rejected for being too cliche. The other was my recent acceptance, “A Million Faces.” The acceptance email actually said that they felt I’d breathed new life into an old trope, which was really nice to hear. I’m really excited about sharing that story with the world — I had fun writing it, and I felt like I really connected with the main character.

But I wonder what it was that made AMF work, while my ghost story still languishes without a home?

I started thinking, maybe I, as a reader, am too close to the ghost story. The stories that spook me the most are ghost stories. Hack-em-up stories gross me out, but they don’t really scare me. Ghosts, however… whew! I still think the pilot episode of the show Supernatural, which dealt with plenty of ghosts, was the scariest one they ever did — followed by all the other ghost stories. The ones about various earth-bound monsters or demons… still interesting, but not as much with the creepy chill factor.

I was never a big fan of The Sixth Sense, but I think that’s because it was built up to me way too much. I didn’t see it until DVD, so by that point, after all the hype, it would have had to be a much more impressive film for me to be blown away. I did think the twist was cool, though. The movie The Others, however, was totally creepifying to me! And there was the other movie that I saw where a guy had this whole life on an estate with a wealthy, eccentric family, and at the end it turned out that the estate was a crumbling ruin and they’d been ghosts all along. That one totally freaked me out, too — though, sadly, I have totally forgotten the name of the film.

So, maybe because ghost stories really affect me as a reader/viewer, it’s harder for me to write one with some distance? Maybe what seems cliche to other people, doesn’t feel that way to me because I still enjoy that trope?

I don’t know if that’s the case, but it would make sense… I struggle with the same thing in my urban fantasy stories. I love stories about vampires, werewolves, etc., in all their forms. I like the classic stories, but I like the ones that twist the myths, as well. To me, it’s about the characters and what they do with these ideas — it doesn’t bother me if the vampire has a reflection or not or if the werewolf can only change on the full moon or has full control of the shifting abilities. The creature’s abilities and flaws are tools that help the writer tell the story they want to tell with their unique set of characters.

But, I’ve gotten rejections on my urban fantasy stories because the editors of that publication felt the stories didn’t do anything unexpected enough.

On the flip side, I absolutely hated the novel Eragon. I couldn’t even get through it. It felt too cliched, and I didn’t like the writing style. I’ve always loved stories about dragons, but I didn’t feel like this one gave me anything new to hold onto. In addition, the characters were achingly flat. So, not only was there no new twist, but there were no characters to really get behind or get involved with.

But, I’m definitely in the minority on that one, if the way the novels are selling are any indication. I even had some friends who read the book say that, yes, they thought it was derivative of basically every fantasy epic in recent history (everything from Tolkien to Star Wars), but they still enjoyed reading it. And, heck, they made Eragon into a major motion picture, so a lot of people out there have to like it.

In the end, I think luck continues to play a big role. Write a good story — the story that you want to write, not the one you think the market wants you to write — and then send it out. Sure, you may get rejections if the editors feel that you didn’t twist the trope into something new enough. But, there is probably someone out there who will get your story and who will love your voice enough to publish it. It’s the idea of the right story, in front of the right person, at the right time.

I want to write a sequel to “The Widow and the Stranger” (Allegory e-zine, May 2008 issue). I love Sarah Kirby, and I want to write about another of her adventures. I like that she’s reserved and old fashioned, but at the same time she’s a liberated feminist.

When my writing group did the Story Every Day contest back in June, I actually wrote a sequel to tWatS, but it was too much of a sequel. It relied heavily on background that someone would only know if they read the first one. One of Jadon’s enemies tried to steal the amulet that he made for Sarah in an attempt to find him.

Sadly, while that might be interesting if I ever wrote a novel about Sarah and her Atlantians, it wasn’t going to work for a short story. Maybe if the same e-zine published it, but you can’t count on that. And even still, in the short story game, each story really needs to stand on its own. The characters can have more adventures, but they shouldn’t have continuing adventures (unless you’re lucky enough to have the chance to publish a short story collection like Mercedes Lackey’s Tarma and Kethry stories or perhaps if you have a market that’s committed to publishing them all).

Recently, I wrote a few paragraphs of the next Sarah Kirby story. The title popped into my head fully formed, and I actually kind of like it — “The Widow and the Lord” — it stands on it’s own, and yet it still harkens back to the predecessor for those “in the know.”

Sadly, that’s as far as it’s gone. I have a good setting and a new character for Sarah to interact with (and bring her common sense business acumen to), but I have no plot! Don’t you hate that? Great concept/idea/character, and no plot. I know that romance is the wrong way to go — Sarah had enough of that last time, and she’s not a woman who opens herself up that easily. So, I need a plot with a speculative twist to involve Sarah in the life of this lord. I want her to somehow save the day this time in a decisive way. But… how? Nothing is coming to mind.

Ah well… I guess I will just have to let “The Widow and the Lord” linger for a while. Perhaps one day, out of the blue, the plot will come to me like the title did. It’s strange, though. Usually I suffer through the title creation process. I never start with a title! Weirdness!

My week has been balanced out writing-wise. I got two rejections (one from the market that had passed my story to round 2 **sighs**), but then yesterday I had a story accepted by Every Day Fiction. This will be my second with them, so I’m excited! I’ll post the link here when it comes out — I don’t know the date yet.

So, to continue on my topic from yesterday, plots or types of stories that I don’t like, I thought I would put together a few thoughts about plots that I do like. Everyone probably has these… those story premises that suck you in every time. Sometimes, I think of these as guilty pleasure stories, because I usually enjoy them even if the writing isn’t top notch.

One of these for me is the story where two people pretend to be a couple for some at least slightly nefarious purpose and then actually fall in love during the con. One example of that is the movie Drive Me Crazy, and it’s a teen movie, too, so it has that Y/A factor that I love. But this concept has been done all over the place — in books, TV shows, etc. — and I always love it! The thing is, though it’s a simple concept, there are millions of ways it can be done. Just because, boiled down, the premise is the same, each story is totally different.

Vampire and werewolf fiction is another one for me. I love the urban fantasy/supernatural feel to these creatures. I love that they are human and “other” at the same time. I like them with the traditional tropes (silver bullets, wooden stakes, no reflection), and I love it when writers give them their own twist (like the werewolves in Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld and the vampires in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight). I used to devour these any time I found them because they were rare. With the current urban fantasy explosion, there are a lot more to pick and choose from, which is great, because I can always find something new to read.

I also love it when two characters who seem to be diametrically opposed (by a point of view, by temperment, by class, by family, whatever) form a really strong relationship. Romantic relationships of this sort abound — think Veronica/Logan on Veronica Mars, the main couple in Pretty in Pink, or even Romeo and Juliet (though, I prefer the ones that end more happily!). But the relationship doesn’t always have to be a romance. A friendship that opposes these lines can be just as fascinating. In this story, it’s all about the depth of the relationship, the connections forged, the sacrifices made, and the ways the characters’ eyes are opened.

I’m also a sucker for a story about a scoundrel/rebel. A character who lives his/her life in shades of gray is inherently more interesting than a black-and-white hero. Give me the Han Solos (Star Wars), the Mals (Firefly), the Deans (Supernatural), the Sawyers (Lost), the Faiths (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the Jos (Little Women), and the Dr. Horribles (Dr. Horrible, of course) any day! I like to see the struggle between right and wrong, and when they choose the right thing over the selfish thing, the reward is so much sweeter. These characters might think they have it easy, but in reality they struggle more than any of the more black-and-white versions.

If I thought for a while, I’m sure I’d come up with more tropes/stories/plots that I have a weakness for, but that’s probably a long enough list for now. What about y’all? What concepts have you buying the book/turning on the TV without knowing anything else about the end product?