Category Archives: Craft & Skills

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.

Programmers, Hackers, and Technology

Character Craft & Skills Matt Jones World-building 4 Comments

As a Software Engineer and Security Analyst, one of the things that always bothers me in modern media is how programmers and hackers are portrayed. There seems to be a common belief that they have almost magical powers to pull usernames and passwords out of the air or complete complex tasks in seconds. I know my complaint is common and that anyone in a specialized profession can share my angst, but I thought I would write a little bit on how it actually works. In order to maintain the tempo of your novel, you may be inclined to skip all my advice and use HollywoodOS (the fake Hollywood systems) but at least you’ll be more informed. I’ll try to talk about where we are and where I believe we’re going in the future.

Starting with programmers, we’re a group very similar to writers. All of our work is creative in one way or another. Most of us are given (or help create) a specification that defines what the finished project will be like. Consider this your outline that talks about each chapter and how the characters move around in it. And much like writing the pages of the novel takes time, writing a full application takes a while to code. This is changing even in our lifetimes, however. Frameworks exist that give the developer the ability to create fully functional applications in a short time. Consider this like having a library of plot snippets that you can freely take and insert into your novel. All that is left is to customize the look and flow between the parts. As this advances, I can easily see a future where “programmers’ just tell a system what they want, how they want it to look, and the resulting application is built for them.

Next we have the hackers. I will say that the term “hacker’ has many connotations and many of them are negative when they shouldn’t be. The word hacker itself is used to describe a group that enjoys the challenge of building new things. This can be that kid down the road that turned his wagon and lawnmower into an awesome go-cart, or even you as a writer. It also commonly talks about people who break software or computer security. Technically, this group should be called a cracker, but since using the term hacker to refer to this group is so common, I’ll bear it and follow suit.

Hackers have many different subsets and it’s hard to classify them as a group. I’ll touch on a couple of the subsets here, but I can’t touch on all of them. First, I’ll talk about the lower class members commonly (and usually derogatorily) called script kiddies. This group attacks using software or scripts obtained from various sources. While their methods are effective, they often do not understand the full mechanics of the attacks they are carrying out. They are quick to take advantage of systems that are out of date and not very well maintained, but are unable to penetrate well maintained systems that may not have any vulnerability already exploited. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a well organized group that gathered and used these scripts as a form of cyber-warfare.

The other side of that coin, and in my eyes the elite group, are the security experts. These are the members who write the code and find the exploits that the other groups use. This group looks the systems and start prodding them to try to figure out how they work. The simple way of looking at this group is like a spy attempting to enter an enemy’s base. They first scout it to determine how it’s configured and look at all the entrances. With enough information they can pretend to be someone else and walk through the front door, or learn the weak points and attack there. Most commonly, unlike the movies would have you believe, this process does not involve the user sitting at the login screen trying to guess the password. They involve lots of surveillance, analysis, and a great deal of luck.

There is one final group that should probably be included and that’s the social engineer. This is probably the most common type of hacker in television and tv. The social engineer doesn’t look at exploiting the computers, but rather the people who work on them. A social engineer attempts to deceive the users to give them information that can then be used to access the system. This information can be usernames, passwords, secret information concerning the infrastructure, or even just access to the secure systems themselves.

While this only briefly touches on these technological roles, I hope you find them useful in building your characters and perhaps making them a little more realistic. If you have any questions or comments, please ask them below!

What I Did (and Didn’t) Learn from Writing Fan Fiction (Part One)

Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch The Writing Life 1 Comment

Fan fiction has a mixed reputation because it is amateur writing.  That’s not a judgment of its quality, which can range from juvenile  to truly excellent, depending on the individual writer’s skill.  Merriam-Webster defines “amateur” as “one who engages in a pursuit… as a pastime rather than as a profession” (www.m-w.com) and that’s exactly what fan fiction is:  writing for pleasure, rather than for hire, or with the expectation of selling the finished product.

Fan fiction will always be amateur writing because, for legal reasons, it’s usually not sellable.  Fan fiction writers are borrowing other people’s characters and worlds, typically without permission, so fan fiction exists in a legal “grey area.”

One of the hardest things for me when I began to write with an eye towards publication (as opposed to for my own entertainment) was to largely give up fan fiction.  I simply don’t have enough writing time to be able to make good progress on my professional projects while supporting ongoing fan fiction series.  And, when I made that switch, I found there were some aspects where fan fiction hadn’t helped me develop as a writer, as opposed to other areas where I benefited greatly from what I learned while creating my reams of amateur stories.

What I did learn from fan fiction?

Voices and characterization.  As I borrowed others’ characters, I began to recognize when phrases or actions seemed out-of-character for them.  This skill helped me develop more individualized original characters.  Different people have different manners of speaking, different standards of behaviour, different motivations; once you know these things about a character, you can extrapolate what the character will do in any given situation.

Change comes gradually.  If you want to take a character in a new direction, or portray a relationship that’s not explicit in canon, you need to show the changes evolving in a manner that seems natural and logical.  Similarly, in my own writing, changes of heart needed to take place gradually and believably.

Tone, mood and theme.  When I made up original characters, I discovered that some fit the already-established tone, mood, and theme of the universe, and others really didn’t-even though they were great characters on paper.  Some of them even found homes in other stories, where they fit much better.

The value of a writing community.  In my early days when I was writing drek, I benefited from having a community of fans willing to take the time to read the drek and offer feedback.  I also shared tips with other fan fiction writers.  I saw how much more difficult it was to get an audience for original fiction by a beginner author.  Having a shared interest in a TV show, manga, movie, or other fictional universe gave me something in common with my earliest readers.  The feedback gave me motivation to keep writing until what I produced wasn’t exactly drek any more-at least, not all the time.

What I didn’t learn from fan fiction – coming next post.

The Art of Writing Medicine – Introduction

Craft & Skills The Writing Life 5 Comments

I think everyone gets a strange mixture of feelings when reading characters who do the same things we do. When a character in a piece of writing has the same hometown, or the same hobbies, I always get excited to see how true the details ring – never wanting the story to get bogged down with the shout-outs, mind, but interested enough to see if the writer knows what they’re talking about. It’s always the most fun, though, when someone has the same job as me.

You see, I’m a physician. And people love to write about physicians, about medicine; in fact, we’re one of the great tropes of genre fiction. Sci-fi, thrillers, even romance novels love to have physicians in them. It’s a perfect setup! If you’re writing a noble protagonist, who better to be selfless and caring, dedicated to healing the sick and doing good works for all? If you want a slick, smarmy villain, who better than the thoughtless physician who cares nothing for patients, deep in the pockets of the pharmaceutical agency or some other sinister cabal? We do half-crazed pretty well, with all kinds of pretensions to playing God; mad doctors have been a staple of science-fiction and fantasy since Frankenstein and Moreau.  A dashing love interest for the romantic hero or heroine – who wouldn’t want to snag a rich doctor, probably good with kids and not too bad on the eyes? The physician is one of those great tropes in fiction that can go any way you please, hero to villain to anything in between.

Even when we aren’t the focal point, doctors make great Fifth Business, as Robertson Davies might have said.  Physicians can be great plot propellers, even if they aren’t main characters – who better to provide exposition to a sudden health crisis, or be forced to reveal some terrible secret, or be a focal point that the heroes must find to heal an injured comrade. Really, a physician can be almost anything in the story, and done well, there’s almost no role that we can’t fill.

Done well, though – there’s the problematic thing.

As with any field, medicine can be a hard thing to write. There is a lot of detail involved, and getting something wrong can turn a knowledgeable reader into a ruthless editor. This is no different from computer science, or history, and it can depend on the scale of the error; getting the name of the surgical instrument wrong is a far cry from an unrealistic portrayal of childbirth or a head injury. As well, getting the details right doesn’t help if the scale of detail swamps the reader. I once wrote a story where a crucial plot point depended on the reader knowing how chromosomes divided during reproduction, and while I think I did a good job explaining the process, it still was nearly half a page of a cytogenetics lecture. It can take a lot of skill to do this properly – or to realize if there’s a better way to explain it altogether.

My next few posts will be dedicated to the art of writing medicine. Sooner or later most writers have some medical plot point or physician character, even if minor. In my next post we’ll talk about some of the common pitfalls that writers experience beyond just getting the medical science wrong.  After that, we’ll take a look at how to write a good physician character, how to write believable medicine in your fiction, and we’ll even look at how to use it in “realistically unrealistic” ways for those of you who like your medical science mad. I’ll talk about other health professions in fiction beyond the physician – after all, multidisciplinary teams are the norm these days – and finally, we’ll look at some interesting ways that medicine could be used beyond the routine tropes of fiction.

I’m looking forward to this Grand Rounds of Fictional Medicine, and I hope you are too.