Category Archives: Writing

Session 2 was a heady one for me. Story workshopping takes a lot of effort and time when summed together across all the members, even when they’re critiquing as short a short story as mine. But that’s one of the main points of the workshop, alongside the exercises and the (now relatively short) lecture periods.

First came showing our homework, three paragraphs of another short story we’ll eventually end up workshopping as well. For each person, we read them out loud after pasting them to the chat room, then Cat gave a light critique, incorporating the concepts we’d covered in the previous class. Everyone’s first three were pretty good at setting up character, setting, and some even managed to get in hints of the main conflict. Something maybe half of us, including myself, did was long paragraphs, which we must remember are much slower than shorter paragraphs, and don’t necessarily draw in the reader. Continuing with long paragraphs are going to result in a slowly-paced story that the reader will be more inclined to put down.

We then workshopped two stories out of the group of us. (These aren’t the stories we were writing first paragraphs for.) I was one of them. In a way, I wish I wasn’t, because maybe I could have written a better story than an older one I felt was my weakest work, and an older one to boot—but on the other hand, finding out why I consider it my weakest would be a good thing. And so it turned out to be.

I figured the experience was going to be a bit embarrassing, so I refrained entirely from talking, even avoiding typing anything into the chat window until nearly the end, which I then realized I should stop. You’re supposed to let the other writers critique without interruption, possibly even in chat, which makes sense. I just hugged the Overcow and kept quiet. No, the critiques did not traumatize me. Everyone balanced the right amount of good to bad crit, and no one was harsh.

For those who are curious about which story I workshopped, here it is.

Let me tell you: the workshop experience, even on an older story, was immensely valuable. I’d always known the story had rotten aspects, but couldn’t pick them out. Things picked out by my fellow classmates:

• Most glaring and embarrassing: Japanese names, wrong. Japanese setting, wrong. Bacon treats don’t exist in Japan. Japanese demons? Wrong. Jade Emperor? WRONG SETTING ENTIRELY OMG. This was before I picked up Nisi Shawl’s Writing the Other. RESEARCH IT IS A GOOD THING.

• I skimp on setting and description. (In this respect, in fact, I am the polar opposite of the other person who had a story to workshop this week.) This leads to readers being lost with where things were happening. Including where one of the main characters was wounded. Oops.

• Not enough explanation of motive—as I said in another G+ post, this is an anti-pattern: to have a vengeance plot where you don’t explain what, exactly, is being avenged. Irony.

• Which character is the focus of the story? It likely should have been the younger of the two kitsune. I didn’t have a clear focus on either one. Pretty awful attempt at limited omniscient, although I didn’t know at the time that this was what I attempted.

• The story is too, too lean, and suffers from structural, character, and other weaknesses as a result. Likely it could be twice as long and make up for that.

• Logic gaps in the plot. (Couldn’t the mother warn her daughter about the legendary character’s insanity, so she’d be prepared?)

• An appropriate title could have been found in the last paragraphs of the story. Even the very last words. A title sets up so much. I never really thought about them that way.

People liked the world and wanted to find out more about it (!), which surprises me, for that was one of the things I hated the most about the story. Ironically, now I’m writing a world where that story would fit in, after being fixed.

Omniscient is going to be difficult to get the hang of. Can’t perch inside people’s heads. I’m going to need to review, in much more depth, Hal Duncan’s Rule 4 for New Writers. If I can’t figure out that post, I have no business writing omniscient. A quote from there I managed to miss, emphasis mine, which may be the key to the whole thing:

The advantages of an omnisicient narrator barely need explaining. This is an all-seeing God who may weave into the story anything and everything that’s happening in the fictive world. It should be borne in mind, however, that this capacity may be offset by a degree of detachment, and by the difficulty of maintaining omniscience if one is not cognisant of the distinction between this approach and multiple third person limited.

Naturally I had to waste everyone’s time by asking for help on omniscient POV when I myself had posted that link, which contains all the answers I could ever want. Sorry about that, guys.

Moving onto the rest of the class, after tons of workshopping, we got on with Cat’s lecture.

So Cat talked about character: what makes for a good character, even what makes for a good villain; getting to know characters, and ways to imbue them with, ah, character. From names to history, whether with an RPG character sheet approach or with writings from your character (that’ll be weird), and even psychological analysis like the Myers-Brigg tests, you need to get to know your character, because story comes from character.

A significant thing I’ll note here about character that Cat talked about: likeable characters have problems that can be identified with, and are active, rather than passive. They must want something, and care about something; even an otherwise despicable character must care about something.

Our new homework, should we choose to accept it (well, of course we gotta): write 250-500 words about one of the characters in our story going to bed or getting up, preparing or eating a meal, earning a living or spending a sizable sum of money. And of course, read and critique up two more stories. Thankfully I’ve already gone!

Workshop, you are a lot of work.

I do wish now that the workshop were longer. If we continue like this, there will not be much class discussion about concepts, which is one of the things I really want. On the other hand, workshopping is probably the main point, so what can I say?

Anyways, what to do with the story I workshopped? Do I drop it down a deep hole and never think about it again? There’s merit in that idea. I want to learn my lessons, remember them, and leave the story to quietly gather dust. It’s three years old.

I’ve only experienced a writer’s workshop once in my life, as part of the SFF Online Writing Workshop Synopsis Focus Group, which was focused on something most writers don’t think about until they’ve finished a book that can actually be submitted to places. Which I had only finished crappy drafts of back then; still, it didn’t stop me from going to the class, so it ended up becoming a “brainstorm an entire book plot in private” exercise. Still useful, but I’d kind of broken the rules. (Here’s what I learned regardless, if you’re curious.)

Cat Rambo’s F&SF workshop is thus the first time I’ve taken a workshop directly relevant to my current stage in my writing career. I’m currently in the throes of a story that became a novelette, then a novella, but not because I knew what I was doing—the scope was out of my range of writing, which thinks in tiny, 1000-word chunks. I couldn’t, I learned painfully, build a story out of that.

And it was definitely the first workshop where I saw everybody, and they could see me. We used a Google+ hangout. That was a bit mind-blowing all by itself to me, but we could interact in real time—something not possible in the OWW synopsis focus group, which communicated via mailing list.

We introduced ourselves: what we liked to read, what we liked to write, two things we hoped to get out of the class. Everyone’s answer was a little different, though plot and structure was commonly mentioned.

Then we talked about stories from a starting point: character-driven versus plot-driven stories, external and internal arcs, and setting up a story from the very first paragraph. Aiiiiii.

We also talked about writing in general: getting motivated enough to write. In Cat’s opinion, there is no such thing as writer’s block, and she suggested a couple ways to defeat it. A daily word quota is one way, as is planning out beforehand what you’re going to write about. Another was timed writing exercises: write for 15 minutes given a prompt, not deleting and not editing (a perfect use for Write or Die).

She then gave us such a time writing exercise: write for 3 minutes with the prompt “When Death’s clowns came for me….” The other students pretty much wrote directly from the prompt, because their minds didn’t freeze up and go wibble. Some of them even wrote completed scenes. I did not do either of these; instead, I wrote up some Brenda Starr dialogue between multiple people (definitely more than two) about the incredulity of Death having clowns. Here’s what I wrote:

“Death has clowns.”

“Everybody dies. EveryTHING dies. Why not clowns?”

“They’re kind of… morbid, you know? I mean, Death in the flesh—the skeleton I mean—is scary enough. To send in clowns is just cruel. What do they look like? Do they have, like, shiny black noses and plain makeup and black custard pies?”

“Nevertheless, sometimes one must send in the clowns, so to speak.”

“When I become Death, I’m not going to have clowns.”

“Yeah. That’s weak.”

“When do you send in the clowns, anyways?”

The Death of Ratsborough Way drew his skeletal head up, and put his hand to his chest. “Politicians, mostly.”

“Oh.”

“Well, that makes sense.”

“Aren’t clowns and politicians kind of overlapping categories?”

“How dare you say that about Cicero’s art!”

“Nobody asked you, Cenipheus.”

Some said it was funny, and I’m glad, because I think it kind of paled in comparison to the rest of the entries. My mind drifts, as it always does these days, to the concept of the gods.

We also talked about the Milford method of critique (which you can read about in Introduction II of the most recent Turkey City Lexicon), which we’re going to apply each week to two stories the students have written and guuuuuuuh I volunteered, but only because I had a short story ready.

Writers are supposed to be afraid, aren’t they? If that’s so, I’m doing just fine.

We went around at some point and read out our 2-3 sentences describing the story we would write for the workshop explicitly. Mine is going to be hard to accomplish, because I don’t know yet what the Terrible Woman Down There is going to do to my protagonists, but it won’t be very nice.

Now for next week, we have some reading assignments to do: find a first paragraph of a short story or even novel that we found interesting/intriguing/blew our minds; read the Turkey City Lexicon; watch a Kurt Vonnegut video about story shapes); and write the first three paragraphs of our short story. Good thing that perfection is not needed, because I’m so going to need help.

Well, I’ve discovered a generally bad way to for me to revise things. I swear this used to work when I was younger, but that may simply be due to not knowing then what I do now. And I’ve got so much to learn.

This was the way I used to approach successive drafts of essays and stories until very recently:

• Maybe re-read the previous draft. Skim most likely, skip a quarter of the time.

• Ignore the previous draft and rewrite the essay/scene from scratch.

I’ve been learning, as I go through more revisions of Seal Tales ¹, that I never write the same draft twice, and that the farther I get from the first draft, the more degradation I see in terms of quality and an unquantifiable element I’ll call fire.

What is fire? It’s the element of freshness, of not knowing where exactly the filled-out version of your scene will go. The groundwork might’ve been laid down by the outline, but the first full fleshing-out is then your fire draft. But as you pound revision after revision, you run the risk of banking the fire—that is, you become so familiar with the scene that you start to leave out vital information—not just backstory, but also characterization, setting, and plot—originally weaved into the first scene.

This effect is magnified greatly when you “rewrite” from scratch. New elements may be discovered, but the banking effect streaks into overtime.

And so I’m spending time consolidating drafts, with the first, fiery draft as the main body, and the new elements discovered in the second, third, and even fourth drafts weaved in. Badly, for now, but later I’ll tinker, which runs far less of a risk of banking the fire, since I’ll actually be paying attention more to what was originally there.

Mind you, this is just how I’m discovering the pitfalls of revision for myself. This doesn’t mean that it applies to you necessarily, or that revision is bad in all cases, or that burning previous drafts to the ground and starting anew is universally bad.

I’m not yet through with Seal Tales in fleshed-out form—I’ve got the outline done, though, which mitigates my sin. I’m discovering, however, that previous scenes affect so much what follows that going back and getting it mostly right is what I need to move forwards well. Otherwise I end up with useless fire, rather than fire that can be tweaked later.

Taking into account all possibilities, however, it could be the case that rewriting from scratch is actually doing me some amount of good. For example, starting from a blank slate allows me to explore alternative scenarios without being bound to the original text.

But right now it’s a bit painful for me to bear, because I want to finish this story and get right on to The Pantheon Plot again, which will be rewritten from the ground up, because hell, it hadn’t been written with a lot of what I know now.

Also, my first session in Cat Rambo’s workshop is coming up rather soon. I am, I admit, rather nervous about it all.

I’m going to finish out this post with what I am getting right. I think.

• I’ve concluded that there are two main plot threads, both of which are necessary to show a different view of the other. Redundant plot threads that offered no extra reflection were cut out.

• Because there are two main plot threads, there are also two main characters. Taking the common principle of reducing the number of viewpoints to only the necessary amount, there will be two viewpoints.

• The story starts directly on the days that’re different for both main characters. One plot thread spins up two weeks after the other, because there’s nothing important happening in the other character’s timeline until that point. That doesn’t mean the character doesn’t get equal face time—indeed, as the outline currently lies, she gets more scenes than the other.

• The story is about the most important event in both main characters’ lives up until that point in their existence.

• Both characters have stakes that grow greater as the story progresses. They have reasons to care. Can stakes get higher than survival? Yes. Yes, they can.

Next on my list is finding ways to twist the knife in my characters. I know the knives now, which hilariously come from the villain and both mentor figures, but I haven’t had the guts to twist… yet.

All this while revising and advancing as I go along. I’ve got nearly 9k in words ², and we’re not yet through the first act.

Oy. This isn’t going to be a short story at all. But I can certainly aggressively cut and trim afterwards… maybe.

Notes:

1. Title change is possibly warranted. It’s not the happiest tale in the world as it stands right now. [back]
2. And to think I used to have trouble getting to 1k words with involved scenes. [back]

The hardest thing to deal with when writing is that you have to find your own way. Nobody else can do it for you. You can read about what other writers do, you can certainly be helped by others, but in the end only you will know if it worked. And the only way to know is to try and, most likely, fail.

I hear from professional writers that what works may also vary from work to work. So even if you do figure it out, the ground will change out from under you anyways. Enjoy!

In this way, writing reflects what I’ll call hard-core problem-solving. You may know them as brain teasers. To deal with problems such as cross a rickety bridge in 17 minutes or die, you need to find a way to frame a representation of problem components and relationships in your mind, and thence come up with ways of attacking a problem that you, as a problem-solver, feel most comfortable with. Not to mention that the actual solving of any single problem is unique to that problem, so you must be adaptable.

I’ll go further: writing is problem-solving, with the representation of a solution being the story. The problems posed are more poetic—less the mechanics of splitting sixpence amongst logical and untrustworthy pirates, and more detailing the tale of Jenny the Pirate and the Treasure Everyone Wants to Kill Her For—but they are at their heart, very hard-core problems. To make things more difficult, usually hard-core problem-solving deals with problems that have a “trick”, that once you know makes the solution fall into your hand. As far as I can tell, while this can happen with stories, it seems to take at least several tricks to untangle a story. And unlike manufactured problems, you can’t know that there is even a trick in the first place; the story may be unviable.

This comparison between writing and problem-solving, while mostly untrue, has helped me cope with my current difficulties in spinning a story-length yarn, or rather what appears to be a novella-length yarn. For instance, in hard-core problem-solving, it’s quite acceptable to come up with multiple failed approaches, only to return to the first one as being closer to a true solution, while incorporating the lessons of the others. It just takes a crazy long time compared to figuring out which of your meds is which without pill differentiation and is more complex to boot.

I wouldn’t call myself stupid for backtracking in a problem-solving situation. Why should I do so when I’m writing?

I’m old enough to have typed on an electric typewriter. I used it to type up papers for high school; it was a used model, and I still remember the mechanical smell when it was turned on and purring. And of course, the sounds when I hit each key, hard, which had a lot of feedback. That was before I learned to touch-type. ((Even in college, I still used a word processor, i.e., a hardware word processor, not a computer until much later; my family was poor, and this was a splurge.))

I missed that sound for some reason, probably because my soft keyboards on my Transformer tablet make a typing sound in lieu of physical feedback. So, as I’m writing fiction, I sought a way to bring back that typing sound.

Incidentally, the method of bringing it back makes using the delete key for more than a couple letters very slow and annoying, which is turning my writing thoughtful. This is either a good or a bad thing, but at least it’s different enough that I may find it useful for a change of pace.

This apparently only works in Mac OS X, Panther and up.

• Step 1: Turn on “Play user interface sounds” in System Preferences, under Sound -> Sound Effects.

• Step 2: Turn on “Slow Keys” under Universal Access -> Keyboard, turn on “Use click key sounds”, and move the acceptance delay slider all the way towards the “Short” end. Unless, of course, you’d like to play around with slow keys to see what it does.

• Step 3: Type until the sounds are maddening again, and then turn off Slow Keys in the same place.

It’s quite easier to type on most keyboards these days than it was on the old typewriter, which really developed your finger muscles, even electronic ones.

And now I’m going to go type stuff for a while longer. Tappity, tappity, tappity.