Author Archives: David Carrico

About David Carrico

David is a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. He has been writing since 1977, but made his first sale in 2004. Most of his work has been written in Eric Flint's Ring of Fire universe, and has either appeared in The Grantville Gazette electronic magazine (http://grantvillegazette.com) or in the anthologies Grantville Gazette III, Grantville Gazette IV, Ring of Fire II, Grantville Gazette V, and the forthcoming Grantville Gazette VI and Ring of Fire III.

Anatomy of a Collaboration

Craft & Skills The Writing Process 5 Comments

I recently passed a milestone in my professional career as a writer.  I collaborated on a novel with Eric Flint, and the manuscript (well, the Word file) was just turned in to the publisher (Baen).  Unless the publisher changes the title, it should see print as 1636: The Devil’s Opera.  I’ve made professional level sales of several shorter works, but that’s the first full length novel (165,000 + words) that will come out with my name on it, second billing though it will be.  To say I’m somewhat exhilarated about this event would be a serious understatement.

When will it come out?  I don’t know for sure; possibly in late 2013, more likely in 2014.  There will be both a hard copy edition and an e-book edition from Baen.

What’s it about?  Well, there isn’t a short answer to that.  It’s a new alternate history story in the series that began with 1632, the first novel in the Ring of Fire series.  There are over five million words in print in that series right now, between the novels and the anthologies and the Grantville Gazette e-magazine issues, all dealing with how approximately 3000 residents of a blue-collar West Virginia town survive and thrive when they somehow get dumped back in 1631 Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War.  This is just another episode in that extended story.  Most of the novels in the series roam all over Western and Central Europe:  large canvases, in other words, with correspondingly large time frames.  1636: The Devil’s Opera will be somewhat unique, in that it’s focused in a single location-the German city of Magdeburg-and it only covers a time frame of maybe four months.  And there’s something in it for everyone:  murder, music, boxing, financial irregularities, taverns and dives, tragedy, guns, humor, skullduggery and skullthumpery, more music, police procedural, a dog . . . oh, and a little romance as well.  If you like video allusions, there are resonances with Rocky, On the Waterfront, Wall Street, The Sound of Music, and NCIS.  Stay tuned; as soon as I find out, I’ll tell you when it’s going to be published so you can check it out.

Okay, enough about the book.  I want to spend a little time talking about what I learned during this collaboration.

Why authors collaborate should be a separate post, I think.  I will note that there are a number of different methods for collaboration in writing.  Almost all of them start out with the collaborating authors doing any requisite world building, outlining the story to be told, agreeing on major characters, etc.  Once all that preparatory work is done, the writing can progress in several different ways.

  1. For example, if sections of the novel require certain knowledge or expertise, one author may write certain parts while the other writes the remainder.  This approach seems to be most commonly used when both authors are of similar levels of skill.
  2. More commonly, one author will write the first draft, while the other author will do the second pass.  If one author is newer to the craft (like me), he will usually write the first draft while the more experienced/skilled writer (Eric) will do the final polish/draft.
  3. And sometimes one author will look at another and say, “You start,” and the story is built somewhat like a tennis match, with no prior planning to speak of and the authors volleying responses back and forth.  A lot of “letter” stories are actually written that way.

And all of those approaches require that one of the authors then do a second pass to tighten up the prose and smooth out any cracks or joints or bumps in the text.

So, yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit I was the junior author in this collaboration.  I’ll play second fiddle to Eric Flint any day.  And yeah, we used option 2.  I wrote the first draft.  I had a small group of alpha readers who I asked to give me feedback as I wrote it during a really rough spell in my life.  It took over a year to write a book that should have taken me no more than four months.  But I finally drove it to a conclusion, and gave the results to Eric.  There was some back and forth between us-he fixed some issues, I fixed some others- plus a final polish pass by Eric, and a round of beta readers in there somewhere.  I think it was the fourth draft that went to the publisher.

Now I definitely learned some things during the writing of the first draft.  I learned a lot more from Eric in the weeks that followed; watching over his shoulder as he worked and reworked the subsequent drafts.  I have a tendency to overwrite, so I expected him to throw away whole scenes and passages, but he really pitched very little, comparatively speaking.  Eric did add some new material, as well, but what he did a lot of was rearranging of the text:  moving blocks of text around, changing scene progressions and chapter structure and sequences.  For example, theoretically I knew that chapters don’t all have to be about the same length.  Eric made it real to me when he carved out single scenes from some of my existing chapters and made them chapters on their own.  Five hundred word scenes became chapters.  A single telegram became a chapter.  And along the way, I discovered this was a technique that would make a particular scene or elements in that scene stand out and be more memorable than they would have been had they been buried in longer chapters.  Just watching that exercise was worth the price of admission.

Paraphrased observations from Eric along the way:

  1. “If you’re going to write a murder mystery, it’s best to have the body on the first page if you can manage it.  It makes a great hook.”
  2. “For a modern mystery, if you want a gritty tone, the city needs to be one of the characters.”
  3. “For modern mysteries, tone down the melodramatic descriptions.  Modern mysteries work better if the descriptions and the speech tags are a little flatter than, say, fantasies.”  (I mentioned I tend to overwrite.)
  4. “You’ve crossed the line with this hero-he’s getting way too hard.  You’ll lose reader sympathy with him.”  (That one was about balance of characterization.)

Eric once told me that a novel collaboration requires almost as much work from him as if he had written the entire novel himself.  Because he’s the senior partner in most of the collaborations I’ve seen him do, that’s probably true.  However, I suspect the nature of his work in a collaboration is very different than when he is working a solo project.  From what I could tell in this collaboration, Eric spent much less time and energy in the creative part of the process and much more in the editing and revising part of the process.  And I suspect that, overall, he spends less personal time in arriving at the final product.

Setting aside polite modesty, my first draft was good.  Eric made it noticeably better.

1636: The Devil’s Opera by Eric Flint and David Carrico.  A novel that is different than either one of us would have written alone.  I’m proud of it.

I Read, Therefore I Am

Reading The Writing Life The Writing Process 3 Comments

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve found that one of the biggest drawbacks to being a professional writer is that all of the time I spend at the keyboard, or staring at the wall, or walking around in a seeming daze as I work out just how high up a tree I’m going to chase my character and how sharp the rocks that I throw at him are going to be-well, let’s just say that it really cuts into my reading time.  (How’s that for a first sentence?)  And that puts me on the horns of a dilemma, so to speak:  because I really really really want to write, and I also really really really want to read.

I’ve always been a reader, for as far back as I can remember.  Partly genetics-Mom was a pretty avid reader-and partly environment:  for a lot of reasons, I typically didn’t have many friends growing up, so I turned to books to fill the void.

I’ve said before that I came to a desire to write relatively late.  I was not someone who knew he was going to be a writer at age 8, or 12, or 18, or even 28.  But my reading prepared me for it nonetheless.  I estimate I’d read 2000-plus novels by age 21, and kept on at an increasing pace.  Somewhere along the way I soaked up a lot about writing, so that when I did finally begin writing, I had observed many examples of the craft, good and bad; all of which stood me in good stead.

When I finally did begin writing, I also began to read writers writing about writing.  It wasn’t too long before I ran into a comment that worried me:  an author stated that when he was writing a novel, he didn’t dare read anyone else’s fiction, because he didn’t want to run the risk of his work being affected by another author’s work and style.

I was new enough in the craft, and the author who made the comment was someone I liked well enough, that I accepted it as almost gospel.  I immediately tried to change my habits so that I only read non-fiction while I was writing.  And it didn’t work.  I don’t mind non-fiction-I occasionally go on non-fiction binges, in fact.  But I can’t live in non-fiction.  I can’t lose myself in a story in non-fiction.  So I kept sneaking away to some of my favorite authors and reading favorite chapters over again, feeling guilty, and all the while worried that I was somehow ruining my writing by doing so.  (Truth is, I wasn’t good enough to sell yet so it didn’t matter, but my mind didn’t know that.)

Then some time later, I read an interview with another author I liked who was asked if he read other fiction while he was writing novels.  His response was words to the effect of, “Sure!  Doesn’t everyone?”

Great relief!  My guilt evaporated, and I started enjoying fiction again while I was writing.  And the take-away I got from that experience was that there is no One True Way when it comes to writing methods and styles and practices.  Whatever works for me is what will work for me, and it may or may not work for you.  What matters is that we find what works for each one of us, and that we write.  To quote Kipling:

There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!

So I still read lots of fiction.  Not as much as I used to, though, because the writing really does take away a lot of the time I used to devote to reading.  And sometimes when I’m reading I do still feel a little guilty, but it’s usually because I know I should be pounding the keys to finish my current project.

I’ve concluded that the reading provides the loam from which my stories sprout.  Or maybe a better metaphor is the reading is what the muse uses to charge up the batteries of my writing engine.  If I don’t read, I don’t write.

Pardon me; I just bought the latest novel by Elizabeth Moon.  I need to go charge up my batteries some more.

There’s No Place Like Home

The Writing Life The Writing Process 3 Comments

Creative people-for example, musicians, actors, artists, and yes, writers-are often considered a bit odd or ‘funny’ by the rest of humanity.  That’s okay, because the truth is we are different.  The drive to create a work that perhaps has no permanent utility yet still stands outside the creator can sometimes cause the creator to do things that are perhaps a bit daft, as our British friends might put it.

This can even be seen in the things we do to put ourselves in a space where we can create.  For example, I once read of a well-known cartoonist who literally could not work if he did not have one foot in a pan of hot water and the other foot in a pan of cold water.  (Unfortunately, the book in which I read that account seems to have not survived my most recent relocation, so I can’t give you a cite.)

At a slightly more mundane level, I can tell you of at least two or three pretty well-known science fiction authors who write best with metal-death music pouring from their stereo speakers at high decibel levels.  I know of at least two very successful authors whose work regimen is to write from about 10 p.m. to about 6 a.m, sleep in the early part of the day, then spend the afternoon and early evening with the spouse and kids before sitting down at the keyboard again at 10 p.m.  And there are always stories about someone’s writing for the day getting totally derailed because his/her coffee/tea/drink of choice was just not available and it blew his/her routine off the tracks.

So writers are often considered to be a species of odd ducks, and sometimes for valid reasons.

I never considered myself to be an odd duck, but the one thing I secretly took pride in was I could pretty much write anywhere.  Airport, coffee bar, hotels, airplanes; if I could get my laptop there and open, I could put words down regardless of the distractions around me.  The day job had me doing the road warrior gig several times over the years, so I had plenty of experience in working in places that were not home.  In fact, my personal best getting-lots-of-words-down-in-a-short-time record happened in a hotel room in Grimsby, England-6000 + words in five hours.  Truth.  Cross my heart.

So for a long time, I kind of felt like I was invulnerable as a writer.

Then came March of 2009.  Remember?  The housing bubble had burst, all the mortgage rocks had been flipped over and we were gagging at the putrefaction we found underneath, and the economy was on a greased slide to nowhere and it was getting there fast.

Skipping a lot of the details, the bottom line is that the day job laid off about 400 people, and one of them was me.  I found out in March 2009 I was going to be laid off, and at that moment my fiction writing dried up.  Withered.  Croaked.  I wasn’t actually laid off until December 31, 2009, but I knew it was coming.  And yeah, at first I was in shock, and angry, and all the typical emotions, but this wasn’t the first time I’d been out on the street, so my head straightened out pretty quickly-except for the creative voice.  I could write text for work without any problems at all.  I was serving as a Bible study teacher, and I could write study materials without a glitch.  Words just flowed.  But try to write fiction?  Wasn’t happening.

Fast forward.  I spent January through October 2010 in school picking up some education credits to help the job search.  Writing for the classes, no problem.  Fiction?  Uh-uh.  Oh, maybe a paragraph here and there, but nothing good, and no comfort at it.  I put that down to just the uncertainty of my situation

In November 2010 I got a new job with a great company.  Only problem with it was I had to move about 160 miles to take it.  And selling a house in 2010 wasn’t much easier than selling a house in 2009 would have been.  So it was back to the road warrior gig:  leave town on Sunday afternoon with a car full of clean clothes and food, come home on Friday night with a car full of dirty laundry, spend the week in a small hole-in-the-wall apartment.  (Not unlike being in college.)

I figured that with the new job, the uncertainty would be gone.  I had lots of experience at living in road warrior mode, and lots of experience at really producing words while doing it.  I thought, “Great!  Five nights a week in the apartment with nothing else to do.  I’ll get tons of writing done.”

Yeah, that’s how it should have been.  But the next ten months proved to be one of the most frustrating times of my life as a writer.  I was used to writing up to 2500-3000 words in an evening.  A night in which I only put down 1000 words was substandard for me.  Yet during those ten months, I would sit down night after night, spend two to three hours at the keyboard, and if I was very lucky I’d have 150 words.  A lot of nights I only had 50.  More nights than I care to think about I had 20, or 10, or none.  Truth.  And if I did get some words down, the next night I’d probably delete most of them as dreck.  But I kept trying.

It drove me batty.  I knew I could do better than that; a lot better.  But no matter what I tried, nothing primed the pump; nothing got the words flowing again.  You could have used me for a picture of frustration in the dictionary.  I was dying of thirst in a writing desert.  Still, I kept trying.

Fast forward again to August, 2011.  We sold our old house in the city we moved from and bought our new house in the city we moved to.  We moved in September.

After the move, I kept trying to write.  And to my surprise (and joy), slowly, bit by bit, it became easier to write.  The words starting to flow again-a trickle at first, but soon in a stream.  The volume of words produced each day started to grow.  At the beginning of December, 2011, I was consistently producing an average of 1000 words every time I sat down, which, while it’s not where I was pre-2009, was so much better than what I’d done in the last 2 ½ years I was ecstatic.  And then around December 15, it was like the muse opened the flood gate.  I wrote 40,000 words in a little over two weeks.  Joy, relief, happiness; oh, yeah, did I feel that.

So what made the difference?  What opened the door to my creative voice again?  I think it’s having a home.  When I was laid off, I knew that I would most likely have to move to get a good job.  I think that something about not having a home even in prospect just really shriveled my creativity, and it wasn’t until I got the new home and actually settled into it that it started to revive.  Makes sense to me.  So perhaps I am an odd duck after all.

What’s your bedrock?  What’s the one thing in your life that if it was removed, you wouldn’t be able to write?

I hope none of you ever land in that writing desert.  But if you do, the best advice I can give you is keep writing.  Persevere, even if you only get 30 or 50 words done in a day.  From my experience, when you get out of the desert you’ll still have the patterns and habits of writing, which means you’ll get back in the flow that much quicker.

Meanwhile, enjoy paddling around with the rest of us odd ducks.    Quack, quack.

In Praise of the Queen’s English

Craft & Skills First Drafts Narrative Voice The Writing Process 7 Comments

First, a PSA:  Grantville Gazette VI, edited by Eric Flint and published by Baen Books, is on the stands now.  It contains my story Suite for Four Hands, which is part of a series of stories exploring how musicians of the early 17th century might react if the music of the late 20th century was dropped in their laps.  Check it out.

Now, on with today’s post.

What do the following words have in common?

Slept, dreamt, leapt, burnt, dwellt, swept.

They are all representatives of a class of irregular verbs.  Four of them are also examples of a trend by American publishers to ‘regularize’ many irregular verbs in American usage.  You’ve seen it, even though it may not have registered with you.  Dreamed instead of dreamt, burned instead of burnt, dwelled instead of dwellt.  (Slept and swept have somehow managed to avoid being replaced with sleeped and sweeped.)

This is apparently an American movement.  The rest of the English-speaking world seems to be doing fine being irregular with irregular verbs.  Now, I am not particularly an Anglophile.  (But I’m not an Anglophobe, either.)  Outside of Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m not especially fond of English writers per se.  (And I’m not sure why I like Dickens-I just do.)  Most of the ‘classics’ of English Literature leave me in a state of vast ennui.  I will even admit to having successfully managed to avoid reading Shakespeare throughout my high school and college careers.

That said, I must stand up and shout against this trend in American publishing.  Author C. J. Cherryh probably described the background and circumstances better than I can in a post a number of years ago.  But regardless of the whys and wherefores of the trend, the fact remains that by removing the usage of these irregular verbs, publishers and copy-editors are removing tools from our writers’ tool chests.  They are removing richness and flavor from our writing.  They are, in fact, reducing our ability to write in distinctive styles.  And I find that deplorable.

When I write, I quite frequently use particular words to create specific effects in the reader; ‘aural’ effects, for lack of a better term.  In my mind, and to my ear, ‘dreamed’ has a different effect than ‘dreamt’.  And I’m not rigidly locked in to one form or the other, although I have noticed that I tend to use ‘dreamed’ forms more in science fiction and ‘dreamt’ forms more in fantasy.  But regardless of the genre, if I use one over the other, it’s because I want the effect of that specific word in the passage at hand.

I guess I’m funny that way.  People can criticize my plots or my characterizations and I’ll listen with an open mind.  And most of the time I’ll take criticism of my narrative and dialogue without getting particularly upset.  But for some reason, if after due consideration I choose a specific word to create a particular effect, to have someone object to the use of that word really rubs my fur the wrong way.  Of course, as a new author, the state of my fur may not be the copy-editor’s highest priority. Which, while probably appropriate from the consideration of publishing as a business, is unfortunate from the consideration of the craft and art of writing.

But today, the rise of e-publishing and the freedom it provides for self-publishing is creating changes in the traditional publishing models, and some of these arbitrary rules may not be a factor much longer.  One can only hope.

So I sing the praise of irregular verbs!  Join the chorus when it comes around.