Tag Archives: Tools

A guest post by Adria Laycraft.

How do you decide what constitutes the best writing out there? ‘Best’ is so subjective. Some love the endless descriptive prose of Tolkien and others go to sleep. Guy Kay is by far one of my favourites for beautiful writing, but again some just can’t get into his style. Some love to devour long series and hate short fiction, other relish the small bites and can’t settle into anything over novella length. Then there are the stories we all seem to agree on, and that makes a hit. So what qualifies as the best?

We could decide that the best are the ones who made it big–Rowling, King, and Martin, for example. While they often get criticized for prose blunders or formulaic writing or ignoring deadlines, they must be the ‘best’ if they’re the household names with heavy pocketbooks, right?

Or we could look at best as award-winning–Robert J. Sawyer is the only Canadian to ever win the Hugo, the Campbell, and the Nebula. He’s also lost far more Auroras than he’s won, as he often jokes, but he still has quite a few. So does that make his writing the best?

Or we could look at critical acclaim, high-rated reviews, whatever criteria we want. My point is, who decides what’s best? How do you define the word? And, more importantly, which kind of best are you personally striving for? It’s good to consider what constitutes the best in your own viewpoint when you think about where you want your writing to lead you. Winning contests might require a different mindset and writing style than earning rave literary reviews.

All I can give you is my own version of ‘best’, of course.

In my opinion the best writing fills the reader with a sense of awe and creates emotion in the reader. How does the line go? If the author’s not crying, the reader’s not crying.

When I’m reading as an editor, it’s not that I demand to be made to cry, but I’d better be feeling something along the way. This is why you might see a rejection letter saying, “We like your work but don’t feel we can get behind this piece in particular. Please continue to submit in the future.” The plotline is there, the prose is acceptable … those editors are just hoping you will hit the emotional mark at some point in your practice as a writer.

I love stories that catch me up with mystery and magic, and weave it together with threads of perfect description, subtext in foreshadowing, and plot twists that deeply affect the characters. They pull me along with those believable and adorable pretend people that we will never forget. The characters have to mean something to the reader for any story to fly, and the ‘best’ in my opinion make an art of this. My favourite examples include Frodo and Sam, Harry Potter, Katniss, House Stark, and Jilly Coppercorn of Newford (a place that becomes a character in its own right.)

What I see as the best writing is the kind that builds loyal readers that trust the author to deliver that same emotion again and again but always with fresh new stories. These are the authors that readers seek out on purpose.

There are far too many to ever do justice to here. Some fine examples I recommend studying include Patricia A. McKillip for the way she weaves fairy tales for a modern reader, or Charles de Lint for his mythical urban fantasy that allows us into the raw emotion of street life, or Guy Gavriel Kay for his lyrical historical fantasy that uses language and subtext and poetry to create incredible vistas of literary landscapes. Some newer finds for me include Michelle Sagara (try out her book Silence for a real emotional punch), and Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Boys), for a teenage viewpoint that doesn’t feel juvenile. All of these authors made an emotional impact on me.

So my ‘best’ has less to do with perfect prose, and more to do with story impact. Don’t get me wrong … I love it when word choice and rhythm all come together to make the story sing. But it’s meaningless to me if there is no emotional connection beyond the pretty words.

All we can do as authors is to write stories that matter to us. When what we’re writing matters, the emotions rise up, and the reader can feel it. No matter what else you might do right or wrong, I believe that’s the key to the best stories.

Adria Laycraft is a grateful member of IFWA and a proud survivor of the Odyssey Writers Workshop. She co-edited Urban Green Man, which launched in August of 2013 and was nominated for an Aurora Award. Look for her stories in Card’s IGMS, the Third Flatiron Anthology Abbreviated Epics, the FAE Anthology, Tesseracts 16, Neo-opsis, On-Spec, James Gunn’s Ad Astra, and Hypersonic Tales, among others. Author of Be a Freelance Writer Now, Adria lives and works in Calgary as a freelance writer and editor. Visit her at: http://adrialaycraft.com/

Clive Cussler, Guy Gavriel Kay and DJ McIntosh are Masters at …

November 20, 2014

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills Prologues The Writing Process Writing Tools 2 Comments

… the dreaded, overused, abused and misunderstood prologue.

I’ve never been a fan of prologues. Sometimes prologues create expectations that the book doesn’t meet either in story content or style or it’s an info dump. If it’s designed to foreshadow or tease I read no further because I want to experience that within the context of the story itself. The prologue must signal that it contains important information which can’t be placed elsewhere in the book. Before I buy a book, I’ll skim the prologue and the first chapter to ensure that chapter one is gripping and that the prologue wasn’t added because the first chapter failed to hook.

Sometimes the prologue works well and in the hands of good writers, you know the story wouldn’t be the same without it. The prologue should entertain, read well and provide a set-up that can’t be integrated into the novel proper.

In The Navigator, Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos interpret history to create a fast paced action adventure. Set in 900 B.C., the prologue is a well written short story with compelling characters, feuding brothers, interesting detail and contains a mystery that the reader knows will be revealed in the thriller’s modern day setting. Like the novel, the prologue is an action adventure with plot twists and turns. We expect that in Cussler’s books and he delivers.

The prologue in Guy Gavriel Kay’s novel Tigana is set back only 20 years and is a delight to read because although it is set in the time of war, it isn’t an information dump and it skillfully sets the mood and the theme. Unlike Cussler’s story approach, Kay paints only a scene between the court’s sculptor and the prince who are steadfast friends. This scene, in the hours before the hopeless final battle, the sculptor and the prince reflect that, despite knowing that they will lose this battle, their legacies will live on through their children and their work and they will die at the hand of a vengeful sorcerer for they have killed his son. There is also the delicate touch of themes, remembrance, the good and evil in people, the ugliness and beauty of a situation, hope and despair. ‘There was singing on the other side of the river too, he noted, listening to the enemy soldiers north of them. It was curiously hard to impute any absolute sense of evil to those harmonizing voices, or to hate them quite as blindly as being a soldier seemed to require.’ The writing is introspective without being melodramatic. ‘There will be ripples of tomorrow that run down all the years.”

D.J. McIntosh is a historical thriller writer touted as the next Dan Brown. The first book of her series, The Witch of Babylon, is set in 2003, just after the National Museum of Iraq becomes a casualty of war. The prologue is unusual in that it has three vignettes: the first sets the time and place, in the ruins of the museum where a thief after a relic observes a museum archeologist; the second where the American archeologist outsmarts the thief; and the third, where a woman is tortured for information and is left to die in a sandstorm. The intimate nature of these situations is information which can’t be known or revealed later because the story is told in the first person and not by any of these characters. These vignettes are handled deftly for they contain well-paced action and adventure written in vividly descriptive, yet not overdone, prose–just like the rest of the novel. For example: ‘And yet on the ninth day of the month of Nissan, a time well chosen by the invaders to avoid the brutal heat of summer, the city did fall, crushed as easily as the delicate shell of a baby bird.’ and ‘She dreamt of water—the feeling of cool liquid slipping down her throat, reedy pools at the edge of the Tigris, icy moisture on ancient rock walls. She was cracking and she knew it.’

These three authors wrote their prologues in very different ways. Each successfully conveyed information without it being an info dump and promised a story/writing style upon which they delivered. They all made for good and memorable reads: Cussler’s ability to deliver action adventure with an interesting historical twist; Kay’s ability to weave a poignant scene with thematic overtones; and McIntosh’s deft delivery of an action based thriller with roots in ancient and modern history.

Yes, that dreaded, maligned prologue can be a joy to read!

Writing By Example – Or Not

November 3, 2014

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills No Comments

Welcome to November!

With November being National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), many are writing furiously, getting those awesome stories on paper as quickly as possible. That’s great!

But how do we know how to tell a story? How did we learn to tell a story? By example of course! We know from reading them, what we like, what inspires us and what leaves us yearning for more. So we write!

What is that we have gleaned from the literature that inspires us or from that which we don’t like? That’s the big question because that forms the basis of how we tell our stories. We can take writing classes on composition, critical analysis and grammar but it’s what we subconsciously learn that prevails.

So for this month, we’ll be sharing what we think are some of the best and worst pieces we’ve read. This is done in the spirit of learning, making us better writers, as we examine what works and doesn’t work for each of us. In a previous post, Stillness – How Shall I Write Thee?, I asked how one could write about stillness and reflection in a way that was engaging because our characters may need to take time to reflect on a situation. I explored how Wordsworth captured contemplation in his poetry because the English Romantic writers so successfully captured ordinary moments and imbued their writing with deep meaning. It is in this spirit that we write this month’s posts.

Whether we read stories and literature form either current or by-gone eras, we are subconsciously considering what we like, what we think works and what kind of story we’d like to tell – or not.

So, sit back and partake of what we’ve gleaned from the stories we’ve read. And this month, look for a special post about Superstars Writing Seminar’s scholarship.

May your writing (and reading) be productive!

Stillness – How Shall I Write Thee?

September 25, 2014

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills Reflection Self-Awareness 1 Comment

Good fiction is life with all the boring bits taken out, not with all the hardship taken out.
Caro Clarke

Those ‘boring bits’ in life can be the most meaningful times yet it’s almost impossible to incorporate them into a story and hold a reader’s attention.

As writers, we are tasked to evoke emotion, to bring meaning through theme, to explore economic, political and social environments. Writing books and blogs tell us we need to delve deep into our characters to understand what formed his value systems, what motivates him and what he fears. Doing this creates characters in conflict and provenance for change.

In real life, change can come from moments of contemplation. During those moments we reflect, digest, and come to understand ourselves. It can be our impetus to change. Most often, I have found the deeper meaning in my life during the ‘boring bits’ like meditating or paying full attention to what I am doing like washing dishes or going for a walk. So how as a writer can I add these ‘boring bits’ in a meaningful way to my genre fiction? Where are those moments of stillness and contemplation in a novel, wherein a character takes time to contemplate and understand and is then compelled to act or change? How can we write it and still move the story along?

The act of reading requires active participation of the reader to turn pages or flick them across a screen. Interpretation, thought and emotion abound, thus the mind is never really still. There must be some way to bring a sense of stillness or contemplation to the page. How do we capture that moment when one contemplates a wonder of nature – a soaring bird, a beaver with a branch in its mouth, silently swimming past your still canoe, a gecko sunning itself or a cotton ball cloud morphing into a unicorn?

English Romantic Era writer William Wordsworth (1770-1850) captured such contemplations in poems and so masterfully conveyed his feelings that the reader is transported to the moment. Wordsworth’s simple moments became a contemplation of his life thereby revealing his emotions and what he values. His poem, To the Cuckoo is an excellent example of this:

TO THE CUCKOO
O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?

While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear;
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off, and near.

Though babbling only to the Vale
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;

The same whom in my school-boy days
I listened to; that Cry
Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.

To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.

And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.

O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for Thee!

Although writing styles and language have changed, perhaps we can still learn something from writers like Wordsworth. Stillness begets contemplation which begets understanding of character or a change in thought. This can be a call to action or a justification not to act.

So maybe, just maybe, there is a way to capture stillness or contemplation in a way so that it isn’t a ‘boring bit’ or elusive like the butterfly.

How do you capture stillness or contemplation in your stories?