Category Archives: Guest Posts

Warrior of Light

Craft & Skills Fantasy Guest Posts William Heinzen No Comments

(Guest post by William Heinzen)

Friendships play an interesting role in fantasy literature, and especially in epic fantasies, which feature large casts of characters. My novel, Warrior of Light, focuses on a young man named Tim Matthias who aids a group of refugees in their struggle against the evil sorcerer Zadinn Kanas. Tim is a figure of prophecy known as the Warrior of Light, destined to face Zadinn in an apocalyptic final battle. Tim’s quest is a true hero’s journey, beginning with him living in the relative peace of the South. Events outside his control, however, soon propel him into Zadinn’s domain within the war-stricken North. Along the way, Tim must come to terms with his own powers, facing a set of increasingly dangerous threats before ultimately facing Zadinn himself.

Many classic fantasy novels, from The Lord of the Rings to The Wheel of Time, contain variants of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Writers frequently use this framework because, as fellow blogger Nicholas Ploucha succinctly wrote, “it works”. However, as I was writing Warrior, I asked myself how I could include a fresh perspective on the hero’s journey. As I studied Campbell’s diagram, I noticed only minimal references to the hero’s companions. Oh, they’re in there – the archetypes in the journey include the hero’s “allies” – but such mentions are brief and easily overlooked.

I reasoned, however, that no victory happens in a vacuum. It’s all well and good to have a central character upon which the fate of the world rests, but what about the people around the character? In short, what about the hero’s friends? Every hero needs an everyman—the character the audience can relate to, the one without the power/mystique/destiny, the person who is simply trying to get by in life but nonetheless finds themselves caught in events much bigger than them.

And so I came up with the character of Boblin Kule, who is just as important to Warrior of Light as Tim himself. Unlike Tim, Boblin lives in the North. He has no magical powers, there are no prophecies about him, and if he had his way, he’d be sitting at home reading a good book. But he doesn’t have a choice—Zadinn has wiped out every last dwelling in the North, and so Boblin is on the run with a group of refugees, doing what he needs to do to survive.

Boblin’s friendship with Tim serves several purposes. He introduces Tim to the history of the North, and in doing so provides the same information to the reader. He keeps the action grounded—while Tim is using the Lifesource to burn his enemies to ashes, Boblin is fighting with sword, dagger, and fist (whatever gets the job done). He acts as a moral compass when Tim begins to question his role in the refugees’ quest, stepping in and reminding Tim of what they are fighting. Tim exists in the story to provide an enormous, heroic force capable of rising up and defeating the all-encompassing evil that is Zadinn Kanas—but Boblin exists so the reader has someone to relate to. After all, where would the great heroes would be without their friends? Sherlock without Watson? The Doctor without his companion? Frodo without Sam?

In each of the preceding examples, notice how the value the hero’s friend provides value to the reader/viewer. Ultimately, the friend provides a way to better understand the complexities of the hero at the heart of the story. The friend is a surrogate for the audience themselves, and it’s the same with Tim and Boblin. One has the Lifesource, the other has his sword, but both are an essential part of the Warrior’s epic journey.

When writing your own fiction, then, consider the ways in which the companions around the central character can enrich the story. In many ways, they may be the opposite of the hero, providing necessary balance and contrast to the tale, and providing a way for the readers to better relate to and understand the world within. When these friendships are crafted properly, however, I think we’ll find our stories are better for it.

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William has been telling stories ever since elementary school, when he discovered the only thing better than reading about sorcerers was writing about them. He holds a degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Jamestown in Jamestown, North Dakota.

William lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, where he enjoys hunting, fishing, being outdoors, and, of course, reading and writing. Warrior of Light is his first novel. Find him at www.WilliamHeinzen.com or www.Facebook.com/WilliamHeinzenAuthor.

An unforgettable friendship

Aimee Kuzenski Author's Perspective Character Guest Posts No Comments

(Guest post by Aimee Kuzenski)

Friendships – pure friendships, that don’t simply serve as a pause on the path to romance – can be difficult to find in YA or adult fiction. That makes the few out there special, and the rare brilliant friendship stands out like a comet.

The central friendship in Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (http://www.elizabethwein.com/code-name-verity) qualifies as one of the most memorable I’ve ever read.

Code Name Verity is a historical fiction set mostly in England and Nazi-occupied France. I won’t get too detailed about the plot, because despite the fact that the book was published in 2012, I refuse to spoil anyone who has managed to remain ignorant. Suffice it to say the first half of the book shows you one view of the world, and the second half tilts that view on its head and then kicks you in the chest. I listened to the audiobook on my commute and found myself sobbing the car, a reaction I honestly rarely have. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

What I can talk about is the friendship between Queenie and Maddie. Two girls of different classes in an England preparing for World War II, they represent the sort of tight bond that comes of shared difficult circumstances. They meet as part of the war effort, and each finds something to admire in the other. Maddie loves her new friend’s strength of character and brilliant mind, the way she’s able to sharpen her tongue on bullies and fools and get the job done whatever the cost. Queenie yearns for the freedom and daring she sees in Maddie, who owns a motorbike she rebuilt herself and flies relief missions over occupied France. They become inseparable, and when Queenie must fly there in the dark of night, Maddie insists on being her pilot.

They are traumatically separated, and the reunion is short and devastating. It comes as a shock, but it’s defined and ordained by the strength of their friendship. It’s not the end of their friendship – the relationship is revealed to be even stronger than the women could have known if they hadn’t been tested by the war.

The novel takes readers from Scotland to the basement of a Gestapo headquarters, from the cockpit of a stripped down biplane to the home of a tense but loving family in the French resistance. Wein’s research was obviously extensive and careful, and all the details ring true.

But the core of the book, what makes it special, is Maddie and Queenie’s friendship. Structured as two diaries, the first belonging to Queenie, the second to Maddie, The book details the women’s inner thoughts and reminiscences of their times together, and their love and fear for each other. Their friendship is the purest thing to be found in the midst of horrific war.

In an art form that tends to see friendship as lesser than romance or family, Code Name Verity takes the stance that friendship can be more important, more resonant, more long-lasting. It’s a gorgeous, bright, long-tailed comet of a relationship, and one I’ll never forget.

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Aimee Kuzenski is a speculative fiction writer with an eclectic history, ranging from the stage to circuit design to Filipino martial arts. A graduate of the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop, she is the author of Eye of the Storm, a modern fantasy in which the god of War takes over the body of a West Point instructor, and The Golem Factory, a fantasy novella about a thief who awakens a sentient golem. Aimee lives in Minneapolis with a hairless cat named Beatrice. More information can be found at her website: http://akuzenski.com.

Shave and a Haircut

Craft & Skills John D. Payne Writing Tools 1 Comment

The thing about tension is, it wants to be released.  This is true not just for bowstrings drawn back to the ear, unresolved chords, or tectonic plates grinding up on each other in the world’s most excruciatingly slowed-down dance club.  All of life, every life, is about the release of tension.

Sometimes the release comes quickly.  Sometimes the stresses just continue to build, ratcheting up ever higher, long past what we would have believed to be possible.  (On a possibly related note, it took me eleven years to earn my doctorate.)

But all of us are bullets, shots in the dark.  We begin explosively, super-charged with unimaginable kinetic energy– as every parent of a small child knows.  Over time, we lose it.  Our trajectories curve groundward, our orbits decay, and we fall.

It is in this sense that mortality is a coil, in Hamlet’s famous phrasing.  Life is a spring, tightly wound.  Tension is what keeps it all going, what keeps this whole universe humming along. Sure, we complain about the stresses we endure day after day.  But in a way, they’re reassuring.  They let us know we’re still here, still kicking, not yet resting in peace.

I’m in no hurry to achieve entropic resolution myself.  Oh, I know I’ll get there in time.  All of us will.  What’s the rush?  Yet, on we run.  We can’t help it.  Tension propels us, speeding us toward that ultimate release.

I think this is true for stories, too.  We all know the unbearable agony of being wrenched out of the narrative before we know our heroes are safe.  I think that’s why parents grant their children the small mercy of finding a “stopping place” in their book (or game, or show) before they have to come help set the table.

We also know that in the very best stories, you can never find a stopping place.  It gets its hooks in you right from the start and doesn’t let you go until the end.  “It rips my life away, but it’s a great escape.”

So, how do I make it work for me?

First, take a cue from Dean Wesley Smith and try exercising a little mind control over your readers.  Hang those cliffs.  Don’t make it easy for them to put your book down.

This doesn’t come naturally for me, but I’ve been experimenting with my preschooler.  He wants to hear stories every night, one from mommy and one from daddy.  And for the last few months, daddy’s stories have all followed a single hero (Percival Bunny-rabbit) in a continuous narrative, usually cutting off at the moment of maximum tension.

It’s cruel, I know.  And every time the boy flops back on his bed with a frustrated groan, or spends the next day begging to hear the end of the story, there’s a part of me that thinks it can’t be good parenting to torture him so.

But another part of me is delighted.

He tells me he prefers stories that have an ending.  So every few nights I give him a break and we come to a place where I can pronounce THE END.  But the very next night my boy is asking me if we have any “leftover stories.”  He can’t wait to find out what his hero is going to do next.  And neither can I.

Which is the second way I am trying to make tension work for me: keeping myself in suspense. I don’t like leaving things unfinished.  In fact, I’m like Roger Rabbit, positively vibrating with the need for  closure.

So I’ve been experimenting on myself, trying to use this tension as a driver.  Instead of stopping my writing for the day at a place where I’ve finished my scene and said all I want to, I cut it short and walk away.

The pressure of that incomplete ending, that unfinished chapter, pushes me to get back to the keyboard.  And until I do, the untold story is bouncing around in my brain– generating dialogue, action sequences, etc.  It itches at my brain, keeps me up at night, kicks me out of bed early in the morning to curl up on the couch with my laptop and punch out the lines that have been running through my head since my last writing session.

The experiment is still young, but it’s had some promising results.  I’m really excited.  I also am a little anxious, because we’ve got a new baby coming and I know that’s going to turn my whole life upside down (for the third time).  And then we have the end of the semester, and then summer (and attendant travel) is going to nuke my schedule, and then we’re going to move.

So even though I’m telling you this works, I really don’t know if I can even keep this up myself.  Will my new writing plan survive the month of March, or will it fall casualty to sleep deprivation?  Will I find the time to finish my novel, or miss my deadline and maybe miss my chance?  What will become of our peerless hero?

Find out next time, in . . .

PERCIVAL BUNNY-RABBIT

AGAINST

THE WORLD CRIME LEAGUE

Coming soon!

John D. Payne lives in Houston with his wife, two sons, and (maybe, by the time this post goes up) his newborn daughter.  (Still looking for names, so please feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.)  His hobbies include removing peanut butter and chocolate from the stupid white couches, blowing bubbles for little boys to chop with laser swords, and using a Mickey Mouse doll to do Pharaoh’s part in the Moses story (complete with Mickey voice).

John’s debut novel is The Crown and the Dragon.  His stories can also be found in magazines and anthologies such as Leading Edge, Tides of Impossibility: A Fantasy Anthology from the Houston Writers Guild, and Dragon Writers: An Anthology. For updates on his writing and stories about his kids, follow him on Twitter @jdp_writes.

Sexual Tension in Fiction

Craft & Skills Guest Posts Tension No Comments

Attraction is easy. Desire is a deep and constant companion for most people. Even advertisers know this. We all have idle thoughts. People go out on a weekend looking for sex, and may find it or not. This is not sexual tension.

For sexual tension, you need a compelling sexual attraction – something that really pushes a character to do something they might not do otherwise.

Often sex and romance get lumped together in fiction. Both serve similar functions in a story, and often the protagonists’ sex is an expression of the love.

But not always. People can strongly desire sex with people they don’t love first, or at all, and it can have consequences other than love. Sex can also be an exchange, or a pressure, used in relationships characterized by imbalanced power. People can deny their true sexual attraction and still have pleasurable sex with others – even of different genders than their natural preference – who are not their first choice. Or, all of the above at once!

Sexual tension is a thing of the body, of the senses, of the id. It is the realm of the cad, the rake, the femme fatale – and yet, it is for all of us. It is manipulative and often shadowy, if not actually dark. It is our selfishness, our self-indulgence.

In fiction, sexual tension has something inappropriate or unwise – from the character’s view, or from the story’s. I don’t mean to demonize sex, or advocate a subtle puritanism, but fiction is always a distorted and extreme depiction, and sex is always a vulnerable state.

Characters can deny it, or give into it. Giving in is inherently heedless – if the sex were uncomplicated, they would just have it. It may lead to ruin. It may be for the good of the persons involved if not the society that denies them. It may even lead to romance and love, but not easily, and not without great disturbance in other aspects of the characters’ lives.

For good or ill, sexual tension leads characters astray.

The endless no

Not all attractions get acted out. Sometimes they linger, unacted on. Long enough and these denials can age like wine into bonds of friendship, or fester into ugly thoughts, or simply drag at us, like tides from a moon we’re bound to.

This works well for series characters, whose relationship can develop over several stories. In a standalone, the reader often comes in the middle of the relationship. In either case, seeing the tension is often more economical than backstory.

Be careful, however, to keep it in its place – after all, the characters are by definition in denial. When we see two characters drunk, or on their spouse’s arms at cocktail party, you can get to mutual sexual interest quickly and believably. In a crime scene investigation, it’s unprofessional, badly comic, and disorienting.

Locks and keys

As I said earlier, uncomplicated sex is not tense. If sex starts with a tension beyond simple anticipation, an attraction has to be more than the opening of a door. It has to be an unlocking, or a hacking, someone gaining access.

The disturbance I mentioned comes from this access, or can precede it. A person otherwise capable of denial might have had a separate major change in perspective making them less in control of their emotions. Or, they might simply find a person uniquely attractive person. I combined these in my novel The Demon in Business Class. When my rival protagonists first meet, they respond deeply on a sensory level, each for their own well-foreshadowed reasons. They’ve also both been through enough change in their recent lives that they are too compelled by their feelings. As my Gabriel later admits, “I was tired of doing the smart thing.”

You don’t have to underline what the character wants. You can even provide them with regular dollops of something they don’t want, even if it’s their normal. Charlaine Harris did this overtly, making Sookie Stackhouse unavoidably psychic, and vampire Bill Compton her first experience of not knowing too much.

Conditional attraction 

The ugliest sexual tension is also the most interesting – when it isn’t mutual. A character’s deep response to a disinterested, or manipulative, other gives the other power.

Usually these come on fast, giving the character no time to think. Also, once another is empowered, they quickly take what they want, or develop contempt.

Remember that even in this situation, you need to consider both characters. It’s not enough that a person find themselves vulnerable to a predator. Why? It’s rare that another is so compelling to a healthy ego; maybe the character’s real weakness is a belief in a distorted version of their true self.

Meanwhile, the predator has to know its prey. Maybe it adapts to attract a known mark, or just happily senses the particular insecurities it knows how to enthrall.

The empowerment can come after the possession, too, like Scheherazade’s tales. If a powerful person takes on an inferior for a lover, but then is drawn into vulnerability, the stakes for the attraction become more compelling.

The movie Looper has a lovely and strange conditional attraction. The mother seduces the young hitman, not for any specific reason, and with a powerful excitement – an intuitive empowerment. She wants him when he is most lost, to get him to protect her son. It’s never stated, it’s hot, but it’s clear he’s the one changing, not her.

Closing the deal

Just as the moment of attraction says more than backstory, the sex that comes from the tension can express the tension economically. Sex isn’t a mindless act. Even if characters give into passion they still know themselves. They also tend to enjoy it. In positions of weakness, or sudden strength, they can still embrace that pleasure.

Sex goes great with any mature genre. Enjoy exploring all the unromantic reasons characters get together!

Anthony Dobranski writes stylish fantasy and science-fiction novels with big ideas and desperate characters. His first novel is the modern-day international fantasy The Demon in Business Class, from WordFire Press. He is currently writing his second novel.
He is a native of the Washington DC area. In his first career he worked for AOL, in Europe and Asia-Pacific, which gave him the international corporate background for Demon. When not writing or reading, he likes odd movies, challenging theater, and skiing.