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James Bond and Kitchen Fires

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Guest Post by Kim May

Kim PicWhat do Robert Ludlum, Vince Flynn, Kathy Reichs, and Michael Jackson have in common?

Thriller.

The thriller genre has a fount of wisdom and literary tricks just waiting to be tapped. So, why are thrillers so popular? Besides being fast-paced, they’re, well… thrilling. They often involve occupations we don’t see on a daily basis. Intelligence agency operatives, the Secret Service, commandos (who are thankfully not commando), and cut-throat lawyers are often at the center of these heart-pumping tales. All of these are real occupations, and while it doesn’t require the reader to stretch his or her imagination, it’s still far enough into the realm of the unknown to fulfill the same fantasy role as a wizard or rocket jockey. It also means that the conflict is easy to understand. The reader doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know why a missing nuclear warhead is a bad thing.

Another draw you’ll find is an exotic location. Think of James Bond. Is he content saving the world in good old London town? No, he’s jetting to every enchanting and mysterious locale on the planet. (Coincidentally, this also provides him with a bevy of beauties to tap.) Granted, the secret lair inside a hollow mountain or Q’s conveniently placed and well-disguised labs probably doesn’t have real-world counterparts, but it’s certainly fun to think they do. I know my imagination runs amok every time I pass gated stairways and mysterious doors. You never know; there may be a super-secret ninja training room inside a donut shop. These things happen.

I realize that neither of these are monumental concepts, nor are they only found in thrillers. Sci-fi and fantasy are just as loaded with exotic locales and professions, many of which are more exciting than those found in reality. For some of us, James Bond in space is a lot cooler than James Bond in the jungle. But I have to admit that not everyone has the imagination required for sci-fi or fantasy-I have family that fall in this category-and there are times when it’s nice to unplug the brain and just be entertained. This is something that thrillers are really good at.

Not every thriller has an exotic location or mind-blowing dilemma. It’s not unusual to find one set in the town next door, or a major metropolis that thanks to TV and movies; we’re very familiar with despite never setting foot there. When the danger is close to home, it can increase the tension. For example, in the Jack Ryan novels by Tom Clancy, one of his most nail biting conflicts wasn’t when Jack was smuggling Russian submarines or fighting South American drug cartels. It was when a vengeful foe tried to kidnap his family. Whether we have been in that situation or not, it’s one that we are socially aware of, scared of, and wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. When it happens to someone we care about, such as the hero of a story, we cease caring about the pot roast burning in the oven because we NEED to know how it ends.

The biggest draw for this genre, and what should be employed more in other genres, is the use of hooks and cliffhangers. If you look at how a thriller is structured, you’ll see that just about every chapter ends with a hook-a burning question or perilous situation (that may or may not involve anthrax) which causes you to turn the page instead of feeding the dog, fetching the kids from soccer practice, or putting out the kitchen fire (seriously, they should put warnings on these things). Hooks are a handy way of entrancing readers. They’re the fabled chemical inside KFC’s chicken that makes you crave more. Can you think of a good reason not to put that in your stories (excluding kitchen fires)? I didn’t think so.

So, if this storytelling tool is so tried and true, why are they not employed in other genres more often? In short, I don’t know. I suspect it may be because we don’t always look outside our chosen genre, but that’s a topic for another day. Regardless of the reason, it does make this the perfect time to use hooks, cliffhangers, and realistic conflicts in your fiction. Thanks to technology, our readers have a lot of entertainment options at their fingertips. Not only are we competing with daily life for the reader’s attention, we’re also competing against every game, social network, and cat video on the internet. Using the draws of the thriller genre will put us ahead of all that. All of the writers I mentioned at the beginning are very good at doing these things and it’s why their work consistently tops the charts. Yes, even Michael Jackson. His ability to thrill audiences got him crowned the King of Pop. I see no reason why we couldn’t be similarly crowned.

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Kim May writes sci-fi and fantasy but has been known to pen a gothic poem or two. She works at an independent bookstore and dog/house sits on the side. A native Oregonian, she lives with her geriatric cat, Spud, and spends as much of her free time as she can with family and friends. If you would like to find out what she’s working on, please visit her blog at http://ninjakeyboard.blogspot.com/

The Maker Spirit of Steampunk

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Guest Post by Billie Millholland

vic ladyWhen I told a friend I was doing a blog piece that championed steampunk stories, she sighed deeply. “Are you sure you aren’t a little late?” She thinks the steampunk genre reached its zenith in 2009/10 with a glut of excellent books like Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker and Dreadnought; Gail Carriger’s Souless, Changeless and Blameless, the first three books of the Parasol Protectorate; Jay Lake’s Pinion; and The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder to name a few. She’s not the only one who feels that steampunk has become so mainstream it’s doomed to wither on a vine of mediocrity.

I’m not blind to the tsunami of pathetically thin, steampunkish novels bursting bookstore shelves under nearly every category label from bodice-ripper romances to futuristic space adventures. Copycat themes that descend into cliché are inevitable following the advent of any literary innovation, but they are not always an indication of waning popularity.  Steampunk stories are still alive and well in the literary world because they offer more than just an entertaining adventure.

What attracts good story tellers to the steampunk genre is not so much the clank and clatter of gears and springs, as intriguing as that is; the pull is bigger than that. I think it’s partly the recognition of a general global anxiety in the wake of decades of plastic, throw-away everything. An anxiety that’s soothed by metaphors of important inventions constructed out of noble, solid materials and forever repaired by a regular person in a shed behind the house. It’s the hope embodied in the notion of the revival of the backyard mechanic.

If anachronistic steampunk images, wrought of leather, glass and metal, were simply expressions of a nostalgia trend, steam trainthen steampunk fiction would have a dim future. It would fade into the shelves of historical fiction, still somewhat satisfying, but not really remarkable. Fortunately, the appeal of a good steampunk story goes deeper than the thrill of an airship piloted by a goggle-wearing aviatrix.

The appeal of a good steampunk story emerges in part from an empowering maker spirit; the clever ingenuity of DIY craftsmanship that flaunts the notion that anyone can build a flying machine and echoes the sentiment that gave birth to the open-source movement. It’s found in flipping the finger at the rigid conventions and stagnant protocols of a familiar puritanical past, the choke hold of which is still present today. It’s welcomed by those numbed by the tedium of relentless modern consumerism.  A good steampunk story fuels a longing for an individualistic, break-away adventure. It encourages a smug satisfaction in heroic self-reliance. Steampunk is the cheeky tendon that connects a cynical present to an equally flawed, yet more colourful and idealistic past.

The industrial frenzy of the Victorian era is a natural mind worm that darts from neuron to neuron, bouncing off the hard curves of the skull like jolts from fresh morning coffee.

The emergence of wild and wonderful technology during the era of steam parallels the whirl of constantly changing technology today. Both are exciting, seductive and frightening. There is still room for good stories that rescue us from the latter by taking us to the former – a world we wish had been.

As recently as March 2013 “Cowboys and Engines“, a steampunk movie idea received crowd sourced funding through kickstarter. The maker spirit is at work here on all levels. Steampunk is about finding alternative ways of thriving in a world of megalithic institutions. Steampunk is for anyone with a maker spirit. It invites glorious literary experiments with giddy mash-ups. It encourages collaboration. Steampunk artists, writers, crafters, inventors, role players breathe life into an arts community forsaken by fiscally paranoid governments. Steampunk allows us to explore the past while contemplating the future. We are a tool-making species and steampunk reminds us how far we’ve strayed from our roots.

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BM -Women-of-the-Apocalypse-CoverBillie Milholland was first published in non-fiction (Harrowsmith magazine, Westernpuzzle_box_cover4 Producer People magazine and weekly newspapers in Alberta and British Columbia); then short fiction (in Canadian magazines & produced on CBC Radio Anthology); then novellas (a Time Travel Romance & one of four novellas in “Women of the Apocalypse“ (Aurora Award winner  2010). More recently she has had a Chinese steampunk story in Tyche Books anthology “Ride the Moon“ and is looking forward to seeing another short story in the “Urban Green Man“ anthology and another novella in “The Puzzle Box“, both coming in August 2013 (both from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing).

 

The Wonder of Fantasy

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Gust Post by David D. Levine

David D. Levine Fantasy is, of course, an enormous genre. Definitions of fantasy vary, but the key concept that distinguishes fantasy from all other forms of fiction is the presence of at least one element that does not exist in the real world. By this broad definition, all of science fiction is a subset of fantasy, and indeed many stories usually described as horror, thriller, mystery, and even literature can be classified as fantasies of one sort or another, because they contain references to supernatural phenomena, nonexistent technologies, or impossible materials. But if you’re trying to write and sell fiction under the rubric of “fantasy,” the mere presence of a fantastic element is not enough; it needs to be integral to the story.

If you took the fantastic element away from your story, could it still take place in fundamentally the same way? Would the characters be the same people, would they do the same things, would they have the same priorities? If so, then many fantasy readers would say that the story is not really a fantasy. You need to think through the implications of the fantastic element and consider how its presence would affect every person, thing, and event in the story.

Even a well-integrated fantastic element is still not sufficient, though: the story also must have a fantasy “flavor” — by which I mean its vocabulary, diction, tone, pace, and conventions of character and plot.  However, because fantasy is such a large genre, it contains many distinct subgenres, each of which has a flavor of its own. Epic fantasies, for example, are painted on a large canvas; they typically have a large number of point-of-view characters and very high stakes. The setting is often medieval or pseudo-medieval and the prose, both dialogue and description, may be somewhat archaic and flowery.  Urban fantasy, on the other hand, is gritty and personal. The setting and language are typically contemporary and, even if the fate of the world is at stake, the characters’ personal issues take center stage. (These descriptions are crude and exaggerated, of course; a successful epic or urban fantasy is far more sophisticated than this sort of two-sentence sketch can convey.)

The various subgenres of fantasy do share a few characteristics.  All fantasy readers, I would say, expect and desire the extraordinary in their fiction. They want not only the well-drawn characters, coherent plots, strong emotions, vivid descriptions, and insight into the human condition they could get from non-fantastic literature, they also want a “sense of wonder” — an experience of something outside the mundane world. This is often provided by highly evocative descriptions of the story’s fantastic elements, whether they are settings, characters, or ideas. But “evocative” need not mean “overblown” — a few carefully-chosen but commonplace words can provide as much of a sense of magic and mystery as a paragraph of purple prose.

One common tool in the fantasy writer’s toolbox is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”  If, early in the story, you describe the character’s world (whether fantastic or mundane) with sufficient carefully-chosen telling details that the reader can easily and thoroughly envision it, you create a sense of trust in the reader that will then pay off when you later introduce a fantastic element. The reader must believe in the laboratory before she will believe in the monster that emerges from it.

Fantasy readers today generally expect fairly tight control of point of view (PoV), with a limited number of PoV characters and crisply demarcated PoV shifts. The more fluid PoV used in many romance stories will be derided by fantasy readers as “head-hopping.”  Also, though some non-fantasy readers sneer at cliché fantasy’s apostrophe-laden names and other invented words, the fact is that fantasy readers expect the story’s voice and vocabulary to convey some of its otherworldly feeling.

Of course, genres can be mixed. Bookstores have shelf after shelf of fantastic mystery, science-fictional horror, and romantic fantasy. But very few stories are equally successful in more than one genre at a time. There’s a difference between a romance story with fantastic elements and a fantasy story with romantic elements; a story that tries to be both at once will probably not completely satisfy habitual readers of either.

So what’s the difference? The key, in my opinion, lies in the story’s climax. What matters most to the characters? What is the most important problem that they have to solve?  What is the event which brings the story to a resolution? The answers to these questions determine the story’s core genre. Even if the characters realize their love for each other at the very same moment they save the world, one of these will matter much more than the other to the characters and the reader, and that fact determines whether the story is a fantasy or a romance.

It may seem that I’m being flip here, but I’m not. A successful climax is the culmination of every other element of the story. Every event, description, and character decision in the story contributes to it directly or indirectly; even a completely separate subplot helps to lead up to the main plot’s climax by reinforcing, echoing, or contrasting with the main plot. If the relative importance of the romantic and fantastic elements of the climax is unclear or muddled, or if that relative importance doesn’t match the relative importance of the romantic and fantastic elements in the rest of the story, the reader will likely be dissatisfied with the story as a whole. (If the story lacks a distinct climax at all, it is probably experimental, literary, or magical realism rather than fantasy. Is magical realism fantasy? Better critics than I are still arguing that one.)

To write and sell a fantasy, you need to be familiar with the fantasy subgenre in which you are working. Read widely and deeply in your field, so that you can be aware of the trends and tropes your editors and readers are already familiar with. You don’t want to repeat an already-too-common formula, but you also don’t want to stray too far from the reader’s expectations without meaning to. Truly unique stories, which defy conventions and expectations, can become breakout smash hits, but they often fail to sell or find an audience. If you’re going to break the mold, you need to understand exactly what you are breaking and why.

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David D. Levine 2 David D. Levine is the author of over fifty published science fiction and fantasy stories. His work has David D. Levine-SpaceMagic_600x900appeared in markets including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy and has won or been nominated for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Campbell. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Kate Yule, with whom he co-edits the fanzine Bento. His award-winning short story collection Space Magic is now available as an ebook from all the major ebook stores, and his web page can be found at http://www.daviddlevine.com.

The Magic in Our Stories

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Guest Post by Tristan Brand

wizardMagic has been a part of our stories since pretty much the beginning.

Homer wrote The Odyssey, a tale full of magical creatures, sorceresses, and vengeful gods, nearly three millennia ago. The Arthurian legend, featuring the great wizard Merlin and King Arthur’s magical sword Excalibur, originated in the dark ages. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare incorporated magic into plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Magic made an appearance in Wagner’s famous opera Der rings des Nibelungen, a story of a magical ring that drew from the same sources which, a century later, inspired Tolkien to write his masterpiece Lord of the Rings.

Magic’s a powerful tool when it comes to storytelling. When a writer decides to include magic in his story, he needs to understand the implications of whatever type of magic they include. Of course, that’s easier said than done, as there are essentially infinite ways to approach magic.

We can make this infinite sea of possibility a bit more manageable by dividing magic into two categories. In the first category, the laws of magic are as well understood as the laws of physics. In the second category, magic is a mystery; its rules, laws, limitations are left unknown.

Both categories carry their own advantages and potential pitfalls. Fortunately, there are a number of excellent stories representing each category that can be used as examples of how the strongest storytellers use magic.

Brandon Sanderson is a great example of an author whose magic falls into the first category.  In his Mistborn series, people called allomancers burn metals within their bodies to give themselves abilities ranging from pulling their bodies towards pieces of metal to affecting the flow of time. Sanderson carefully weaves in information about allomancy into the narrative so that the reader learns its capabilities and limitations, while taking care not to bog the story down with excessive detail.

In crafting allomancy, Sanderson made use of a couple principles (which he often terms his first and second law of magic.) The first is that the author’s ability to use magic to solve conflicts is directly proportional to the reader’s understanding of said magic. The second is that magic must have significant draw-backs to those that use it.

The first law demonstrates the key advantage to using well-understood magic. It allows that magic to become a tool in the author’s tool-box. The second law offers a cautionary point. If the writer creates a magic system that’s too powerful, the reader may at some point wonder why the hero is going through all this trouble

Vin, the protagonist in Mistborn, is a powerful allomancy who routinely uses her ability to solve problems. If the reader didn’t understand allomancy, Vin’s constant use of it to escape danger would seem cheap. If allomancy did not have significant limitations, the reader might wonder why Vin was letting herself get into so much trouble in the first place.

The magic in George R. R. Martin’s epic series  A Song of Ice and Fire falls into the second category. Magic appears directly on the page far less than in most fantasy novels, though it’s always lurking in the edges. Undead monsters rise in the North.  A summoned shadow assassinates a would-be king. A crippled boy can project his mind into the body of his pet wolf.

If there’s an underlying logic, a set of principles governing what can and cannot happen, Martin keeps it well-hidden from the reader. A key reason this works is that Martin’s magic is just as mysterious to the viewpoint characters as it is to the reader. The mysteriousness of his magic is not an arbitrary choice but rather a consequence of the world he’s created. In this world, the characters fear magic – and the reader learns to fear it as well.

One pitfall to Martin’s approach is that he is far less able to use magic to solve conflicts, a consequence of Sanderson’s first law. But Martin doesn’t need to. The magic in his world serves a different purpose than the magic in Sanderson’s world.

The trait that both Sanderson and Martin’s approaches share is consistency. Magic might break the rules of nature, but it cannot escape logic and consequence entirely. Adding magic into a world irrevocably changes it. Cities, cultures, politics, wars, everything, will be affected in some way. Regardless which approach is chosen, its success will likely be determined by how consistent the author is with their magic’s effect on the world.

Most authors fall in between the two categories. Patrick Rothfuss uses magic called sympathy in his Kingkiller Chronicles, and though the reader is given some rules there are clearly parts left unexplained. The same is true of weaving in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time or the magic in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files.wizard 2

Magic may exist only in our minds, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s in our stories, and our stories are part of who we are. They reflect our culture, our history. Through stories, even those about dragons and wizards and talking dogs, allomancers and undead hordes, we constantly explore what it means to be human. By allowing the impossible to play out on the page, we can find insights that considering only the possible would have left undiscovered.

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Tristan Brand is an aspiring fantasy author and technical writer. When he’s not obsessively checking the mail for his long-overdue invitation to wizarding school, he can be found playing StarCraft II, practicing classical piano, or reading a good book. He keeps a blog at www.TristanDBrand.com, does a web-show with his friend called Why We Like It (http://day9.tv/d/b/why-we-like-it/), and can be found on twitter as @TristanDBrand.