Category Archives: Craft & Skills

I’ve converted my den into a writing sanctuary, filled with souvenirs from my vicarious and real lives. On the corners of my desk are two matching silver candlesticks to remind me of the lessons learned from reading Les Miserables.

Hugo, Melville, Tolkien, Twain, and Lewis have all taken me on unforgettable journeys, and it might sound cliché but their writings have had a profound effect on my mortal existence. This post was meant to be about them, but I was invited on a journey last week by another amazing author and I must write about that experience.

David Farland is the author of the Runelords and many other works of fiction. And his books are fantastic, but that isn’t what I’m writing about in this post. Farland pulled back the curtain and gave us a look behind the scenes of becoming a successful author.

When I first started writing, I tried my best to adopt Victor Hugo’s omniscient style of point of view and was surprised when my writing was met with strong criticism for doing so. Farland explained that two centuries ago, many writers would jump around the characters’ minds much like a movie in omniscient POV, but with the developments of film this style of writing no longer worked for the readers. The one thing that books offer above film today is the ability to become intimately involved in the mind of the Point of View character.

Farland’s classes are offered online and in person. I’ve been to similar courses before but was never taught by this level of insight and genius. I have been struggling with several short stories that I started to write but had difficulty finishing because I didn’t know where to take them. I had strong characters and setting but I lacked conflict. I struggled to place my creations into hard situations that might cause them to change.

Jean Valjean is my all-time favorite character. Analyzing it now, I see that what made me fall in love with him, as a protagonist was the pain and suffering he endured. The irrationality and unfairness of receiving a 19 year prison sentence for stealing a loaf of bread played on the Man vs. Society conflict in the story. (I know it was compounded because he tried to escape several times). And the bread wasn’t even for him, but his starving nieces and nephews, which endeared me to him further. Farland called this “petting the dog.”

In Farland’s class I learned that characters of the story didn’t necessarily need to be people. I used to think Javert was the antagonist of the story but now I see him as the contagonist. The real antagonist is society, selfish and unwilling to help the miserables.

Javert and Valjean were both good and bad. They both believed they knew what was right and for the most part tried to live according to their moral code. Both illustrated the Man vs. Society conflict and in the end it turned out that society was wrong. Valjean refused to bend his moral code and was blessed by providence while Javert struggled to see a world beyond himself and so he took his own life.

Hugo’s genius is found in how his characters struggle through the conflict they are placed in and how their conflicts play off of the other characters. For instance, most that have only seen the play version of the story do not realize that Eponine is Gavroche’s sister, children of Mr. and Mrs. Thenardier who changed their name when they moved to Paris. One of the most touching parts of the story to me is at the wedding party when the Thenardiers show up to loot the guests, seemingly celebrating in the wake of the barricade where they lost two of their children who saw something greater than themselves and were willing to sacrifice their lives for that cause.

Farland showed us how to develop such a story by brainstorming character conflicts. Not just the protagonist against the antagonist but analyzing how every character would interact with every other character. There may be multiple protagonists or antagonists or contagonists and so on. As I have employed this type of brainstorming, I’ve been able to finish my stories.

I am grateful to the masters of old like Victor Hugo and to the masters of today like David Farland. I’ve added a book to my writing sanctuary, Million Dollar Outlines.

The Importance of Word Choice

November 12, 2014

Colette Black

Colette Black Craft & Skills Narrative Voice No Comments

Which plot sounds better? A maid stuck in a tower serving a princess for a thousand days, or a girl trying to escape a society where everyone is tattooed with barcodes and discriminated against if they don’t have them? Usually, I would say the second, but I read these books close to one another and the importance of well-formed prose became starkly apparent. I have to point out a bias here, Shannon Hale was an author I already liked, but after “Book of a Thousand Days,” she moved into the role as my absolute favorite writer. Why? Because she could take a plot so seemingly boring as a girl stuck in a tower and pull me in from page one. Reading her prose is like a serenade. When a story’s great theme has lousy prose, it’s like stepping into a brand-new truck, going down a bumpy road, and realizing the shocks are out.

Here are the first few paragraphs from “Book of a Thousand Days”:

My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years.

Lady Saren is sitting on the floor, staring at the wall, and hasn’t moved even to scratch for an hour or more. Poor thing. It’s a shame I don’t have fresh yak dung or anything strong-smelling to scare the misery out of her.

The men are bricking up the door, and I hear them muttering and scraping cement. Only a small square of unbricked sky and light still gape at me. I smile back at its mean grin to show I’m not scared. Isn’t it something, all the trouble they’re going to for us? I feel like a jewel in a treasure box, though my lady is the—

Notice the variation of shorter and longer sentences, the simplicity of language, and the inflections in the words that allows the prose to become like a melody when read aloud.

Both books are written in the first-person. However, at the end of Thousand Days, I felt like I knew the main character, Dashti. In the other, the protagonist was still an enigma whom I didn’t understand and whom seemed inconsistent. I think this happens, in part, from a focus on story over character. An indication that Hale knows her character well from the very beginning is shown by her word-choice:

“…hasn’t moved to scratch…,” “It’s a shame I don’t have fresh yak dung or anything strong-smelling to scare the misery out of her.” “I smile back at its mean grin to show I’m not scared.” and “Isn’t it something, all the trouble they’re going to for us?”

These statements tell us about Dashti’s background, her fortitude, her humility, and her simplicity. Of course, this is because we’re seeing the world from Dashti’s view, but the author shows us this view by word choice. Yak dung? Those two words tell us a lot about the story’s location and about Dashti’s place in it.

Don’t get me wrong, story matters and being a good storyteller with proper pacing and resolutions is key, but before you jump to tell the story, think about how much you can tell us by each word, each sentence, and the beauty you strive for in bringing them together. Author Dan Wells has suggested to writers on multiple occasions that we take the time to read and learn poetry. This is why; when we learn to string the right words together, in the right order, our stories rise in dimension and readers find themselves as transfixed by the prose as the story.

The Emperor and the Impostor

November 9, 2014

Kim May

Craft & Skills Kim May 1 Comment

Few things push my happy button faster than reading a story in an Asian inspired setting, especially when it’s done well. Conversely, there are few things that can earn my wrath faster than a misrepresentation of everything my ancestors lived. Let’s start with an example of the good.

The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson is beautiful story. If you haven’t read it than you need to put it at the top of your reading list. It’s about a forger that has to forge a new soul for the emperor in order to evade execution.

One of the central ideas in The Emperor’s Soul is that anything less than perfection is unacceptable. In the protagonist’s line of work, it’s a necessity. However that very same trait is one that is considered a fault in western cultures but prized in eastern cultures.

Another necessity of the protagonist’s profession is that in order to forge it, she has to know every aspect of it — everything that made it what it is today. It’s an ideal that Sun Tzu talks about in The Art of War. Popularly the concept is referred to as “know your enemy.” I don’t know if Brandon borrowed the notion from Sun Tzu. I do know that he does a fantastic job showing the varied nuances and complications such a study brings.

On the other end of the spectrum is a manuscript that will not be named. A friend asked me to read it and I never made it past the first chapter. In fact it took all of my willpower not to throw my laptop across the room. This story made the same mistake that I’ve seen in a lot of movies. They grab hold of the cool elements — Samurai swords, martial arts, ninjas, etc — and throw the rest out the window.

The problem with that is the history, philosophy, sociology, and traditions are so intertwined and influential on the cool elements that you can’t separate the two and do it justice. A Samurai sword is nothing more than an overgrown letter opener without the training, and dedication of Kendo. The man wielding the sword is nothing more than an armed criminal without the code of Bushido.

(Note: This particular manuscript is not the best example of the anonymous author’s work. That’s why I’m not revealing the book’s name or theirs.)

Is it hard to understand a culture that is not your own? It can be. Though I feel the end result makes it worth the effort. For me, it’s not just about getting the details right to show the inspiring society the respect it deserves. We’re in a time when the industry is very aware that we need fiction with more diversity; and we truly do. But what we need more than that is well executed diverse fiction that helps the reader understand the world we live in and cultivates respect.

In Loving Appreciation of the Story Swirl

November 7, 2014

Evan Braun

Craft & Skills Evan Braun Reading Reviews 1 Comment

As a reader, I have a lot of reverence for the cliffhanger. I think I am perhaps in the minority here. I can certainly remember a time when cliffhangers drove me crazy. Back when I was in junior high, I would anxiously (not boldly) go into the various Star Trek season finales, knowing they wouldn’t end well for my heroes and I’d likely suffer months of torment afterward waiting for the inevitable resolution come fall.

Now, an undisclosed number of years later? To put it mildly, I’ve changed my mind. I love cliffhangers. Love them! In movies, in books, in television series, in all their different forms. But we’re mostly talking about books here at the Fictorians, so I’ll continue in that vein. In particular, I love the way multiple storylines come crashing together in a maelstrom of calamity at the end of a book. I love how these storylines may seem unconnected—that is, until the disparate threads careen together like shoelaces tipped with metallic sheathes, all drawn irresistibility to a magnet (one of the strangest and most ineffective metaphors I’ve come up with, granted, but which I’ll fail to edit out only on account of its extreme curiosity). As a writer with a greater understanding of narrative and structure, I don’t often fall for this anymore, but I try to pretend I don’t foresee the adhesive “story swirl” that brings characters and plots together in fun, hopefully unexpected ways.

Nowhere has this been better executed than in Otherland: City of Golden Shadow, the first in Tad Williams’ Otherland trilogy (or rather, one of his patented tetralogies). I can remember exactly where I was when I first raced through the concluding chapters of that book. I was in my first year of university, secreted away in a quiet nook in one of the library’s upper-level alcoves; these alcoves were magnificent places, because you could spy down on people wandering the stacks unawares. Very little spying occurred that day, however, much to the delight, I’m sure, of the unsuspecting library populace (so far as a person ignorant of spying can be delighted that they are not in fact being spied upon), because I was engrossed. Tad Williams had my exclusive attention, and he held it in his unyielding grip of fiction prowess.

My carpool had deposited me at school about an hour before any of my classes started, so I had some time to read. But an hour was not enough time to get through the last 150 pages of the book. To this day, that’s an unprecedented amount of reading for me to accomplish in one day, never mind one sitting, as I typically do not read very quickly. My class’s start time approached, and I could not put the book down. I realize that is an oft-abused cliché in reading circles, and I don’t go to this particular well lightly. That well-worn paperback may as well have been cemented to my hand with skin-ripping crazy glue. My first-year psychology seminar could not compete. I stayed up in that alcove until I got to the last page of the book, and not a moment sooner. In fact, I only left quite a large number of moments later, since I had to sit silently in stunned, mandated appreciation for about half an hour after turning the last page.

That ending is a work of art which never fails to stimulate me, and I’ve subsequently read the story five or six times. It’s the classic “story swirl” effect I mentioned earlier. I fear spoiling this magnificent read with plot specifics, as my zealous desire is that this blog post will inspire you to search it out and experience it for yourself. Suffice to say that there are a large cast of characters, of different ages and ethnicities, in wildly divergent corners of the earth, in circumstances so unrelated that I could not imagine how they might conglomerate in the end. But they did, and it was (is) beautiful. I don’t think there has ever been a reader who got to the end of Otherland Volume One and then didn’t immediately flip into Otherland Volume Two, were it available. (Fortunately I did not have the second book available that day, else I would have missed several classes.) It would be like someone seeing Locutus of Borg declare war on the Federation at the end of “The Best of Both Worlds, Part One” and then say to herself, Meh, I don’t care what happens next. It has been scientifically proven that no such breed of human exists.

I dare you to prove me wrong. I dare you!