Back in April, I posted about procrastination. Since then I’ve been thinking about writer’s block and whether or not it actually exists. Sure, I struggle to write at times. Actually I struggle to write most of the time. But I can usually identify a reason: fatigue, stress, not knowing my characters well enough, not knowing where the story is heading, not being in a creative mood… I can give you any number of reasons why I can’t write today. But is it “writer’s block”? Or is it just me making excuses?

In the movie Stranger than Fiction, one of the lead characters is a writer who is unable to come up with a way to kill off a character in her book. The plot paints her as a wildly successful writer who is paralysed by her own success. But is this necessarily “writer’s block” or a case of someone who lets herself be overcome by circumstances to the point where she can no longer write?

I’ve read several theories about what causes writer’s block – it’s a result of stressful conditions, it’s a disruption to activity in a particular part of the brain, it’s a writer running out of inspiration… I’m not arguing these aren’t all real issues that can halt the flow of words but aren’t we using them as excuses? We’re too tired, too stressed, too busy to write, so we tell ourselves we have writer’s block. What other profession would accept this as a valid reason for not producing the required work? I’m sorry, I can’t paint your house today because I have painter’s block. I can’t clean your teeth because I have dentist’s block. I can’t sell you any milk because I have shop assistant’s block. It’s really quite ludicrous when you think about it.

So I’ve decided I will no longer believe in writer’s block. If Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny stop coming around because we no longer believe in them then I choose to believe that writer’s block will disappear if I don’t believe in that either.

This doesn’t mean I won’t ever be too tired or too busy to write. It doesn’t mean I won’t ever have one of those days when I sit at the computer for hours without writing a single word. It doesn’t mean writing will suddenly become easy. It just means I have one fewer excuse for why I’m not producing what I know I can.

What excuses do you dress up as writer’s block?

The Art of Writing Medicine – Good Medicine

August 17, 2012

Dylan Blacquiere

The trick to writing good medicine is starting from what makes sense. There are all kinds of medical mistakes in fiction that get laughed at by those in the know; these tend to go beyond the big ones, such as people walking away from getting CPR, even in the field. I recently watched a movie where a main character had what was called “heart failure” without so much as a cough or a wheeze; they collapsed quietly to the ground and when a monitor was placed on their chest (without exposing the skin, of course), it showed the heartbeat still in a lovely sinus bradycardia, slowly cycling down to zero with the big flashing green numbers growing ever smaller. What did the paramedics do? Chest compressions. No atropine, no external pacers, nothing. Of course the CPR (and a kiss from a lovely woman) brought him right back, at which point he began chasing the bad guys straightaway without so much as a warning from the paramedics that a trip to the nearest cardiology ward might be a bright idea.

Now I’m not saying that one must be a cardiology expert in order to bring a bit of high stakes medical peril into the story, but you do have to have a vague idea of what you are talking about. To continue the cardiac arrest example, only five to ten percent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests without external defibrillation survive, and even then, survival involves rapid transport to the nearest emergency room with blasts of epinephrine, a search for the cause of the cardiac arrest, and often times a prolonged hospital stay involving deep sedation and therapeutic hypothermia. You could avoid those things for the sake of your story, perhaps, but it would be nice to at least recognize of the seriousness of the event. In the end, of course, it all boils down to doing research and asking for help, if needed and available.

This rule usually applies most when dealing with fiction that takes place in the early twenty-first century with human patients as characters; the rules become more complicated when dealing with fantasy or science fiction settings. George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire does a great job of dealing with the nasty complications of unsanitized wounds in a medieval setting, and even obliquely references characters having epileptic seizures and inflammatory conditions such as gout, all in terms that make sense given the feudal setting. Many science fiction authors do amazing work in plotting out the various biological facts and medical needs of various alien species or evolutionary offshoots, usually taking off from known species and medicine that we are familiar with in our day-to-day lives and extrapolating from there. But these different styles and genres have that starting points from the well-established medical canon, and then letting the needs of the story take over. One of my favourite writers, who is also a good friend, has characters in her work with plant-based biology, and every time she talks about chloroplasts and carbon dioxide I start to smile. I also forgive any small errors, being in a much more charitable mood after seeing her work earlier in the story.

By now you may be detecting a theme in these posts, and that’s fair. It all comes down to doing your research, knowing (or having a fair idea of) what would happen medically in any given situation, making adjustments for the time and the place that you’re working with, and then deciding how much license your story needs to take with those elements. These really isn’t much point in trying to be pedantic; example above notwithstanding, most people don’t know the elements of advanced cardiac life support and will overlook or forgive most errors. But you don’t have to be exhaustive in order to have at least a partial grasp, and it’s always better in your research to consciously decide to leave details out than not to be aware that they exist in the first place. Even if you’re going the full-out fantasy route and plan to have your healing be with magic rather than moxifloxacin, it’s still not a bad idea to have an idea of what would happen in the medical realm and then figure out a way to have your healer’s spell do the arcane equivalent.

So, do your research, make your adjustments (if the situation calls for it), and don’t overwhelm readers with details – you’re not trying to write a medical textbook, after all! Keep it plausible and grounded in realism, or at least with realism as a starting-off point, and you should avoid the worst of the errors, such as a kiss doing what atropine could not.

Honoring the Giants

August 15, 2012

Brandon M Lindsay

Brandon M. Lindsay The Writing Life World-building No Comments

A while ago, I was at a book reading by an intriguing new fantasy author at one of my local bookstores. I’m naturally curious about how ideas originate and evolve, so during the Q & A period I asked him what other authors in the genre influenced him. I had expected a laundry list of the classics of old-Tolkien, LeGuin, Eddison-or at least some mention of today’s bestsellers. But the stammered and confused response I received was along the lines of, “I don’t have any influences, I don’t want to talk about it.” I left the reading feeling a little perplexed and disappointed, yet not fully understanding why.

This wasn’t the first time that I had this kind of response. I’ve heard similar questions fielded at conventions with similar answers given. It’s not something that’s made sense to me-I’m always quick to spout off my favorite authors and the things they do that I think are amazing-and given my inclination for seeking the origins of ideas, I wanted to know why people were refusing to admit that they have been influenced.

Of course, there is the fear that of being called derivative. Many, if not most, authors fear this, myself included. In any genre, but especially in speculative fiction, originality is of paramount importance. After all, isn’t that what writing is? The creation of something new? This is a real, and I think legitimate, fear, but I don’t think it adequately described what I had been seeing with these authors’ reactions, since many authors who fear being labeled as derivative have no problem discussing their influences. Deeper digging was required.

I believe the answer lies with how many people view creativity.

On a superficial level, creativity is the process by which something new comes about. That’s not controversial, but there is dispute about where this new thing comes from.

The common view of creativity is that it is intuitive, that an idea is not truly new unless it plucked from the ether, and not at all associated with anything else in existence. This follows suit with how many of us actually experience a new idea: sometimes it just pops into your head, and you don’t know where it came from.

But if that were true, every new idea would be completely incomprehensible since it would be divorced from any context we could comprehend (which is much the state of nonrepresentational modern visual art, and why it turns so many people off). In order for this new creation to be meaningful to us, it has to have some place in the world as we understand it, and thus it has to relate in some way to the things we have experienced before.

I think that creativity works the same way, but in reverse: the creator takes elements of their experiences and combines them in new ways.

Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity is often considered to be a work of staggering genius and the pinnacle of scientific creativity, and rightly so. Most people have difficulty understanding relativity, and can’t imagine how anyone else could conceive of it. But Einstein certainly didn’t pluck it out of the ether (especially since relativity helped destroy the very concept of the ether); he developed it as an answer to the problems that had been found in Newtonian physics. He combined his knowledge of physics with observed measurements in a way that resulted in a completely new theory. Far from being divorced from reality, his achievement attempted to describe it totally.

Other forms of creativity are no different. The unicorn, for example, is a mythical creature that has permeated cultures throughout the world for hundreds if not thousands of years, and is often a symbol of the fantastic. Yet ultimately, the unicorn is just a horse with a horn on its head and magical powers. It is nothing more than the combination of these attributes, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a completely original creation.

Imagine asking the creator of the unicorn to describe it. “Well,” he would say, “it has a horn, and magical powers, four legs, hooves, a mane and a tail… but it is definitely not a horse or related to horses in any fashion.”

This is akin to what many of these authors are saying about their own works in their frantic scramble to distance them from those of their influences.

Some of the greatest works of literature have clear influences. Tolkien was influenced by mythology (no, he didn’t invent the idea of Elves, though his Elves were nonetheless a remarkable creation), The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan can in many ways be seen as a fusion of Dune and Arthurian legend (the Aviendha/Chani connection), and Steven Erikson proudly declares that he was shaped by Glen Cook’s writing, and a side-by-side read of Gardens of the Moon and The Black Company supports this (can you tell I’m biased toward fantasy?). Despite the fact that their works were influenced by many things, they still stand at the high-water mark of creativity in fantasy fiction.

Now, I’m not at all suggesting that you should become a complete hack. Tolkien already wrote The Lord of the Rings; we don’t need you to write it again. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t let him or anyone else inform your own stories, so long as your stories and the elements that comprise them are your own.

Nor am I trying to diminish your creativity as being unoriginal. Utilizing what exists in the world and combining it in new and fresh ways is really hard work. Just ask Einstein.

So if you find yourself famous someday and asked who influenced you, feel no guilt as you give us your laundry list, and honor those giants upon whose shoulders you stand.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

P.S. My epic fantasy novelette, Dark Tree: A Tale of the Fourth World, is now available for free on Smashwords! I hope you’ll check it out!

Rebecca Shelley: Facing the Blank Page

August 13, 2012

fictorians

Craft & Skills Giveaways Guest Posts The Writing Life 5 Comments

Guest Post by Rebecca Shelley

I went skydiving once. It was a thrilling experience, one I hope to get the chance to do again soon. Ever since then, one moment of the whole experience has stuck out in my mind, that is the moment I stepped up to the open door on the airplane and looked down at the ground so many thousands of feet below me.

The wind whipped my face, stinging my cheeks, and my stomach dropped to my toes. I knew I had to jump, but every instinct screamed that I should not. My instinct for self preservation had kicked in, and if I had listened, I would have missed out on one of the most exciting adventures of my life.

Fortunately I was jumping in tandem with an instructor, which means our harnesses were hooked together. He didn’t hesitate, so I couldn’t hesitate either. Together, we thrust ourselves from the plane and fell.

If you’re a writer you’ve probably experienced something similar to that moment before I jumped out of the plane-the stomach-dropping moment of opening a new file and facing the blank page. Even if you’re an experienced writer like I am and have faced that same blank page every morning for thirty years, there is still that flash moment of uncertainty. The desire for self preservation that makes you hesitate, wondering am I good enough, can I put into words the story that is swirling in my mind, what will my readers think of this, what will the reviewers or the critics say?

I’m sorry to say this moment of consternation that comes with the blank page doesn’t go away over time, the more things you published even, the more this feeling can intensify. It feels like so much is at stake and it would take almost inhuman courage to just get writing. If you’re feeling this way, it may (or may not) help to know the feeling is normal. Here’s what I do to combat it.

Jump

Jump. Stop staring at the blank page, stop taking in the dizzying height and jump. When you first open the blank page, jump into writing as fast as you can. When I first start writing in the morning, I put my hands on the keyboard and start typing whatever comes into my head, which usually turns out to be a selfish rant about everything bugging my in my life for example:

(My carpet is terrible, I need new carpet, and paint and furniture, my stove won’t even work. I don’t dare let people come to my house until I can get it all fixed up but I don’t have money for that because all the money goes to pay school fees and medical stuff and car repairs ack. I can’t even deal with the money issue right now and I really really hate my carpet.)

My initial jump onto the page completely ignores spelling and punctuation. All I’m doing is jumping, getting my hands moving on the computer keys.

Then gradually as I type I run out of things to rant about and can start typing my feelings and impressions about the book I’m working on or about to work on. Random ideas about character, things I think I need to go back and change, how I want the scene to go. Words I might want to use in describing the setting.

At this point I’ve already jumped out of the plane and experienced free fall. Now, I pull the chute and it opens, slowing my descent. By writing about the book or scene, I’m creating a parachute which I can control and steer toward the landing spot on the ground.

That landing spot, the place where my feet touch ground, is the point where I’m fully engaged in the point of view of the character in the scene I’m working on. I’ve left behind my real life and all its problems as I fell and worked my way into the life and problems of my character and am ready to live the book I’m writing.

So here’s my challenge to myself and everyone out there facing the blank page. Jump!

For those of you who take my challenge, I’m offering a free copy of my latest ebook Wings and the White Horse. Just email me at rebeccashelley at rebeccashelley dot com with your jump story, and I’ll give you a coupon code for the book.

Ode to a Blank Page

By Rebecca Shelley

So beautiful

Clean and White

Unsmudged by ink and its offenses

You stare at me

I stare at you

Eye to eye

Daring each other to blink

What muse would thrust the first stroke of words?

What writer would dare to pour heart-pumped blood onto the page?

Knowing that no critique can despise the empty white

No reviewer can chastise the unwritten word

I stand on the brink, trembling with uncertainty

And you, oh daunting nemesis, taunt me

Questioning my skill and courage

With the weight of Atlas on my fingers

I reach for the keyboard and strike

_________________________

Rebecca Shelley is the author of over 27 books, including the best selling Smartboys Club series, and the beloved Dragonbound series. Her latest book, Wings and the White Horse, celebrates her love of flying.

Wings and the White Horse

After her father dies, Jolain Thomas must decide whether to pursue the career her father set out for her or follow her lifelong dream to become a professional pilot. Gathering her courage, she chooses her dream but falls into the clutches of a desperate kidnapper. Now she must battle her fears and fly through a dangerous storm if she is to survive and save the kidnapped baby.

Includes a bonus short story, “Magic Works,” in which a line of magical housecleaning products causes mayhem.