The unholy marriage of writing and blogging.

Photography: Luz A. Villa

I’ve been busy with the guest-posting, yes:

Four Important Lessons I Learned From Writing Serials over at Fumbling Fiction.

Photography: DerrickT

Writing fiction is hard. Bringing to life a series of manufactured events with pretend people in a world that only exists in your head—it’s a kind of mental origami that takes years to master.

Just about any beginning writer eventually figures that bit out. And figures out that they need to learn at least some of the basics somewhere. The net seems the perfect place. Doesn’t it? There are any number of web pages, blogs, and forums to read about this sort of stuff.

The problem is, much as I love the net, and much as there are great sites about writing, a writer needs more than that to grow quickly, so that their first stories will suck less and suck for a shorter period of time.

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Photography: neotint

Some of you may be wondering why updates to my various blogs stopped cold the first couple weeks this March (or even earlier). That’s because I participated in an SFF Online Writing Workshop Synopsis Focus Group, wonderfully administrated by Pen Hardy. Let me tell you: it was an intense 2-week experience, despite just being online.

And although I’m an unpublished peanut gallery idiot, I learned a ton of things and then some, mostly about what a synopsis is and what it isn’t.

And then the Internet Zeitgeist struck, and now synopses are a hot topic in the writing blogosphere. And I thought: ah well, might as well join in on the fun.

So here’s what I learned from OWW….

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Photography: tanakawho

Beginning a story is like planting a seed. The problem is that people want to see flowers.

And can you blame them? You’re competing with hundreds of other books out there. How can you convince people to stick around and watch your little seed grow?

Like beginnings, such a task is difficult. After all, it’s not like you even have buds yet, much less a stem or roots.

That’s why you need your seed to be interesting.

To that end, here are some basic Do’s and Don’ts.

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Photography: somma

Lately, there have been some amount of posts in the blogosphere about the art of writing query letters. One key point has been the hook.

If you can’t hook, you can’t survive. Merciless, but that’s writing for you. Luckily, there is help from Techniques of the Selling Writer: Swain’s “starting lineup.”

Is *very* simple. Idiots (like moi) can do it. Let’s look at an example.

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“Suddenly, you have doubts. Suddenly you question whether or not everything you’ve done has been one enormous, futile lie. If everything you sacrificed, you sacrificed for nothing.”
– Harry Dresden, Small Favor*

There’s something missing in the world. I believe that all pain is based on this inevitable self-discovery. We try to make sense of that missing hole, to fill that disturbing void in reality with meaning. By trying to make sense of the wrongness of the world, we create an ephemeral part of it. Is this writing? Or just philosophy?

Perhaps it’s both.

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Anyone can learn to write, but learning to write well is another matter.

Because writing is very much an art and not a science, people have a tendency to approach learning it with very strange ideas.

Strange Idea #1:

“Writers are born, not made, and words easily flow from the tip of their pens/output of their keyboard. All they write shall be as gold instantaneously and will sell like hotcakes in Siberia.”

Bull. Writers are not gods. Even if someone is born with a brain attuned to written communication and perhaps storytelling, writing is still hard.

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We writers go through great lengths to get ideas, because we know how hard it can be. Sometimes these can be physical, like cards. Here, I’m thinking tarot cards. This is the method I used over November when I had to come up with characters with differentiated personalities, quick.

If you’re uber-superstitious about the tarot, skip this article. For the rest of you, we’re going to talk about using a small part of the Tarot for character creation. This is a simple exercise, one I used in November for brainstorming characters.

My deck of choice for the purposes of generating fiction is the Quest Tarot.

The Tarot is split up into the following useful sections:

• Trumps: life-changing events, meetings, and influences, the “set pieces” of life;
• Minors: day-to-day events, meetings, and influences; and
• Court Cards: characteristics of people.

We’ll be using the court cards.

Remove the court cards, and look at them while reading their descriptions in the book–it helps to have picked a Tarot deck that comes with a nice hefty book explaining each card in detail, which the Quest Tarot does. Then assign a card to each character.

Here are some extra guides:

The personality of each court card is partly based on its rank and suit.

Each rank (King, Queen, Princess, Page, or whatever is available in your deck) carries different implications of age and force of personality. Note that gender does not necessarily have to match between character and card, nor do physical characteristics have to match.

Each suit (Swords, Cups, Pentacles, Wands, or whatever is available in your deck) is like a family, with similar characteristics carrying through its court cards. Families of characters, of course, can still spread across multiple suits.

Note that in many decks, cards have two readings: an upright, usually positive reading, and a reversed, somewhat opposite reading. You can pick and choose, using both positive and negative characteristics as a basis for a well-rounded character.

After you’ve picked out the card, then do some free-writing about your character, stream-of-consciousness brainstorming, turning off your inner editor completely.

That should help with the character ideas.

In a mystery series (murder, crime, medical, or otherwise), every story needs to start with a third party that hasn’t been seen before, and who will most likely never appear again. That’s true of many short stories as well, although it’s possible to “cheat” and have short stories really be a series.

And then you have the core of the mystery series, the detectives or doctors or whoever, who always appear, whose personal stories are long and cover multiple stories, intertwining with the temporary stories of their clients.

How do you make that combination work? It’s more complicated than simply having a core set of characters. Instead, you have a core set and another important set who’s part of the current story. You need to work two teams, the home team and the visitors.

And more importantly, the plot that involves the visitors–the introduction of the case and the solving of it–is the driving force of the book–the character moments in the home team are more or less a background rhythm, whether subtle or a rock beat, that’s what it is.

Which makes mysteries (and others of that ilk) really about short stories.

I tend to be a character-driven writer, not plot-driven. I’ll have to change my tack to be plot-driven as well, which isn’t my strength. But I must make it my strength.

I’m watching House, M.D. and trying to puzzle out how it’s done. I feel such sympathy for the characters who come on and off, even though they last but less than 30 minutes of screen time all told (but a most important half hour they are). And yet the character moments between the core characters are done, just right, enough to make them compelling from episode to episode.

It’s like studying magicians from a distance, trying to see the tricks they pull, when you’re strongly tempted to just sit back and enjoy the illusion with the rest of the audience, because the observation is difficult work.

Observing, observing… writing.

“Gorgeous women do not go to medical school. Unless they’re as damaged as they are beautiful. Were you abused by a family member?”

“No!”

“Sexually assaulted?”

“No.”

“But you are damaged, aren’t you?”

“… I have to go.”

– House and Cameron, House, M.D.

When we think of protagonists, the first word that comes to mind is hero. More than a word, actually; an archetype, universal and vast in its meaning. But what is that meaning? Taken at its everyday face value, a hero is “good”, which in turn means, in its simplest and most primal sense, someone who does the right things for the right reasons.

The idea of an unlikeable protagonist seems a hard idea to get over for some. How can you write tens of thousands of words about someone who’s an ass? How can you read hundreds of thousands of words, watch hundreds of hours of shows, when the central character is a jerk?

How can they be legitimate heroes? How can they have readers or watchers? Isn’t that somehow… wrong?

Ah, but heroes were never “good”. Not even in the blandest of mythologies, not even in the most hero-worshipping religions.

Heroes are different.

They are above and beyond the common man. They are the crazy people: the ones who have the strength and the will to walk down that dark and twisting path that Campbell calls The Hero’s Journey.

It’s by no means any easy feat.

You only start down that path with damage, and every step of the way burdens you with more damage, and in the end that damage stays with you–even if you don’t die. Wisdom at the end of the journey is contextualized as the idea of straddling the two worlds, but that’s really a euphemism for damage: a self split between two incompatible worlds, irreversibly rent.

And is it not so that wisdom is only gained through hardship–gained through damage?

When we look at successful unlikeable characters, in particular the ones around which circulate the adulation–if not admiration–of sizable audiences, what we are looking at is a human fascination with damage, the ability to survive it, and the strength to manage to give the world more than what was taken in the first place.

Being nice comes nowhere near it. Giving the world what it needs, rather than what it wants, in fact is often considered not very nice.

Why be fascinated with these damaged souls?

As human beings, whether we think of ourselves as heroic or not, we acquire damage throughout life. We know that damage does not usually leave us with beatific smiles, immeasurable patiences, nor guileless innocence.

Should we think we’re weak because we let damage get to us?

No. Even retreating into a halo of virtue means that damage has struck upon our soul, caused us to change, stirred the mercurial temper of our beings–left an indelible mark on our hearts. We are never pure after we are damaged.

The damaged hero is a human one.

Gods save us from undamaged heroes.

“… you knew he was dying when you married him. Must have been when you first met him. And you married him anyway. You can’t be that good a person and well adjusted.”

“Why?”

“Because you wind up crying over centrifuges.”

“Or hating people.”