Tag Archives: David Carrico

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.

In Praise of the Queen’s English

December 28, 2011

David Carrico

First, a PSA: Grantville Gazette VI, edited by Eric Flint and published by Baen Books, is on the stands now. It contains my story Suite for Four Hands, which is part of a series of stories exploring how musicians of the early 17th century might react if the music of the late 20th century was dropped in their laps. Check it out.

Now, on with today’s post.

What do the following words have in common?

Slept, dreamt, leapt, burnt, dwellt, swept.

They are all representatives of a class of irregular verbs. Four of them are also examples of a trend by American publishers to ‘regularize’ many irregular verbs in American usage. You’ve seen it, even though it may not have registered with you. Dreamed instead of dreamt, burned instead of burnt, dwelled instead of dwellt. (Slept and swept have somehow managed to avoid being replaced with sleeped and sweeped.)

This is apparently an American movement. The rest of the English-speaking world seems to be doing fine being irregular with irregular verbs. Now, I am not particularly an Anglophile. (But I’m not an Anglophobe, either.) Outside of Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m not especially fond of English writers per se. (And I’m not sure why I like Dickens-I just do.) Most of the ‘classics’ of English Literature leave me in a state of vast ennui. I will even admit to having successfully managed to avoid reading Shakespeare throughout my high school and college careers.

That said, I must stand up and shout against this trend in American publishing. Author C. J. Cherryh probably described the background and circumstances better than I can in a post a number of years ago. But regardless of the whys and wherefores of the trend, the fact remains that by removing the usage of these irregular verbs, publishers and copy-editors are removing tools from our writers’ tool chests. They are removing richness and flavor from our writing. They are, in fact, reducing our ability to write in distinctive styles. And I find that deplorable.

When I write, I quite frequently use particular words to create specific effects in the reader; ‘aural’ effects, for lack of a better term. In my mind, and to my ear, ‘dreamed’ has a different effect than ‘dreamt’. And I’m not rigidly locked in to one form or the other, although I have noticed that I tend to use ‘dreamed’ forms more in science fiction and ‘dreamt’ forms more in fantasy. But regardless of the genre, if I use one over the other, it’s because I want the effect of that specific word in the passage at hand.

I guess I’m funny that way. People can criticize my plots or my characterizations and I’ll listen with an open mind. And most of the time I’ll take criticism of my narrative and dialogue without getting particularly upset. But for some reason, if after due consideration I choose a specific word to create a particular effect, to have someone object to the use of that word really rubs my fur the wrong way. Of course, as a new author, the state of my fur may not be the copy-editor’s highest priority. Which, while probably appropriate from the consideration of publishing as a business, is unfortunate from the consideration of the craft and art of writing.

But today, the rise of e-publishing and the freedom it provides for self-publishing is creating changes in the traditional publishing models, and some of these arbitrary rules may not be a factor much longer. One can only hope.

So I sing the praise of irregular verbs! Join the chorus when it comes around.

On the Fictorian Art

November 19, 2011

David Carrico

Craft & Skills Narrative Voice Reader Investment & Empathy Suspension of Disbelief The Writing Process 3 Comments

The truth is, writing fiction is hard. No, correction, writing good fiction is hard. This is borne out by the fact that the majority of new books in any given year are non-fiction. The last statistics I remember seeing were that three out of every four new books published in the U.S. were non-fiction. And if you removed elementary children books from the mix, the proportion would be even higher.

At first that seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? I mean, when I look at a thick history of World War II, or a 500 page comparative theology book, or a multi-volume biography of someone like the Duke of Wellington, I am (reluctantly) impressed, and I think to myself that I could never do that.

Well, that may or may not be true. But let’s look at this logically for a moment.

What is required to produce a work such as one of my three examples?

1. The non-fiction author must do a lot of research and fact-gathering in order to lay the foundation for the book.

Does a fiction author have to do research? If he’s any good, you betcha. Why? Because an author has to know the milieu/universe where his story is going to be laid, whether it’s historical, current, future, or fantasy in nature. (See the posts about world-building.)

2. The non-fiction author has to organize the researched material to support the thesis of the book.

Does a fiction author have to organize her material? Yep. She has to make sure that her story is consistent and has continuity. Otherwise, people won’t enjoy it.

3. The non-fiction author has to present the information well to make his case, and to tell the story he wants to tell. (And yes, many non-fiction authors do tell stories.)

Does a fiction author have to tell . . . Of course a fiction author has to tell a story! That’s what writing fiction is all about, isn’t it?

So if the general skill set and methods appear to be so similar between the non-fiction author and the fiction author, what’s the difference between the two disciplines? Getting back to the initial theme of this post, what makes writing fiction hard? Or harder than writing non-fiction?

I would submit that it lies in the goal of the writer.

The non-fiction writer writes to impart information. That’s pretty much it. Oh, maybe she wants you to adopt a philosophical/political position based on her presentation, but it still comes down to imparting information.

The fiction writer writes to tell a story. That’s the difference. But more than that, the fiction writer writes to entertain, to enthrall, to enlist, to elicit, even to addict. That requires something unique, something not ordinarily present in non-fiction: the creative voice.

I’m sure there are people who will argue with me, but to me, the level of creativity required to write good fiction takes us out of the realm of craftsmanship and into the realm of art. No matter how good our writing skills are, no matter how polished our authorial technique may be, if there is no creative voice in the story, it’s a flop. And not everyone has the creative voice.

That’s not to say that skills and craftsmanship are not important. They are. After all, we really should know what the rules are before we can understand when it’s appropriate to bend or break them. But there must be more than that in good fiction. And it is the learning to apply the creative voice to the results of the research and the organizing of the material and the presentation of the material/case/story that makes fiction hard.

I’ve read a ridiculously large number of books in my life. I can tell you with some assurance that I have never finished a non-fiction book, then turned back to page 1 and started over again. I can, on the other hand, point to a number of fiction books where I have done exactly that. I can even point you to one novel that I read cover to cover eight times in the first eight days I owned it. Those authors’ creative voices entertained me, enticed me, drew me into their stories so profoundly that I didn’t want to let go.

That is the Fictorian Art. And that is what we as Fictorians aspire to-are driven to, in most cases.

Welcome to the Fictorian world.

To Infodump, or Not to Infodump-that is the question

August 19, 2011

David Carrico

Craft & Skills First Drafts Narrative Voice Reader Investment & Empathy Setting and Milieu The Writing Process 3 Comments

Actually, every writer with any experience at all will tell you that the question is not whether or not to infodump. The answer to that question is automatically yes. Yes, yes yes. The need to provide mass quantities of data to the reader is almost universal. Especially in longer works. Most especially in longer works laid in milieus that are outside the reader’s common experience.

No, the real question-questions, rather-is how/when/where/how much to infodump?

And as much as I would like to be able to give the One True Answer to those questions, there is no such critter.

If you were to put three authors in a room and asked them one of those questions, you’d get probably get somewhere between five and nine opinions.

Actually, I misspoke. There is one answer, but it is not an answer. (And no, I’m not going all zen on you.) The answer is . . .

It Depends.

Seriously.

That’s the only answer there can be.

Okay, setting aside the foolishness, here’s the hard core.

Yes, as a writer you have to be able to fill the void of ignorance each reader faces when he/she picks up a new work by you. My experience is that writers attempt to do this in one of three ways.

1. The Bulk Transfer Method

Wherein the writer attempts to stuff everything the reader might possibly need to know down the reader’s throat at once. Two common forms of this are:

The dreaded “As you know, Bob…” conversation, in which one character will recount the history of the universe from the Big Bang all the way through to the ultimate death of heat, coincidentally along the way sprinkling the conversation with little nuggets of data that the reader might find useful somewhere around page 397.

The ubiquitous conference, wherein various talking heads sit around a table and explain to each other things that they already know but are needful for the reader’s understanding.

The problem is that, especially when attempted by new writers, these usually result in large indigestible blocks of verbiage sitting right athwart the plot line, and contact with said block all too often bounces the reader right out of his/her reader’s trance. This is Not A Good Thing.

2. The Teasing Method

Wherein the writer attempts to provide subtle hints-a word here, a phrase there-expecting the reader to not only read the written page but also the authorial mind, and somehow pull out of the aether the missing context needed to understand what the author is desiring to communicate.

The bad news here is that telepathy doesn’t work any better between authors and readers than it does between husbands and wives (which, based on personal experience, I’d have to say is not at all), and readers quit in frustration.

3. The Pay As You Go Method

This is the one that most authors eventually develop, where they learn to tell the reader as much as the reader needs to know at that point in the story. The trick is developing first the awareness of just what out of the entire back story and world building framework the reader needs at just that moment in the narrative; and second, the skill to add that to the narrative in the right spots and the right proportions.

The frustrating thing is that, like a lot of guidelines, we have all seen successful writers produce successful books that ignore them. Well, just because they can get away with doesn’t mean we can.

Case in point: two or three years ago I turned in a draft of a longish story to my editor. Not long thereafter I got a note back: “You have committed a staff meeting.” Translation: I had a ubiquitous conference in my story, and she didn’t like it. “You know better than that. Fix it, and I’ll buy the story.” I attempted to justify what I had done by pointing to a recent novel by a well-known popular author that had a conference scene that ran for page after page after page. Her response: “You’re not him. Fix it.” I fixed it.

To summarize: Option 2 just doesn’t work. Option 1 doesn’t work well . . . except when it does. Option 3 is preferred, except for those rare occasions when Option 1 is the best way to go.

In other words, It Depends.

Final word: whatever technique is used to provide information, it can’t be just a static dump of data. Somehow, in some way, the presentation of the data must advance the story. If it doesn’t, we’re just building walls instead of roads to the end of the story.