Voice/fresh way of seeing/ new novel arrives

Seeing Your Fiction

I think this has to do with the author’s vision. Whatever your skills with the various aspects of writing a novel, whatever your talents, you have a unique way of looking at the world. Everyone does. If you can imbue your work with the unique vision, find the voice for it, then you’ve done something. Something for you. Something for the person reading. I think this has to do with the strong VOICE that every editor and agent says they're looking for.

I know when I start reading certain books I feel an immediate rapport with the voice of the novel, an immediate interest, because it feels authentic. I get really excited if it also feels different. Your way of seeing the world is what makes your writing yours.

So all the talk about craft and all the various aspects of writing fiction and yadda yadda yadda—all important but the writer needs to put himself/herself into the work. That fresh way of seeing the world is so important and so hard to do.

Or so I think today.

AND

here's a link about seeing the world in a fresh way by an author, Boyd Morrison,  who recently got a puppy and observes that the way the puppy engages with the world reminds him  he wants to create this same emotional enthusiasm in his fiction. I'd say it's kin to the sensual experience of the fictional world  that Robert Olen Butler talks about in his excellent, FROM WHERE WE DREAM.

http://killzoneauthors.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-puppy-world-view.html#.Ug52eOCf_zI

AND here's also a picture (OK, I admit I'm a crappy photographer but...) of my new novel coming out Sept. 10--just got an early copy.

formulas in fiction

Some thoughts on writing using formulas from Nathan B. with some links to more thoughts on using formulas and a blog I wrote about formula.

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2013/08/storytelling-is-getting-formulaic-this.html

forget the formula

Bad Writing Advice #9: Write using a formula.

There are a lot of people out there who have story formulas they're trying to sell. And maybe they do work for some though I don't personally know any writer they work for. In most cases, I don't believe they work because writing is an organic act. You make a story come to life. Having to do X by page 49 and Y by page 61 and so on strangles the life out of your writing. This is not to say a writer shouldn't outline. Some do very well with an outline. It's not to say a writer can't plot and plan, but adherence to any formula throughout a manuscript robs it of the kind of spontaneity it needs to come to life.

You need, as a writer, to come upon surprises while you write and engage in those surprises in a way that they lead you to interesting shifts in story and character. You have to get down deep in yourself when you're writing and make connections between all the elements in your story. This requires intuitive leaps. Forget the formula.

Or so I think today.

Writers: Struggling With Rejection

Every writer knows rejection way too well. We all have to learn to deal with it. Sometimes the rejectors get it wrong. The NYT article below gives some good examples. I think sometimes rejection is just part of the process of improving your work. For most of us, it takes years of writing, revising, learning to find our writing way. In this blog entry, I wrote a little about being stubborn and give some  examples of famous work that was rejected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/opinion/47-rejections-then-the-booker-long-list.html?src=recg&_r=0

AND MORE ON REJECTION FROM ME

You have to be stubborn to be a writer. You have to be stubborn with the work itself and you have to be stubborn to keep going in the face of compelling reasons not to write at all, let alone try to make a career out of writing.

One of the first things you have to be stubborn about is rejection. Every writer deals with it. Some have fewer rejections than others, it’s true, but with rare exceptions, writers will have a unpleasantly large collection of rejections. And each rejection is, at best, a thorn that you have to pull out of your side. On a bad day a rejection will be worse; it may become the voice that says, “You’re not good enough. You’ll never be good enough.”

So you let the voice have it’s say and you try to go on and if you can’t go on right away then you do something else for a short time. But you have to shut the voice up and remind yourself that the voice is you. A rejection of a story or novel is just saying that one person on that day can’t publish your work. It’s one opinion by someone who can choose very few pieces to publish. It’s not a rejection of you was a writer; it’s a rejection of one piece you’ve written. There’s plenty more where that came from. If you’re a writer, you have or will write many works of fiction. So let me just say it again. They are not rejecting you as a writer. Only you can do that.

And they’re fricken wrong a lot of the time. Here are just a few, a very few, examples.

William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES –20 publisher rejections

JK Rowling’s first Harry book—dozens of publishers passed (they cry themselves to sleep many nights)

Heller’s CATCH 22—many rejections

Madeleine L. Engle’s A WRINKLE IN TIME—29 rejections

Stephen King’s first novel, CARRIE—dozens of rejections

Ursula K. Le Guin, George Orwell, William Faulkner, John LeCarre --all had rejections for great novels.

Using metaphor in speculative fiction

      One thing I love about writing speculative fiction is you can amplify an aspect of the real world and it becomes metaphor. In my novel, Alien Invasion & Other Inconveniences, I was trying to use an alien invasion to explore ideas about corporate greed and colonialism and power and what happens when a much more powerful civilization meets a weaker one. We know, from our own past, what often happens. This time all of earth is on the short end of that stick. OK, I want to tell a story, too, and make the language sing and make interesting characters, but the metaphor—the power of comparison and the various shades of mythical memory they can inspire—opened up many opportunities.

     The sequel of my alien duology is Homicidal Aliens & Other Inconveniences. This one plays more with myth, trying to use ideas of the “hero” to give the story  and main character more emotional depth.

     In Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series one of the evil characters can actually change the way people think. It’s his grace. Of course we see this kind of influence all the time--sometimes in the minor way of a dynamic speaker and sometimes in the more extreme way such as cult leaders like Manson and political tyrants like Hitler etc… She amplifies this kind of characteristic and uses the metaphor to give the story and character deeper value.

     I think fantasy and sci-fi often are situational stories. There are great opportunities to use metaphor in any story but particularly in speculative fiction.

We'd all have to be exactly the same size to see eye-to-eye: making characters distinct

If we all saw everything the same it would be kind of a boring world. In fiction, if our characters all see things the same, well, it’s kind of  boring.

People are different. That’s the beauty and tragedy and mystery and frustration etc…of people. When I’m writing, I sometimes find that my characters start to sound too alike-- or maybe just two of them who I identify with most closely with sound alike. This is not good. Characters need to sound distinct and be distinct. This means not just what they do and how they do it but how they sound when they think and talk.

I struggle with this sometimes. I suppose most writers do. One way to help make your characters more distinct is to focus on their flaws. If your characters don’t have flaws, then that’s a problem too. Most likely they’ll have different flaws, and if they do this might help you make them more distinct. Along these same lines you might think of one sort of major flaw of a character to help you develop that character.

At any rate, characters are not the same size and they should each see the world a little or a lot differently.

Create the story from the inside out

How do you turn on the light? Because that’s one way to look at writing. You have to turn on the light in your fiction. You have to bring your world and story out of the darkness and into the light.

There’s a lot to the question though. The answer would have to cover all the aspects of craft and the somewhat less definable aspects beyond craft. It’s kind of like saying “how do you write a novel?” There are many many answers for that. You can say one sentence at a time but how much does that help? You can  say focus on the characters but…that’s only part of the story. There are so many things you have to do at once without thinking (while thinking a lot) in order to write a novel.

Bradbury says get out of the way. Let your intuition take over. I do think that sometimes you have to do just that. Let yourself be the story, be the characters, and the light will come on. By this I mean see what’s happening through your character’s eyes. Let the light come from that. Move with the character, think with the character, respond to the plot and setting with the character. Create the story from the inside out.

Why It's So Hard to Go From Last to First Draft

            When you’re writing final draft you’re crafting sentences, refining scenes, tweaking characters, sometimes tightening structure. It’s all about refinement. You’re living in your novel by that point. You’re comfortable. You’re excited. Each change seems to help. You know what you’re doing.

            Now, of course, you may be wrong. Writers delude themselves all the time. We need this delusion to keep writing. We need to believe we’re writing something well. But whether you’re right about the feeling or not, those final moments of the final draft are pleasant. You’ve made it to your destination or close. Not as perfect as you imagined it. Never that. It was always a bit better in your imagination than you could do.

            Still—not bad.

            And then a day or week or whatever later you start the next novel. And it’s a bloody mess. Did you ever really know how to write a novel? How could you possibly have finished one in the first place? You know nothing. You can’t even write a decent sentence or if you do write one the next one sucks. Characters are as thin as a paper. And where are you going? You’re wandering like a drunk failing a sobriety test. You think, Lock me up, please! Get me away from this!

            BUT “this” was how you began the last novel, too. Writing in the dark, stumbling and fumbling about, trying to find your way. One of the reasons it’s so hard to go from the last stages of a novel to the first stages of the next is the memory of those last stages is clearest in our minds. You yearn, if you’re like me, for the relative clarity and precision of the last work when you were at the last of it. But you have to put that out of your mind. Writing a first draft is a different experience. It has other pleasures, like the pleasures of discovery. Enjoy those. There will be plenty of time for all the refinements later.