i meant to wait for you
but you never came
i kept waiting
and i saw you passing by sometimes
laughing with someone else
sometimes i didn’t see you at all
i meant to wait for you
but you never came
so now my skeleton waits
instead
Tag Archives: writing in conceptuals
What have you learned in writing the series?
I’m learning the same lesson every single time. I’m learning to trust the process. I’m trying to remember that writing should be a form of play. I keep saying the fate of the free world does not hang in the balance. Even if I write a book that fails, nothing will happen. I’ll be mortified and embarrassed, but lives will not be lost over this. I take writing terribly seriously, and sometimes that just gets in my way. Writing is about the Shadow, which is about play. I just have to learn that again. And, in my own life, it’s like I can’t learn that I’ll rise to the occasion. I do rise to the occasion, but I’m never sure that’s going to happen. I keep thinking, Uh-oh, this is going to be the book that does me in. So that frightens me so desperately that I get into a panic when I should shut my mouth and get on with it.
“never use this word because it’s common, instead use all of these things that i’ll call synonyms even though they carry different connotations and will change the meaning of your dialogue if you use them” — very bad and unfortunately very common writing advice
“Do you want this sandwich?” she elaborated, acquiring the sandwich from her rucksack with a set of fingers.
His visage was set aflame with a smile. “Sure,” he postulated.
Smashing Pots
Every now and then, people ask me if I should go to art school, and I usually say something like “Do you want to go to art school?” and if they say “Yes,” then I say “Yes,” and if they say “No,” then I say “Don’t.” This is why I am a crappy source of career advice.
However.
There is ONE class that I think nearly every writer, artist, and creative type out there would benefit from, and as it happens, it’s ceramics. Preferably with a strong wheel-throwing component.
No, really.
Back in ceramics class, in college, at the end of the year we would gather up all our dishes and pots and sculptures that we had labored over for weeks—and you really do labor for weeks, because you’re sculpting and drying and firing and glazing and firing again—and we would look at them.
And what we generally realized was that we had created a lot of things that sucked. There is just a point where you hold this lumpy-ass thing in your hand and you realize that it has not added to the sum total of awesome in the universe—and that you don’t have to keep it.
And then you wind up and fling it into the massive dumpster behind the ceramics studio and it smashes against the bottom and a demented exhilaration surges through you and you grab the next one and smash it and it is glorious.
Now, there are people who do not smash their failed work, who cannot bear to do it, and so there was always a shelf full of sad lumpy clay things with a little “free to good home” sign on it. Some of them possibly were adopted eventually. Mostly, though, we learned to smash.
Pottery, particularly wheel-throwing, is wonderful for this, incidentally. You fail over and over and you fail fast and you are creating quantity to lead to quality. You throw and throw and throw and things die on the wheel and things die when you take them off the wheel and things explode in the kiln and after you have made a dozen or two dozen or a thousand, none of them are precious any more. There is always more clay.
It breaks you of preciousness and perfectionism. You can’t fiddle for two hours with wet clay on the wheel getting it perfect. It’ll be an over-saturated lump of mud long before then. If the walls are thrown too thin, they are too thin. It’s not worth fixing. Start over. Do it again. Finish, don’t fiddle.
I can’t do pottery any more because if I tried to hunch over a wheel these days, my back would go out so hard that I would never walk upright again. But I still think it was one of the most valuable classes I ever took, because it taught me to acknowledge failure, not to fear it, and then smash the hell out of it.
The Importance of Mary Sue
When I was in Ninth Grade, I won a thing.
That thing, in particular, was a thirty dollar Barnes & Noble gift certificate. I was still too young for a part-time job, so I didn’t have this kind of spending cash on me, ever. I felt like a god.
Drunk with power, I fancy-stepped my way to my local B&N. I was ready to choose new books based solely on the most important of qualities…BADASS COVER ART. I walked away with a handful of paperbacks, most of which were horrible (I’m looking at you, Man-Kzin Wars III) or simply forgettable.
One book did not disappoint. I fell down the rabbit hole into a series that proved to be as badass as the cover art promised (Again, Man-Kzin Wars III, way to drop the ball on that one). With more than a dozen books in the series, I devoured them. I bought cassette tapes of ballads sung by bards in the stories. And the characters. Oh, the characters. I loved them. Gryphons, mages, but most importantly, lots of women. Different kinds of women. So many amazing women. I looked up to them, wrote bad fiction that lifted entire portions of dialogue and character descriptions, dreamed of writing something that the author would include in an anthology.
This year I decided in a fit of nostalgia to revisit the books I loved so damn much. I wanted to reconnect with my old friends…
…and I found myself facing Mary Sues. Lots of them. Perfect, perfect, perfect. A fantasy world full of Anakin Skywalkers and Nancy Drews and Wesley Crushers. I felt crushed. I had remembered such complex, deep characters and didn’t see those women in front of me at all anymore. Where were those strong women who kept me safe through the worst four years of my life?
Which led me to an important realization as I soldiered on through book after book. That’s why I needed them. Because they were Mary Sues. These books were not written to draw my attention to all the ugly bumps and whiskers of the real world. They were somewhere to hide. I was painfully aware that I was being judged by my peers and adults and found lacking. I was a fuckup. And sometimes a fuckup needs to feel like a Mary Sue. As an adult, these characters felt a little thin because they lacked the real world knowledge I, as an adult, had learned and earned. But that’s the thing…these books weren’t FOR this current version of myself. Who I am now doesn’t need a flawless hero because I’m comfortable with the idea that valuable people are also flawed.
There is a reason that most fanfiction authors, specifically girls, start with a Mary Sue. It’s because girls are taught that they are never enough. You can’t be too loud, too quiet, too smart, too stupid. You can’t ask too many questions or know too many answers. No one is flocking to you for advice. Then something wonderful happens. The girl who was told she’s stupid finds out that she can be a better wizard than Albus Dumbledore. And that is something very important. Terrible at sports? You’re a warrior who does backflips and Legolas thinks you’re THE BEST. No friends? You get a standing ovation from Han Solo and the entire Rebel Alliance when you crash-land safely on Hoth after blowing up the Super Double Death Star. It’s all about you. Everyone in your favorite universe is TOTALLY ALL ABOUT YOU.
I started writing fanfiction the way most girls did, by re-inventing themselves.
Mary Sues exist because children who are told they’re nothing want to be everything.
As a girl, being “selfish” was the worst thing you could be. Now you live in Narnia and Prince Caspian just proposed marriage to you. Why? Your SELF is what saved everyone from that sea serpent. Plus your hair looks totally great braided like that.
In time, hopefully, these hardworking fanfiction authors realize that it’s okay to be somewhere in the middle and their characters adjust to respond to that. As people grow and learn, characters grow and learn. Turns out your Elven Mage is more interesting if he isn’t also the best swordsman in the kingdom. Not everyone needs to be hopelessly in love with your Queen for her to be a great ruler. There are all kinds of ways for people to start owning who they are, and embracing the things that make them so beautifully weird and complicated.
Personally, though, I think it’s a lot more fun learning how to trust yourself and others if you all happen to be riding dragons.
This is the best explanation of the Mary Sue phenomenon I have ever read, and I should know, having written my share of Mary Sues once upon a time (and no, you’ll never see them, because of dark heartbreaking psychological reasons). Moreover, unlike so many other things I’ve read about Mary Sues, it’s generous. Thank you!
If I had the power, I would ask all the authors in the world to do Yuletide or something like it every year. Sign up for a fic exchange and write some porn for a stranger; tailor your stories to an audience of one, let go of the long-form plots and the careful wide-spectrum appeal, embrace the joy of spending a hundred words on Carlos’s perfect hair or Buffy’s perfect shoes or Jo’s perfect knives. Remember the joy of waiting for one person to open a story and see what it contains.
Because fanfic is joy. Fanfic is fixing the things you see as broken, and patching the seams between what’s written and what is not, and giving characters who got cheated out of their happy endings another chance. There was a time, not that long ago as we measure things, where all fiction was what we would now call “fan fiction.” Shakespeare didn’t come up with most of his own plots. He wrote plays about the stories people already loved. We didn’t get a thousand versions of “Snow White” accidentally: people changed that story to suit themselves, and no one said they weren’t storytellers, or looked down on them for loving that core of red and black and white, of apples and glass and snow.
Seanan McGuire, “Let’s Talk About Fanfic.”
(hat tip to kassrachel for the link!)
why do fantasy worlds always have to include real world misogyny and sexism
and racism
Because some of the best fantasy serves as allegory for the real world.
Why can’t good fantasy serve as an example of the kind of world we could have instead of reflecting all the real world’s prejudices? Maybe some of us are sick of fantasy worlds where we’re to accept that dragons and elves exist but the presence of POC, gay people, and gender equality are too far fetched to be believable.
I’m not saying it can’t, but it sounds to me like you don’t want dramatic storytelling, you just want wish-fulfillment. I don’t endorse any of these practices in real life, but they exist. Good fiction, some of the best fiction reflects all the goods or ills of society and shines a spotlight back on it.
Take, for example, George R.R. Martin. He doesn’t endorse these things in real life, but I think the reason his characters resonate with so many people is because of how real they are. And you have characters like Arya, Dany, etc that are overcoming this and proving they are among the most badass people on the planet.
Conflict drives a story. A story without conflict is boring, and boring is the worst thing a story can be.
A story can have conflict and drama without relying on racism and sexism to be the source of it. These are not essential elements of “dramatic storytelling,” they are some of the most common and easy tropes out there that authors use.
See: David Weber
I guess until someone can tell me just what it is that makes my writing so bad I’ll just keep on as I am.
Can anyone recommend any Dereks that would be willing to write with me?
Motherfuckers will read a book that’s 1/3 elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and White people think we’re taking over.
Junot Diaz to the interview question “Do you think using Spanish in your writing alienates some of your readers?” (via lamegrownup)
I’ve finally figured out why “said is dead” and other purple prose writing tropes irritate me so much.
Anything that resembles the writing style of The Eye of Argon that closely makes my soul hurt.