Category Archives: Craft & Skills

I had a nice conversation with occasional Fictorians guest poster Petra Klarbrunn about how she ended up becoming a writer. Here’s a mini-interview that gives a good explanation as to why some folks write.

Guy Anthony De Marco

When I walk into Everyday Joe’s Coffee House in Fort Collins, Colorado, it takes all of ten seconds to locate Petra Klarbrunn. A prolific author who writes under at least ten pseudonyms, she built a temporary wall of research books around her clunky pre-Lenovo IBM laptop to keep the world at bay. Her face remains focused on her computer, fingers pounding away on keys polished blank and smooth from years of hard use.

I place my order for an espresso and a cup of Earl Gray for Petra. While the volunteer baristas expertly craft the brews, I realize that my author friend looks more like a librarian than a writer of bizarro stories and niche erotica novellas. Her round Harry Potter-esque glasses are oversized for her small features, and tattoos of Marvel comic book heroes peek out from around her well-worn Batman t-shirt. Everything about her is a clash between multiple worlds. Marvel versus DC. Demure librarian versus hardcore literary dominatrix.

She remains in her own bubble universe until I pierce her event horizon by sliding the ceramic mug of steaming tea into the only open spot within her reach. Her clear blue eyes lock onto mine and she flickers the corners of her mouth upwards.

“Gimme a minute to finish this scene, would you?”

Nodding, I take the opposite chair at her table and locate a few spare inches of table space to set my cup. The coffee house is half-full of students from Colorado State University, and Petra blends in seamlessly. I’m easily the oldest person in the place. Most of the students are working on homework or socializing. Several kept glancing at the attractive brunette with the loud keyboard. Once I had settled in, even more eyes wandered towards our table. Was I her father, her friend, or something more? The enigma baffled the college crowd.

Petra finally pushes the screen down on her laptop, the old hinges squealing in protest, and she looks up with a lopsided grin. “I had to get that scene down before I forgot it.”

“What are you writing about today?” I asked while adding a little brown packet of raw sugar to my espresso.

“Chick porn.” She laughs with a clear soprano voice when a barista stops in his tracks at her words and then continues on as his face turns red. “Gotta pay the bills. This one is set in Ireland.” She waves at the books piled on the table with the grace of a ballerina. All of them pertain to some aspect of the Emerald Isle, ranging from travel books to historical castles. “I love to travel. One day I’ll make it out to Europe. I’m keen on visiting Wales, Ireland, and especially Scotland.”

When pressed why she wanted to go to Scotland, it was her turn to redden her complexion. “It’s the kilts. I can’t resist someone manly enough to basically wear a skirt and drink Scotch.”

Sex, a travel bug, and a sad childhood are what started Petra’s foray into writing erotica novellas for women and, to a lesser extent, for QUILTBAG readers. “It allowed me to travel virtually for a while, burying my head in travel books and online forums so I could forget my problems. Eventually, I had to get off of my butt and go see things without having to peer through a window made by IBM. By the time I was ready to get on a plane, I had 33 erotic novellas published under a couple of different pseudonyms. I made enough to cover my living expenses and to travel to my first exotic location – Los Angeles.” Her laugh is contagious, and eventually everyone in the coffee house is smiling.

When asked about her family, Petra admits she barely remembers her father. She does remember the tears and the sobbing that gripped her mother. “I was, what, five or six years old. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with my mom. She was Wonder Woman to me…indestructible, yet loving and warm. To see her so broken up, it broke my heart.”

Those feelings haunted Petra. In grade school, she fought so often that the principal joked he was going to adopt her because they saw each other more than he saw his own kids. “I was a terrible hellion. The girls start growing faster than the boys, and they were all afraid of me. I never had to wear make-up because I had a bruise or a black eye. Maybelline Fist, I used to call it.”

Unfortunately, when the boys started their growth spurts, she remembered the principal saying that she had better start to use her brain instead of her fists if she wanted to survive. “That made sense to me. Someone talking to me like I was an adult, telling me things that made logical sense…that was the game changer for me.”

Several bleak Christmas holidays in a row, one of them requiring a midnight jaunt to a park to locate a suitable shrub so she and her mother could have a tree to decorate, convinced Petra to settle on a career choice. She heard about the lofty advances that authors like Stephen King were pulling down, so that seemed like an easy method to get rich. “My god, what an idiot I was. Still am, now that I think of it.” She laughs and snorts, which causes her to laugh uncontrollably for several minutes.

“I was the proverbial broke, struggling writer until I wrote my first erotica—based in Scotland, of course. My roommate read it straight through and convinced me it was fantastic. I uploaded it to Amazon’s Kindle Digital Publishing platform, and it began to sell. I made more money the first month than I did waiting tables. I wrote another one in a week, and that one did even better. I kept writing, and the books got better and better as I learned my craft. I now make enough to pay my bills, my mom’s bills, and I’m taking her on a two-week vacation to Scotland next month.” That lopsided grin lights up her features again. “We’re going to drink real scotch and find out what’s hidden under those kilts. It’s my mission in life now.”

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.

Two Must-Knows About Your Inner Muse

February 10, 2016

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills Self-Awareness The Writing Process No Comments

Your inner muse is the voice of your experiences – both real and desired.

I think my muse went this way.... — I think my muse went this way….

That inner muse can be elusive. It is who we blame for our writer’s block.

But there is a secret to keeping that muse away from the straight jacket of silence. That secret is understanding the two truths of the inner muse which no one talks about.

Those two truths, once realized, will forever unfetter your inner muse. This month’s theme is about how life’s experiences shape what we write. We know that our experiences shape our perception and hence what we write. Experience also shapes what our inner muse reveals. But, did you know that there is a way to tap into those experiences while letting the muse do its sorting and compiling to create those aha! moments?

Tapping into our experiences happens when we’re aware of the two truths about the inner muse that no one talks about:

1) Inspiration isn’t always obvious; and
2) You may not realize what you know.

It seems that I’m stating the obvious. But without conscious awareness of these two truths, your inner muse doesn’t have permission to stay away from the straight jacket of silence.

What these two truths mean is that what inspires you to create a world and to write the story can be hidden somewhere deep inside and you don’t even know it.

Can you dig it out? Find it? Use it? Of course you can. The best way to do that is to not go looking for it. Sometimes, you’ve just got to let it happen. Sometimes you just have to be literal about being inspired. Here’s what I mean:

To be inspired means to be in spirit. That means giving your muse permission to access all that information in your head, all those observations and the situations you’ve experienced. It means letting your muse make the associations it needs to and to draw from the library of your inner knowing.

All you have to do to succeed is to trust it. Yes, trust your muse, trust what you know even if you’re not aware of it. Why? Because:

1) Inspiration isn’t always obvious
Sometimes we have an aha! moment which inspires a scene, a story even or a moment in the book. More often it comes from somewhere deep within. How often have you read what you’ve written and wondered how you knew to write that, or to word it that way, or your character has surprised you? Those are the moments when inspiration isn’t obvious and you may never figure out what inspired you to write what you did, but aren’t you glad your inner muse was working for you?

Our brain likes to make associations, find familiar in the unfamiliar, and find patterns. It sees shapes in clouds, a face in a whorl of wood, that phone number is all primes and if I add the first two numbers together…

The trick is to trust the inner muse and to trust that it’s working for you. Forcing the writing, forcing a scene, rarely works. It has to come from the characters and the situations we created and from the inner muse which understands those creations at a much more profound level than what we are sometimes aware of.

2) You may not realize what you know
I’m a kid from the farm. It took a little while for me to realize that most of my stories happen in rural settings in whichever genre I’m writing. I have detail which I take for granted and other people have to research. I understand the relationship people have with the land and animals. I have planted, harvested and marketed, I have prepared and stored food for the winter and have experienced limited access to store bought foods,.

It’s the same thing with the characters we create. We tend toward the familiar, especially when it comes to relationships. That’s when patterns in our writing occur. Strong female, weak male characters or vice versa. Female characters who hate their fathers. Male characters who are emotionally deprived heroes. There are countless patterns and stereotypes we fall into because it’s subconsciously familiar in some way. It’s the material the muse has to work with.

Whether it’s settings or characters, relationships or values and ethics, our inner muse has the information of who and what we are and uses it, even if we don’t realize that’s what is happening.

So we don’t always realize what we know and even what we don’t know. But when we consciously let the muse do its work, when we become consciously aware of the work it is doing, then we can form a relationship with it that changes what we write. We can give the muse permission to explore new situations, characters and relationships. This awareness allows us to ask for help to change the pool of information the muse has to work with. In a critique group I’m in, a well published author informed us that she had become aware that she always wrote a specific father-daughter relationship into her stories and she understood why. Now she wanted to change it up.

The two truths contradict each other:

“Trust inspiration” versus “Don’t trust what it’s telling you”.

Or, so it seems at first glance. But the real axiom is:

Trust Inspiration. Understand what it’s telling you so that you can change it up – if you wish.

We, and our inner muse, are the sum total of our experiences. As writers, we’re not always aware of what we know and what we don’t know. The more we write, the more opportunity we have to understand what informs our writing and to change and expand upon that.

You know that the writing myth that says you’ve got to write a million words before you’ve got a chance to be successful? It’s not about the word count, it’s about understanding your inner muse and developing a comfortable, trustworthy relationship with it. Sometimes, it takes a million words before you realize you’re basically writing the same story, the same themes albeit in different settings and milieus. Once you realize that, you’ve hear your inner muse. Now, you can give it new fodder, inform it with new information and experiences. You can give it permission to shake it up a bit.

Will you need a million words to do this? Maybe yes. Maybe no. And remember, I used the word ‘myth’ for a reason.

Inspiration isn’t always obvious and you may not realize what you know – once these two unspoken truths are understood, your life experiences will shape your writing in ways you never imagined it could! So, trust Inspiration and understand what it’s telling you so that you can change it up – if you wish.

A Game of Horns

February 7, 2016

mary

Conflict Mary Pletsch Superstars Writing Seminars No Comments

If you’re one of our newer readers, you might not know that the Fictorians were formed at the first Superstars Writing Seminar in 2010, or that our regular members are all alumni of the course.

There are lots of writing courses out there. I took a creative writing course in university, which was a great way to explore new ideas, work outside my previous comfort zone, and receive feedback from both my fellow students and my course instructor. But this course didn’t do anything to teach me how to sell the stories that I had written.

Superstars is not a course on how to write. It is a course on how to write as a career.

The best way to learn career craft – how to get an agent, how to read a contract, how royalties work, how to present yourself, how to create buzz about your work, how to turn your hobby into a career – is from the people who do it for a living. That’s what Superstars is all about. The instructors are not making a living from instructing; they’re making a living from writing.

Superstars Writing Seminars took me from a fanfic writer with a desire to publish original fiction, to a multi-published short story writer who now has a book contract.

I was able to go thanks to the generosity of those who helped me afford the trip. We know that not everyone is able to afford the tuition fee, and not everyone is lucky enough to have people in their lives who are able, or willing, to help.

That’s why WordFire Press and Superstars Writing Seminars, with Lisa Mangum as editor, launched the Unicorn Anthologies. Inspired by a quote from Kevin J. Anderson – “if you agree to write a purple unicorn story, write the best purple unicorn story you can; that’s professionalism” – the proceeds from these anthologies goes towards a scholarship fund, named for Superstars alumnus Don Hodge, to assist writers who want to go to the seminar and need help affording the tuition.

One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple Unicorn Anthology was the first. Now A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology is available!

The second anthology focuses on stories involving strong conflicts. Red is the colour of war; the colour of blood; the colour of passion and will. Conflict is an essential aspect of plot. It drives the story forward; it takes place when characters confront obstacles.

My contribution, Queen of the Hidden Way, is the story of Anpu, a royal daughter whose kingdom is under another’s rule. A third player wants to take the throne by capturing and ensorcelling a karkadann, a desert unicorn. With death and treachery all around, Anpu must choose her conflicts wisely, and in the end, decide what battles are truly worth fighting.

You can pick up A Game of Horns on Amazon in either paperback or ebook. Proceeds will help provide Don Hodge Memorial Scholarships for future Superstars attendees in financial need, and provide you with a showcase of the excellent talent of the Superstars.

The Unconscious Autobiography

February 4, 2016

Leigh Galbreath

Character Conflict Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Leigh Galbreath Self-Awareness Tropes & Archetypes World-building 3 Comments

It’s been said, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before, that all characters in a story have a bit of the author in them. Everything you write is colored by your personal preconceptions, observations, experiences, and random thoughts about life and your place in it. In a very real way, who we are leaks into the text whether we want it to or not. I don’t know if I’m the only one who has had this happen, but I find it interesting, and sometimes unsettling, when I realize something about a situation or a character is actually something about myself that I had not realized until I saw it on the page. In a very real way, our characters are our reflections, though sometimes distorted ones. Their experiences and reactions to those experiences are deeply colored by our own.

Now, this doesn’t mean that one could use a piece of fiction as a case study of the author. Authors don’t directly translate themselves onto the page. Most of the time this is an unconscious phenomenon.

In fact, this happens so often and with so little thought that it’s almost impossible not to write what we know. Our subconscious does it for us. When we need a scent, we pull one from memory. When we need to show an emotional reaction, we look at how our own bodies might feel in the same situation. If the character experiences something that we never have, we might find an analogous experience to inform what is on the page. While in most cases writing fiction is writing stories about other people, we cannot help but write about ourselves at the same time.

On some level, writing what you know comes without thinking. But notice the “without thinking” part.

The difficulty comes when we let our own experiences limit what we can and do show in a story. It’s extremely easy to fall back on our own point of view. For example, I find that my characters can sometimes be reserved, even repressed, about their emotions. As a result, I often find it difficult to push the emotional dial up to full for an explosive moment of conflict. That comes from me. I’m a pretty laid back person who doesn’t feel all that comfortable when people around me are really emotional. While I can bring tension, sometimes just bringing tension isn’t enough for a big scene. I’ve seen and heard about other writers who will actually skip hugely important scenes in their books because they themselves have no reference point, or their own beliefs or view of the world make it difficult to face what their characters have to do.

And of course, there’s that ever present failure when an author writes a gross generalization or something just flat out wrong that is deeply insulting to an entire group of people because said author didn’t look outside their own point of view.

For instance, I once knew a real young man whose personality was so over the top that he seemed almost like a caricature. At the time, I thought he’d make a great character in a book, but part of what made him utterly ridiculous was intrinsically bound to an entire group of people who are mostly not ridiculous at all. That character isn’t showing up anywhere in my work as a result. Some might think, to avoid this, one should steer clear of any type of character that is not like them. Sometimes this might be the right call, but limiting oneself to just the familiar often leads to boring characters and lackluster plots. Variety is, after all, the spice of life.

My point here is simply to be mindful of what is going into the mixing pot that is your story. Pay attention to those moments when a character trait or bit of setting or what-have-you relies a little too much on what you know. Look for those opportunities when something different can strengthen and deepen what you’re working on.

Who knows, your characters might rub off on you for a change.