Olympic Orgasm

So, um, I had ideas for my weekly Meaty Mondays post, but, um, this hockey game kind of got in the way...

Canada's awesome men's team just beat the equally-awesome Team USA to win the gold medal--a fact that not only makes a lot of Canadians ecstatic, but also gives our country the all-time record for most gold medals won at a winter Olympic games. Like, whoa. Go team!

I live in the Olympic city. This is what downtown Vancouver looks like at this moment. The noise beggars description; Vancouver is roaring.

Lots of random happy people:


Robson Street:


They call us tree-huggers for a reason, you know.


I wish I'd gotten a better shot of these guys' awesome maple leaf turbans:


More random happy people:


Two guys riding down the zipline:


The river of red and white:


More random happy people:


With random happy puppets:


The heart of the celebration (the crush of the crowds got scary-intense up here, so we didn't go much farther):


Yay, Team Canada! But also kudos and congratulations to Team USA for their brilliant performance and their silver medal.

I shall not lie: you guys had us pooping out mason blocks.

The Werewolves Are Laughing Their Tails Off At Us

Thanks to Writtenwrydd for pointing out this hugely interesting article by Michael Briggs, husband of Patricia Briggs, on silver and how it can be used (but not without a LOT of effort) to make silver bullets.

Silver Bullets

"[P]rior to the industrial revolution, there was insufficient sulfur in the atmosphere to tarnish silver."

"Because some organic poisons contain high concentrations of sulfur, it was found that poisoned food or wine could blacken silver on contact, leading to the widespread custom of drinking from silver cups, or eating with silverware."

Golden Girls

First, allow me to apologize, in a typically Canadian way, for the following outburst of unrestrained and thus rather un-Canadian enthusiasm.


YAY!! Congratulations to the Women's Hockey team!

Like, You Know...?

Thanks to FairyHedgehog for twittering about this very cool and entertaining video:

"[T]he most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago."

Writing Advice From Famous Authors

This has been circulating for a few day, but hey, it's good! So I'll circulate it too.

Here and here are two webpages full of lists of advice from a variety of respected authors. Some of their "rules" of very wise, some are very funny, and below I list enough of my favourites to fall afoul of the principles of Fair Use. Oops. I do recommend reading the full lists at the links above!

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

7 [T]here's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.


Roddy Doyle

1 Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.


Helen Dunmore

4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away.

7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.


Geoff Dyer

2 Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés... Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.


Anne Enright

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.


Richard Ford

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

2 Don't have children.

3 Don't read your reviews.


Jonathan Franzen

6 The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.


Esther Freud

7 Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.


Neil Gaiman

5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.


David Hare

7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.

10 The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".


PD James

5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.


AL Kennedy

6 Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.

9 Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

10 Remember writing doesn't love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.


Hilary Mantel

1 Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.


Michael Moorcock

10 Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.


Michael Morpurgo

10 With all editing, no matter how sensitive – and I've been very lucky here – I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.


Andrew Motion

5 Remember there is no such thing as nonsense.


Joyce Carol Oates

1 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.


Annie Proulx

1 Proceed slowly and take care.

2 To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.


Philip Pullman

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.


Ian Rankin

9 Get lucky.

10 Stay lucky.


Will Self

5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

8 The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply.

9 Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.


Zadie Smith

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.


Colm Tóibín

3 Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.

7 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.


Sarah Waters

3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick...

9 Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce... Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end.

10 Talent trumps all. If you're a ­really great writer, none of these rules need apply.


Jeanette Winterson

4 Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are doing is no good, accept it.

6 Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.

Quality Over Quirkiness

Here's an interesting article linked to on Twitter by Dale McGladdery:

'Good' Beats 'Innovative' Nearly Every Time

While we're fond of trumpeting the praises of Apple, whose iPod revolutionized music, we forget how dismal the competition was. It was not a field of masterpieces; it was a motley crew of ugly, clunky, painfully hard-to-use devices. Apple applied basic design sense to an immature field at a time when the world was ready for something better.

...

If your competitors are mediocre, the merely good can seem exceptional. All things being equal, in a battle between a good product and an innovative one, the good one will usually win.

The relevance of this to writers is obvious: The quality of your storytelling is more important than the bonafide dewy-freshness of your idea.

Of course, a fresh idea combined with great storytelling is a blockbuster combination! But if you haven't got both, strive for quality over quirkiness.

You can't build a writing career based on mediocre books. People will wait five loyal years for a novel from an author they trust, but they won't even remember to look for the books of an author who disappointed them--even if that author comes up with really fresh ideas.

Dealing With Jealousy: Learn, Don't Burn

As a child, I once asked my grandmother what the difference between jealousy and envy was. She defined it as follows: Jealousy is when you wish you had what someone else has; envy is when you wish they didn't have it.

It made sense to me, but I note not everyone defines those terms the same way. A lot of us use the words jealousy and envy interchangeably.

Psychologists define things roughly the way my grandmother did, but they use different terms entirely. They define "benign envy" to be coveting what someone else has, and "malicious envy" to be wishing to deprive the other person of the thing that you covet.

Benign envy feels like sadness, self-pity. It's associated with the urge to mope. The person feeling benign envy is focused on themselves.

Malicious envy feels like anger, rage. It's associated with the urge to do harm. The person feeling malicious envy is focused on the other person. They are often willing to destroy their own chances of getting the thing they want as long as their actions also deprive the other person of having it.

When Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote about Surviving Someone Else's (Professional) Jealousy, she provoked a goodly amount of discussion and argument. Some people said jealousy could be useful, that it could spur a writer to greater heights, whereas Ms. Rusch argued firmly that jealousy was damaging to everyone involved.

I think part of the disagreement stemmed from the various parties not making a distinction between benign envy and malicious envy. They were arguing about the merits of different concepts.

In Eileen Cook's SiWC 2009 presentation, Psych 101 for Fiction, which I covered in this blog post, she noted that success is more strongly correlated with optimism than it is with talent or IQ.

Optimists don't give up, and that's why they succeed. (And the nice thing about optimism is that even if you're not naturally optimistic, you can fake it by being bloody-minded stubborn.)

I think the people arguing in favour of jealousy as a useful driving force for writers were thinking in terms of how an optimist deals with benign envy.

The optimist feels icky, temporarily, to see someone else enjoying the success they want. But then, being an optimist at heart, they get over the moping and try even harder. They begin to see the fact that someone who (in their eyes) is less deserving of success has it as a kind of encouragement, i.e. "If Fred Hack over there can do it, I definitely can!"

I think Ms. Rusch was arguing so hard against jealousy because she was focused mainly on the kinds of malicious envy she had seen and suffered in her professional career.

My own take on this is that Ms. Rusch is correct in saying that jealousy is never helpful. Benign envy doesn't get you anything, and malicious envy is a symptom of psychological issues you really should see a therapist about because they're probably poisoning your life in ways you don't even realize.

I also fervently agree with her tactic for dealing with jealousy. She tells writers to nip your anger or mopiness in the bud and ask yourself a hugely useful question: "What is that person doing that I’m not doing?"

And don't fall into the trap of answering via insult, i.e. "They write populist drivel" or "They're a schmoozing suck-up." That's just you enabling your malicious envy. Really try hard to understand what that person is doing right.

Jealousy doesn't ever help get what you want, but understanding how to become a success will. Learn, don't burn.

That said, I don't think benign envy is much to worry about provided you counsel yourself to get over it in a timely fashion, say 24 hours (faster is better, but some situations will hit you harder than others.) Everyone feels disgruntled by another person's (seemingly unfair) success at some point.

It's how fast you recognize that unhelpful emotion for what it is, and what you choose to do about it afterward, that matters.

~~~~~~~

What do you think? Does benign envy have its place in provoking a healthy competitiveness, or is competitiveness always a counter-productive emotion in a field where your talents (no one else's) determine your ability to succeed?

Do you ever feel benign envy? Malicious envy? Have you ever been the victim of malicious envy? What did you learn from those experiences? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

'Ware The Koala--She Sees All!

Writtenwyrdd pointed me to the (very funny) Autocomplete Me website, and what did I find?

Proof that all of us taking part in McKoala's Year Of Submission Challenge should be very, very afraid...



Don't even think about lying to her, folks!

Review: THE STEEL REMAINS, by Richard Morgan

I don't usually do book reviews on my blog, but for books that knock my socks off, I will make an exception.

The Steel Remains, by Richard Morgan, forcibly jettisoned my socks. It has a bit of a slow start, but turns into a rip-snorting and very masculine adventure tale featuring hilarious, engaging and gloriously profane characters, a believable medieval dystopia, and a hugely imaginative retelling of classic faery mythology.

To enjoy the book, you do need to be able to handle lots of swearing, quite a bit of viscerally-described violence, and two wee dollops of (very sexy) male-male erotica.

The story itself is quite simple: A man needs to rescue his cousin from slavery.

But then a bunch of gods, aliens, elves and corrupt religious fanatics get in his way.

But What If The Sundogs Try To Chase It?

"Sun dogs", or parhelia, are faint patches of rainbow seen in thin cirrus clouds located about 22 degrees to the left and right of the sun.

Here's what happens when you shoot a rocket through one:



Found via Geekologie.

Omit Needless Words--Or Heedless Concepts?

My husband thinks English is a silly language. As far as he's concerned, it should be spelled phonetically (i.e. fonetikalee).

The best argument against that, as far as I'm concerned, is that English is spelled phonetically--provided you speak English the way they did in England 400 years ago. 'Knight' really did used to be pronounced 'k-nig-h-t' rather than 'ni-t'.

Plus there's the issue of the language being portable. Someone living in Scotland pronounces words differently than someone in Barbados, and if we all spelled phonetically, then we'd all have a heck of a time understanding written communication from different countries. Standarized spelling--even when it's illogical--is more useful than strictly transcribing the sounds that come out of our mouths, because those sounds change with time and with distance.

Meanings change also. The word 'awful' used to mean basically the same thing as the word 'awesome'.

And I got thinking about this today because the Washington Post had an article (locked down for subscribers only now, so I won't link it) arguing against banning the word 'retard'. They made the point that the problem isn't the word, it's the attitude behind using it a particular way.

The term 'mental retardation' was originally introduced as a kinder way to describe intellectual disabilities than the commonly-used terms of that time, which included 'idiot', 'imbecile' and 'moron'.

And why did they want a new term? Because the general population was using the words 'idiot', 'imbecile' and 'moron' the same way people these days use the word 'retard'. It was becoming impossible to use those terms dispassionately without implying an insult.

So I think the Washington Post makes a fair point: The problem isn't the words, it's how they're used. If you ban a word, there's another that can be twisted into something just as ugly; you're better off attacking the offensive mindset rather than the language being used to express it.

A writer needs a fine ear for not only what words mean, but what they mean when used in a variety of situations. Mark Twain is famous for (well, lots of great writing, but also for) saying the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.

This ties in to the wisdom behind Strunk and White's advice, "Omit needless words." If you say exactly what you mean, that doesn't take up much space. A punchline is usually brief. So is a scathing retort. So is an aphorism.

I'm certain the reason my first drafts are longer than my more polished versions is because figuring out what I want to say takes up much more space than saying it. Once I've hammered out what I wished to convey, I can sharpen my language and express the idea much more succinctly.

We blather only when we're trying to figure out what we mean to say--or when we haven't determined the exactly-right word yet.

~~~~~~~~

Do you agree? Disagree? Is wordiness always a weakness, or is this call to be succinct yet another symptom of our society's lessening attention span--the 'sound bite' syndrome?

Are there words that have too much emotional weight to ever be reclaimed? Is there merit in banning them? Or should we fear any tendency to remove words (and thus concepts) from the public consciousness? Is doing so a form of thought control or propaganda?

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

It's Polite To Point

Rachelle Gardner has a great post on how craft, story and voice go together to make a literary agent say YES.

If editors and agents are looking at your samples and immediately criticizing your craft, be aware this means they aren't able to see a fabulous story in there and they’re probably not compelled by your voice.

In other words, if they're picking at your SPAG errors, you have bigger problems than that.

With Glowing Hearts and Blue Toes

Okay, owning no television definitely has its downside.

I just stood outside for three hours, in the rain, without dinner, and without feeling my toes for a while, all so I could watch the opening ceremonies for the Vancouver winter Olympics through the plastic tarp of a bar's patio. I wasn't the only person doing that, at least--there was quite a crowd--although I think I was the only one who stayed the full three hours.

But you know what? It was totally worth it. Yay, Vancouver! (Even though the torch borked.)



RIP Nodar Kumaritashvili

MemeMemeMeme...

Crikey! Maybe Genius dun tagged me!



And I, for my crimes, must tell you 10 honest things about myself. Here goes:

1) I'm six feet tall in my socks, and that means I have a built-in excuse for never, ever wearing high heels. Mwuhahaha!


2) I'm much more eloquent on paper than I am in person.


3) During graduate school, I worked in an awesome laboratory, at a great university, with wonderful and brilliant people, doing a cool and interesting project, and my supervisor was arguably the nicest man on the face of the Earth.

And I have never been so miserable in my life.


4) I'm limber enough to wrap my ankles around the back of my neck, but not limber enough to touch my toes. I have no idea why that is.


5) I'm an utter wimp about a wide variety of things, but not public speaking.


6) In fact, I find face-to-face conversations much more anxiety-provoking than talking to a room of people.


7) They say most of us dream in black and white, but this isn't true. We dream in colour; it's just that our brains forget the colours after we wake up.

I remember my dreams as being full of colour--but silent.


8) I can't whistle. I've been trying to learn since childhood, and I. Just. Can't. (I can make a pathetic sort of lisp-y sound, however.)


9) I must take medicine in order to live.


10) I don't understand why anyone sunbathes. Never mind that it's bad for you, how can they stand the boredom?

At this point, I am supposed to tag several others to complete this meme, but let's do the following instead:

You are forbidden--forbidden, I say!--from leaving a comment on this post unless you tell us all one truth about yourself.

That's right; you must pay a truth-toll!

(Mwuhahaha.)

Candy For Strangers

Editorial Anonymous has some great points in his/her post, Do Your Family a Favor and Talk Some Sense Into Them. Here are my favourite snippets:

Editors are often sympathetic, patient people at heart (though overworked), but I know they all wish that more people understood that when one asks one's author-friend to do a favor and send a manuscript to their editor, one is not asking the author to do you a favor... What one is really doing is asking the editor to do you a favor, and you don't get to ask strangers for favors.

(snip)

Publishing a manuscript is about appealing to thousands of people. There are lots of wonderful manuscripts that would make dozens, or scores, or even hundreds of people happy. They can't be published. They would be cherished, and they would sell, but they would not sell enough.

(snip)

Publishing is about appealing to strangers.

(Emphasis mine.)

That last line has a corollary I think helpful to anyone whose heart is breaking because they can't get the book they wrote--and love like it's their child--published:

Yes, your book is valid and worthy and precious, but those things don't guarantee it's saleable. To be saleable, your book must appeal to strangers--lots of them.

Building a Story Up From an Idea

My brother Sarf asked a good, meaty question in the last post's comments: If you have a story idea and a setting, how do you go about fleshing that out? How do you hammer out the question of why it all happens?

There's more than one answer to that, so I encourage all my writer-buddies to jump in and offer their own strategies in the comments.

Here's my attack:

The Big Picture

1) Stories are about people, even if those people don't happen to be humans. Your main character, at the very least, needs to be someone the reader can relate to.

That usually means your protagonist needs some moral grounding, some intelligence, and some depth. Personalities that are too extreme, in any direction, don't work well in the role of protagonist. (They're great as secondary characters, however.)

2) Stories are about change. The story begins when the protagonist's life swings out of balance. Their actions thereafter are about trying to get their life back to normal.

They never really succeed, however. The events of the story must leave the protagonist changed forever, otherwise it's not a story.

The Meat In This Sandwich

1) Conflict and tension are what make a story gripping to a reader.

1a) If you keep implying that fireworks and mayhem are about to happen, the reader will happily plough through another 400 pages to see everything blow up. Tension is the sense (either to the reader or to the characters in the story) that the situation is escalating.

Tension can be completely internal and emotional, by the way. The promise of heartache and angst is just as powerful a way to keep the reader turning pages as the promise of giant robots punching each other.

1b) Conflict is when there's a struggle between two entities to trying to reach mutually exclusive goals. This is usually between two characters who want different things and are acting to get them, but a single character also can be internally conflicted if they want two things but can't have them both.

2) Empathy is what makes the reader care about what happens in the story.

The best way to make the reader care is to show them how much your characters care. If your protagonist is in distress over the events of the story, that emotion helps drag your reader's emotions into play.

The Nuts and Bolts

So how do you actually take an idea and setting and then turn them into a story?

First, figure out what the conflict is (or can be.) What is going wrong in this world? How are people going to be hurt?

Second, create a character who (1) will have their life thrown out of balance by these events and not like it, and (2) is able to act to try to restore the balance.

This person is going to be your protagonist. Their struggle to swing their life back to normal forms the body of your story.

Why? Because stories are about people, even when they're also about something massive like the end of the world. You need to focus on people, usually one person--your protagonist.

Your protagonist has a problem (their life is out of balance), and they're trying to fix it (by reaching a goal, something they think will help re-balance their life.) Now you need to give them obstacles; you want to make it virtually impossible for the character to get what they want.

And you want your character to care about that. It should cause them distress to not be able to reach their goal. They might be angry, sad, anxious--there are really only two emotions in the world: pleasure and pain. You want your character in pain.

Because that will cause the reader to empathize with them.

I explained in this post what I think you do next:

You have the protagonist act. They choose to do something they think will get them closer to their goal, but events conspire to give them something other than what they expected. Often, those events make the situation worse.

So the protagonist must act again, this time more courageously, and again things go wrong. You keep doing that until the character has been traumatized enough that they finally find the inner strength to overcome all remaining obstacles, reach their goal and fix the problem that started the whole story.

The Nitty-Gritty

There're a few last things to consider:

Every scene needs:
1) Conflict (at least two forces in opposition)
2) Tension (the sense that things are getting dire, or that they won't work out)
3) Emotion (one character must care about what's happening in that scene)
4) A turning point (a moment where things change irreversibly)

You want to consider how many possibilities for the above four things you have while you plot out a scene, but you also want to keep those four things firmly in mind while you write the scene, too.

Without conflict and tension, you won't hold the reader's attention. Without emotion, the reader won't care about the story or its characters. Without a turning point, the scene is wasted space--turning points are the moments when your story steps forward, and those are the only moments that should be included.

~~~~~~~

Again, I'll invite my writer-buddies to share their expertise in the comments. How do you take an idea and turn it into a living, vibrant story? What do you think are the essential elements? In your view, what's the most important 'big picture' thing to keep in mind? What's the most important 'fine detail' thing?

Are there some things you refuse to think about until you actually start writing, or do you plot out every nuance ahead of time? I'd be honoured if you shared your wisdom with us.

Yay, Index Cards!

I've got a WIP that is quasi-finished. Except for two chapters that need to be re-written, I'm excited about the prospect of sending it to my agent.

So why haven't I yet? Because this WIP turned out to be so large that what I have is only Ye Olde Part One, and to sell Ye Olde Part One (given I'm an unknown writer), my agent needs an outline for Ye Olde Part Two.

And plotting is my nemesis.

I do think out scenes before I write them, because I need an idea of where that scene is going before the words will flow. I also generally know how the book will start and end. However, coming up with scenes for an entire novel, all at once, has proven rough. For one thing, as soon as I've got an idea, my brain wants to keep running with it. It starts sketching in conversations and images for that scene, and I wind up scribbling feverishly, trying to capture the good bits of dialogue.

And I'm thrilled that happens, but it defers me working out what the next scene will be.

A few weeks ago, I bought index cards. Yesterday, I actually broke the cellophane.

I've never used index cards to organize my thoughts before, but the chapter I've been working on has been kicking my butt. I had general ideas for what needed to go into it, and some specific scenes, but my brain just couldn't hold everything at once and juggle it all into place. It seemed the right time to swallow my scatter-brainedness and act hard-core secretarial, yo.

So today I tiled my living room floor in 3x5" bits of paper, and now that chapter is nailed down better than an undead butterfly in the Smithsonian.

Part of me still resists the idea of using index cards because it's so alien to the way I'm used to working, but the rest is quite tickled at how well things shook out today. I think I threw away about 50% of the cards I wrote on, but that was usually because I'd thought up something better for my characters to do.

~~~~~~~

So how far behind the learning curve am I, here? Do any of you use index cards for part or all of your plotting? If not, what system do you employ? If so, what prompted you to start using the cards, or did that always seem like the natural way of doing things? I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Does anyone else feel a story coming on?

Click an image to see more of photos of this sculpture at Baekdal
Artist: Andrew Chase
Found via Geekologie