Category Archives: The Writing Life

I’ve really enjoyed the posts this month – the insights into the history and motivation behind why we’ve all chosen such a difficult, time-consuming, and not-yet lucrative focus for our time. This month provided a rare opportunity for self-reflection, for looking back, and for reminding myself why I enjoy writing so much.

I love a good story.

It all boils down to that. As early as third grade, I began devouring books way above my grade level in search for great stories. I read widely, but gravitated toward science fiction and fantasy, reveling in foreign worlds, alien technology, and boundless magic. Many of the great stories mentioned this month are ones I enjoyed too, but I thought I’d mention a couple of other favorites from my early days as an avid reader.

First there’s the classic Sword of Shannara, epic fantasy from before it was clear what made classic epic fantasy. It’s one of the early greats ones. It had everything: the mysterious, powerful mentor; the young hero hopelessly in over his head; the faithful sidekick; the experienced fighter friend; and an ancient evil no one really expected anyone could defeat. It also included spectacular battle sequences, terrifying monsters, magical talismans, and memorable moments of wonder and horror. What’s not to love? Many of the sequels were good, but for me, none of them surpassed the parent story.

Another of my all-time favorite series was The Mallorean by David Eddings. The magic system was fairly simple, yet consistent, and the world well-developed. Most importantly, the characters were awesome. I loved how they interacted, how they each had a distinct voice, how even the minor characters had some interesting arcs, and important roles to play. For me, this was a series that showed how to manage and utilize a big cast of characters.

There are many other stories I still cherish to this day, but these are a couple of classics that helped cement my love of fantasy. I read so much, it became a problem in school and at home. However, it wasn’t until I started role-playing games that I really started recognizing I had a talent for spinning my own tales.

As a youth, I played a spin-off version of D&D with brothers and friends that minimized the use of dice (everything was done with a single die), and focused more on the crafting of great adventures. Through that effort, I soon discovered I had a flair for inventing great stories, for adapting quickly on the fly, and holding a group’s interest.

It was about that time that I started writing my own stories in earnest. In high school, I plotted out a couple of complete novels, although I never finished writing any of those ginormous epics. I wrote many short stories, some of which were actually pretty good. At that time, I knew I wanted to be a writer, to craft long, epic tales that would thrill me, and hopefully a few readers too.

Unfortunately, I went to college and fell in love with computers, which were just becoming mainstream, and shifted focus to become a computer programmer. That’s what became my career, what supported my family for over a decade until the desire, the need, to write began consuming me again.

Now I write as much as I can, and I’ve arranged my schedule to allow more time to write. I’ve written and thrown away well over half a million words, and have completed three novels and a novella that are viable properties. It’s a long road to become a competent writer, but it’s a road I’ve loved. Soon I hope to reach the next big milestone: publishing something, but that’s a different topic.

And I still play role-playing games, now with my kids and their friends. I still find it one of the best ways to exercise my creative muscles, to keep my mind sharp, nimble, and focused on what’s important in stories. It helps me stay in tune with what makes stories fun.

Because a fun story is a good story.

More Than Meets the Eye: Roleplaying, Fanfiction, and Giant Robots

May 28, 2013

mary

I’ve always loved the name White Wolf gave to their role-playing system: the Storytelling System. The manuals remind both game-masters and players that the goal of the game is not to defeat a monster or accumulate treasure, but rather, to tell a great story.

I began roleplaying when I was in university. One of my biggest frustrations in growing up was the increasing difficulty in finding someone to play with. As I got older, the games I played with my toys became increasingly more complex. Unfortunately, my playmates kept getting younger, as kids my age gave up play entirely and I had to turn to my younger neighbours, who complained when the stories I came up with were too complicated for them to understand.

Then I went away to university, in the dawning age of the internet.

I wasn’t fortunate enough to find a role-playing group at my university, but I did find a number of online, text-based roleplaying games. These are not the “RPGs” of Nintendo or Playstation fame; these are groups of fans who used words alone to describe environments, objects, and characters. Fans from all over the world met up online, took on personas, and acted out events. Simple code introduced elements of random chance into the game, and described the level of damage if two characters got into a fight.

Some players occasionally acted as game masters to lead characters through organized events: an alien visitor, the investigation of a mysterious disappearance, a quest for a treasure, a battle between two factions. Other times, players just got together on their own and explored the relationships between their characters, talking about the characters’ histories or dreams.

I didn’t find a My Little Pony roleplaying game, but I did find a few based on everyone’s favourite Robots in Disguise: the Transformers.

Excited by the logs I read-the interesting, well-developed characters and complex plots-I created a character and signed up. Finally, at long last, I was able to play Transformers with people who could keep up with me, who could challenge me and surprise me, and together, we acted out our own epics. I had daily practice writing my character’s dialogue, describing her surroundings and tools, and scripting action in a manner that was clear, detailed, and fast-moving. Soon, I began writing some fan fiction stories about my character, providing glimpses into her past and possible future.

I’d written stories before, mostly for school projects, a few simply to entertain myself. These stories, though, were intended to be shared. I posted them on the internet and published a few in a paper fan-zine.

Looking back, I’m surprised how long it took for me to realize that this was something I wanted to do: not only create worlds, but share those worlds with others. I did undergo a learning period, a time when my writing was focused on fandom (roleplaying, fan fiction, etc.) and I also underwent a growth period when I struggled to balance the time I spent on fan activities with the time I needed to create my own original, marketable fiction. I eventually left my Transformers role-plays, though I do still role-play occasionally.

Roleplaying gave me a chance to share my stories with others, to use words alone to describe settings and action, to refine my skills at dialogue with the help of my fellow players, and most of all, to keep me inspired and writing during the long years of learning my craft.

My Last, Best Hope for Mastering Structure

May 27, 2013

Evan Braun

Evan Braun The Writing Life 5 Comments

Earlier this month, I wrote about how Star Trek ignited my passion for writing and gave me the push I needed to start committing words to paper at a young age. Not all my early work, however, was Star Trek fan fiction; I also produced a couple of short original pieces, as well as a 100,000-word novel in ninth grade called The Investigators. What all these works have in common is that they were very terrible, though each one improved on the one that came before.

There are a number of failings in these first works, but the main problem is that I didn’t have a handle on structure. My understanding of plotting could be reduced to this: the plot is the sequence of events that occur over the course of the novel. I mean, you can’t get any vaguer than that. If you read my first novels (I don’t recommend it), this is evidenced by the overall sense that I was making the story up as I went along. There were so thematic underpinnings, the twists and turns came out of nowhere and served no purpose beyond surprise, and the characters did not progress through meaningful arcs. Lots of stuff happened, but none of it told a story. The plot points were random; I may as well have written some plot ideas on playing cards, shuffled them together, then wrote the novel based on the order of the cards with no thought towards what would make sense or provoke an emotional response in the reader. The plot was just what happened-and it could be anything.

In 1998, however, at the age of fifteen, I was washing dishes at the restaurant where I worked when a coworker, Carole, asked me if I’d ever seen Babylon 5. The two of us shared a passion for Star Trek, which is what we talked about most often, but I had barely heard of Babylon 5, even though the show had just about completed its five-year run by that time. Carole had the first couple of seasons recorded on VHS, so one day she came to work with a bag full of tapes for me.

I took those tapes home and began to devour them.

Much has been written about the unevenness of Babylon 5. Especially in the first season, the acting was rough, the effects were cheaply produced, and the writing was… bumpy. Awkward, even. And yet I immediately fell in love with the show, because it was the first time I encountered a television series that was unabashedly serialized. It was a show that was intended to be viewed in order. Though individual episodes had beginnings, middles, and ends, Babylon 5 told a larger story that could only be fully appreciated and understood in the context of many seasons.

Since that time, Babylon 5 has been followed by dozens of serialized shows, so many in fact that heavy serialization has become the norm. However, in terms of structure and planning, no show, in my opinion, has ever surpassed the high standard established by Babylon 5. The show’s creator and main writer, J. Michael Straczynski, personally scripted 91 of the 110 episodes, and wrote the last three seasons entirely by himself, with the exception of one installment. This resulted in unbridled consistency. From the beginning, he knew where the story was going. He had a full series outline. Many shows’ writers have claimed to have known the end from the beginning (I’m looking at you, Lost and Battlestar Galactica), but Babylon 5 is the only show I’m aware of that proves its structural integrity by directly foreshadowing its later twists and turns right from the very start. Rewatching the show, with full knowledge of how the show progresses and ultimately concludes, allows its genius to be fully appreciated.

Structurally, Babylon 5 taught me to think ahead. It taught me to think about consequences. It taught me to think about the significance of the events of my story, even the very small events. In fact, the very small events in my stories often end up triggering very large events down the road, something which Babylon 5 excelled at.

It could be said that Straczynski planned his show almost too well, with the effect of producing uneven episodes which aren’t always much fun when viewed in isolation. The plot momentum of that show, however, is pretty overwhelming-in a good way. When it comes to understanding the importance of structure, Babylon 5 provides a master’s course.

What If?

May 25, 2013

fictorians

Guest Posts Reading The Writing Life No Comments

ValoisTapestry_HeidiB_guestPost — Valois Tapestry

Every story had a question lurking just beyond its boundaries… What If? That question shaped the characters, setting, and plot of the tale told.

What If a farmboy left his home planet to join a rebel alliance (Star Wars)? What If all of the fictional locations of literature existed on a real map (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica)? What If a wizard lived in Chicago (The Dresden Files) and What If a two-thousand-year-old druid lived in Arizona (Iron Druid Chronicles)?

Growing up, I found I enjoyed most the What Ifs with fantasy or science fiction answers. If the answer to a What If was “literary” or real world, I wasn’t interested.

And always, always, it was the characters of the story, how they answered the What If, who kept my attention. They were the reason I went back and bought another book by that author.

So when I started writing my own stories, answering my own What If questions, I started with a character. Later I learned to use the word “protagonist,” but in fifth grade, it was just the person I wanted to watch in the movie in my head.

Much later, like after college, I figured out most of my What If questions came to mind while listening to stories about other protagonists, and the answer was provided by a side character.

The short story that became my first sale required the opening line “In Pigwell, time is not measured by days or weeks but by the number of eighteen wheelers that drive by my house.”

My question became What If a yeti terrorized the town of Pigwell every winter and a ten-year-old boy couldn’t stop it? (See what I mean about fantasy and science fiction influences?) So while the “hero” called in by the boy fights the yeti, the story is from the point of view of the boy, a side character.

My first novel’s What If popped into my head when my boyfriend told me about an RPG he played which took place in a fantasy city. I have no desire to play an RPG (dice rolls make my eyes glaze over), but hearing about his character’s adventure as if it were a movie can be fun.

The side characters in that kind of game are often referred to as NPCs-non-player characters, like a centaur, who give out important quest information. In my mind, What If that centaur ran a bar in a city overseen by someone who hated non-standard (Human, Dwarf, Elf) races? In the world of the RPG, he was a side character. In my world, he had a larger role to play.

Characters define the point of view of the story. The reader sees through their eyes and through their actions, the reader understands the plot. Thinking of my protagonist as a side character is also a helpful way to start a bigger story, since other players with other motives are then waiting on the sidelines to make their presence known.

Some series do a great job of this, such as the Legend of Eli Monpress. The thief is the protagonist, and as the story develops over the five novels, the reader learns how small he is in the grand scheme of things… and also how vital.

Because side character protagonists are the center of their world. They have to be in order for the reader to care about what happens to them. And you want the reader to care, otherwise they won’t buy your next book.

Imagine looking at a tapestry that spanned the length of a museum wall-huge and detailed at the same time. By focusing on one part of the tapestry, deciding to write from the farmboy’s perspective instead of the emperor’s, you get a different What If to answer. And you still have lots of room to tell future stories that include the other people and places and plot threads in the tapestry.

While every story started with a What If in the author’s mind, whom they chose to be the protagonist defined the adventure that happened.

And side characters can have some awesome adventures.

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Heidi Berthiaume is a side character in an epic story who writes, develops children’s book iPad apps, edits fan music videos, and has almost figured out what her own adventure will be. You can find out more on her website and on Facebook.