Author Archives: mary

Make friends with your fellow writers.

Who, the people I’m competing against for publication contracts, agents’ attention, spots in magazines and anthologies?

Yes, them.

Why? I need publishers, editors, reviewers and readers. But I’m the writer. Why do I need other writers?

Very few people are good at everything, and, particularly when you’re starting out, you can save a lot of time, money, and or mental strain by getting some advice from someone who’s done something before. If you’re in a tough patch, a fellow writer may be more than a sympathetic ear: they may actually know a coping strategy that worked for them. And who will know your field better than a fellow writer?

I remember expressing frustration that I couldn’t take part in a book launch event because, at the time, my only publications had been in anthologies and the event was for novelists only. If I’d been on my own, my aspirations might have ended there. Instead, I vented to a writer friend of mine.

She said she knew two other writers in the same position as me, and maybe we should get together and do our own launch. We could call it an “Author Launch” since the books we were in had multiple contributors. I was in.

Where could we have it? At the time, I was working for a Business Improvement organization. One of our member businesses provided us a meeting space, free of charge, on the proviso that the invitees purchase a certain dollar amount worth of food and drink.

Another person knew a guy who specialized in film and photography. Another person knew a bigger-name local author who agreed to be our master of ceremonies. Another person designed and printed some posters, which we all helped to distribute. The authors were invited to be on a radio program. The local sci-fi community came on board.

We packed the room. We sold books. We had fun, and got our names out there.

I could never have pulled off that event all by myself.

Fellow writers can introduce you to key people: agents, publishers, editors. They can let you know about new markets, calls for submissions, convention events. If you want to know who designed their web site, their book cover, their business cards: you can ask them.

Going to a convention is a lot more affordable when there’s four people splitting the cost of a hotel room and gas. This blog is created by a group of writers who met via Superstars Writing Seminars and decided to start a blog together. I certainly couldn’t maintain the demands of five blog posts a week all on my own!

One big caveat. The idea is that writers help out other writers, but nobody wants to be friends with someone who is just using them for contacts. If you take and take and never give back, people will notice. If you only talk to someone when you want something, people will notice.

In order to benefit from the Six Degrees, you have to be willing to give back.

In every group you will find people you click with and people you don’t, and that’s okay. If you spend time with people who have a common interest (writing), you will naturally gravitate towards some of them. It’s likely you and they will have other interests and commonalities–the foundation of friendship. Some people may not be interested in getting to know you, or may be too busy. That’s okay too. Let them go, and focus on the people who return your interest.

If you say you are going to do something for someone, do it unless an extreme circumstance arises. Being hospitalized is an extreme circumstance. Putting it off until you feel like it is not. Most people will be understanding of an unexpected emergency, but if over time you develop a reputation for not making good on your word, it will be hard to shake.

Every writer has to strike a balancing act between writing (what we’re all here to do) and non-writing activities in support of our writing. Some of those activities may include blogging, conventions, writers’ groups, and hanging out with our writing friends. It’s your responsibility to decide how much socialization is important (because career-related discussion, venting, support and advice is very important) and how much is procrastination posing as time well spent. You can’t volunteer for everything if you hope to get your writing done, so choose carefully what you’re going to do: pick things that will support your career, allow you to give back to your fellow writers, and still leave you time for the writing itself.

Character Names that Mean Something

May 5, 2015

mary

Character Mary Pletsch The Writing Life World-building Writing Tools No Comments

Sometimes it’s hard to think of a good name for a character, location, or object. When I first started writing, I would ponder for days, sometimes weeks, trying to find the right name. Once I got on the Internet, though, I realized that the World Wide Web contains all sorts of resources that can make the task of naming your characters (and locations, and McGuffins) easier.

First and foremost is the wide variety of baby name sites on the internet. If I know a bit about my character’s personality, I can search “baby names meaning warrior, baby names meaning beautiful, baby names meaning leader, baby names meaning sorrowful.” I’m often able to come up with a name that suits my character and yet doesn’t sound painfully obvious (hint: if you’re naming your male character “Rad” then you’d better have more to that choice than just wanting to be sure your readers understand that this character is awesome.)

I’ve often wanted a character to belong to a particular real-world ethnicity (including Indian, Polish, Anishinaabe, and Celtic) and had difficulty naming them, because I don’t like to give characters the same names as real-world people I know from those cultures, and I really don’t like making up some nonsense word that “sounds Chinese, Polish, Celtic, etc” as that can be truly offensive. Online resources have provided me with lists of authentic names from those cultures.

Three cautions for baby name sites: as with much information on the Internet, verification is key. It’s easy for someone to say that a name or word means something when it doesn’t, and some names have a variety of interpretations (like my own, Mary, which means “chosen by God,” “bitter,” or “rebellion,” depending on who you ask). Cross-check your source to be sure it’s reliable.

Secondly, consider the culture of the character(s) and the setting of the story. If your setting is a modern medical school, it’s relatively easy to explain a character with a Greek name, a character with a Swahili name, a character with an Arabic name and a character with a Sri Lankan name as co-workers. If your setting is in Steampunk England at the turn of the 20^th century, the explanation becomes more challenging. If your setting is a fantasy village and your characters are all natives of the same village, it’s almost impossible to explain why their names are from completely different languages. And while there can be interesting character hooks in, say, the Italian boy with the Pakistani name, or the Chinese girl whose name, translated, becomes a boy’s name in English, it can be confusing at best and insulting at worst if characters have ethnic names, but no other links to those ethnicities. Conversely, if your character has immigrated to a society where there is prejudice against her ethnicity, she may deliberately choose a new name that will be easier to pronounce and “fit in” with the majority of that society—or she may be forcibly given one.

Thirdly, recognize that some names carry pre existing associations. I love the idea of a girl’s name that means “to think like a man”—but the name in question is “Andromeda.” Andromeda’s already a well-known mythological figure and if I don’t want to conjure ideas of constellations and sea monsters in the reader’s imagination, perhaps another name is a better choice for my character.

Google can also be an invaluable tool if you’ve just made up a name that you think sounds really cool. The subconscious can play tricks on us; it’s possible that we might be borrowing a name that we’ve heard somewhere before and not realize it. Do you really want the star of your space opera to be named Luke or Kirk? Or the name that sounds neat to us might be similar to a word that’s embarrassing or offensive in another culture (witness the word “slag”, where the word’s literal definition is waste material from coal production. Sounds like a badass heavy-industrial name for, say, a fighting robot–except that in Britain, “slag” is a derogatory slang term for a promiscuous woman. Oops! And this is why a certain Dinobot has recently changed his name to “Slug.”) When I make up a cool-sounding new alien species, planet, or character name, I always run it through Google to see if it’s already part of some other franchise, or if it has meanings or associations that I didn’t realize.

The World Wide Web can provide writers with all kinds of inspiration for naming characters, places and objects. Search engines also provide a quick and easy way to double-check that the neat and totally original new name you just thought up hasn’t already been used by someone before you.

Returning to the Lake

April 9, 2015

mary

Horror Mary Pletsch No Comments

Last year, fans of lovely monstrosities, dark secrets and long-lost nightmares ventured to Fossil Lake, a place where things perhaps best left buried stirred in the sediment beneath the water in an Anthology of the Aberrant.

This year, horror fans who’ve faced the darkness and find themselves hungry for more can return to the Lake in Fossil Lake 2: The Refossiling.

“Red Ochre,” my contribution to Fossil Lake 2, allowed me to address one of my greatest regrets about my story in the first Fossil Lake. I wrote a previous Fictorians article *here* about the experience of writing “Mishipishu: The Ghost Story of Penny Jaye Prufrock.” Mishipishu was set at a summer camp for kids and, like the summer camps I went to at that age, I gave the lake and its legend names from Native American folklore. But I remained cognisant of the fact that there’s something culturally appropriative about the way summer camps used Native names to suggest wildness and closeness to nature, and yet rarely had any Native staff, Native campers, or instruction on any aspects of Native culture beyond the shameless borrowing (stealing?) of names and ghost stories.

I used the Native names as a matter of authenticity – this is something summer camps did, and some still do. But I felt a certain lingering regret for the way that Native American identity had been stripped away from these names. Longtime readers may recall an article earlier this year where I talked about how changing the point of view character helped make my contribution to Fossil Lake 2 into a stronger story. If you missed it, you can find it here.

“Red Ochre” has been my opportunity to tell a scary story through the eyes of a Native American character, Meesha. Meesha is torn between her shaman uncle, urging her to learn more about her heritage and her people’s traditional beliefs, and her parents, who want to see her as a successful, respected member of the wider society. Meesha wants to fit in with the other students at her school, but she recognizes that elements of both her own history and her people’s change how others view her. She had hoped that a camping trip with her friend, Perry, could give her a much-needed vacation.

Unfortunately, Perry is more than he first seemed. And so, too, are those legends her uncle swears are true. Meesha finds herself caught in the riptide of history, and its current threatens to drag her away…deep down into the waters of Fossil Lake.

If you’d like to take another dip in the Lake, Fossil Lake 2: The Refossiling is now available in Print and Kindle editions.

And if you’ve never been, the first Fossil Lake Anthology is still available, also in your choice of Print or Kindle.

So come on in. What are you waiting for?

The water’s fine.

April: In Love…and In War

April 1, 2015

mary

Character Conflict Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch Storyline Tropes & Archetypes Writing Tools No Comments

In February we took a look at the different kinds of love that characters can experience, and the importance of allowing characters to feel love. Whether that’s romantic love, love for family, love for friends, love for a belief or a cause, or any of the other myriad forms of love, stories convey intense emotion when it’s clear the characters care strongly for something or someone.

In April we’re taking a look at the other side of the equation: conflict.

If a character strongly loves something, but there’s no threat to that thing, there’s no conflict and no story. If a character strongly loves someone, and the other person returns the feeling without obstacle or hindrance, there’s no conflict and no story. If a character passionately believes in a cause, and immediately puts that cause into effect, there’s no conflict and no story.

A strong conflict is essential to a strong story. It’s hard to keep a reader’s interest when the characters don’t face any challenges, and there’s nothing to stop them from doing, having, and enjoying what they want.

Just as there’s many different types of love, there’s many different types of conflict. Conflict can run the gamut from actual combat to a character trying to come to terms with her own thoughts on a subject. Stories can include more than one conflict. For example, two members of the superhero team might be rivals, fighting against one another to be chosen as team leader, while also fighting villains.

Conflict can include:

Fights against an antagonist adversary, whether that be a single villain, a government system, an opposing nation, a bully, a competing love interest, a series of foes, or a concept such as criminality or evil.

Rivalries

Physical fighting, ranging from one-on-one to armies in combat

Contests (sports games, chess matches, spelling bees, races…)

Arguing (fighting through communication, whether it be spoken, online, a series of gestures, etc)

Conflicting ideas or philosophies

Obstacles preventing the lovers from getting together, or the hero from enacting her master plan, or the apprentice from reaching his goal

A character struggling to survive against nature (ie natural disaster, trekking across the wilderness, being abandoned to the elements)

A character fighting to overcome (or live with) a disease or illness

Internal conflict. This occurs when the conflict is in a character’s own mind. Examples include ethical dilemmas, characters raised in one culture, faith, or belief system questioning whether what they’d always believed is in fact correct, or a character wondering if his current course of action is what he truly wants to be doing.

This month we’re going to talk about the different kinds of conflict, how to write about conflict, how to make conflict believable, and how to tackle conflicts you as the writer haven’t personally experienced. Take up your shields (or your swords) and prepare to defend that which you love.