Storied Women and Book Recommendations

HWWF:SW ended last week. Great course, I already miss the community. It was a lot of fun, but now it's time to get back to my regular writing schedule. As you saw from Monday's post, I'm mostly doing editing, because it would be fun to submit a few more pieces this year.

The only deadline for December (for now) is for the Cosmos Pen short story, which is nearly done, anyway. I've got a week of vacation time coming up before Christmas, and though it will mostly be taken up by activities of the present-wrapping, gingerbread-baking, and glögg-drinking variety, I'm hoping to get some writing done, maybe finish one of the stories I wrote for Storied Women. It's only  got the opening so far, but I've got it all plotted out in my head.

And now onto the book recommendations.

I had the flu a few weeks ago, and the only good thing about being sick is that you get to stay in bed and read all day without feeling guilty. I was too tired for anything too cerebral, so I picked books from my "fun book" pile.

November is definitely the best time to read Jenna Kostet's Marrasyöt. The name doesn't translate directly. "November Nights" is the literal translation, but in Finnish it also calls to mind the twelve night after Kekri (Finnish version of Halloween), when the gates between the worlds of the dead and the living are open. The novel is a detective story with speculative elements, set in the Finnish archipelago. I enjoyed it a lot, read the whole thing in one sitting. It would have been even better to read it at the summerhouse in front of a roaring fire. I think I'll give it to my mom next so she can do that if they decide to go up for a wintery weekend.

I also started Katri Alatalo's new short story collection Älä riko pintaa, set in the same word as her fantasy trilogy Mustien ruusujen maa. (The Land of the Black Roses), and am enjoying it a lot. She's doing a series of posts on her website about how the stories in the collection came into being, which is fascinating to read.

Another one I tried was Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey, and I absolutely loved it. Loved the main character who's literally been to hell and back, loved the character voice and dark humour, loved the gritty feel to it. This one's a thrill ride, if you want a vacation from reality.

What about you guys? Read any good books lately?

How Writers Write Fiction: Storied Women 4

This week we talked about character and structure in immersion. A lot of the videos were the same as last year, but no worries, still interesting.

Author Leslie Jamison talked about world-building and using a world glossary, with the idea that you can pick elements of your world and let your mind play with the possibilities, even if you're not writing speculative fiction. She also talked about how it's important to create the physical world but also the emotional world, to view the world through the lens of your character's moods, memories, and feelings. The aim is to make your world almost a character of its own. I think this also has to do with specificity, as in which details are important at that time, in that place of mind, to that particular character.

Russian fiction writer Alisa Ganieva spoke to us about using an orchestra of voices. In her novel The Mountain and the Wall, she used multiple voices to create a tapestry. This involved crowd scenes and  disagreements, gossip and rumours, but also clippings of newspapers and letters written by the characters, a kind of collage style. There is also an orchestra of language in the book, with so many different characters. But the thing I liked was that she also emphasised the power of silence.

Shenaz Patel, author of the novel Sensitive, talked about the writer as god, in the sense that when you're writing, you get to decide what happens to the characters: you can save them or abandon them to their doom. When writing her novel, she struggled with deciding the character's fate. She wanted to save her, because she was attached to the character, but in the real world the character would have been lost. She decided to write the more realistic ending, because she believes that books can change people and change the world, and that maybe this kind of ending would affect the way people saw similar girls as the main character in her story. She also talked about the importance of research, but also about the importance of knowing when to put that aside so the voice of the novel can come through.

Naomi Jackson talked to us about researching her novel The Star Side of Bird Hill last year, too, and  we got a quick replay of that. She told us abut the importance of research and actually having the experiences your character has, if possible, and about that "purposeful inquisitiveness" that you should embrace when doing research, so learning about a culture, for example, with the purpose of using the information in your book. She also talked about researching language and speech patterns, because even one word can take the reader out of the story. (No pressure. Thank the gods for beta readers!) She also reminded us that it's important to use all your senses when doing research to help your setting come to life, and that you can do research without travelling. It involves maps, magazines, period accounts, and lots of googling.

This week's assignment had us write a scene where something has happened that changed the setting, and to write an immersive scene that shows the world before and after it changed.

How Writers Write Fiction: Storied Women 3

This week we discussed plot and cast. Angela Flournoy was back, and she talked about managing a large cast of characters. She talked about this last year, too, but it was nice to have a refresher course. In her novel, The Turner House, she juggled multiple POVs, and she pointed out that every POV has to have a purpose. You don't want to have some POVs that the reader just skips over because they're boring or bring nothing new to the narrative. The whole point of having many POVs is that you can examine the character from the outside and get another viewpoint into her issues. Sometimes you can use the other characters as mirrors or to show what could have been hard the character taken another road. Flournoy said the other viewpoints are there to add layers to the main characters. I like that.

Another good piece of advice was to think about the hierarchy of characters: who's the most important one? Then you can make decisions about interiority, or how deep the POV goes. Like Flournoy explained, with the main character you get lots of information about her problems, how she thinks, backstory. So basically the big existential issue that the character is struggling with, which probably has something to do with your theme. The main characters have the most character development and the reader expects their issues to get solved during the narrative. For secondary characters, you probably get some interiority, but not as deep as for the main characters. They can also have issues that get solved, but they're probably less complicated and can maybe be resolved in a few scenes, and the reader expects them to get solved before the main character's issues, which are the most important things in the story. (So these are probably the side plots.) For tertiary characters, it's enough to give a few memorable details, but in their POV you don't really have to go into their issues (it's enough that the reader imagines they have them, that they're real people), but usually they're used to convey information about the main character you couldn't convey from the other points of view.

It's also important to apply the idea of the hierarchy to the level of conflict you assign to a character. Flournoy said that  the primary characters get the big, existential, difficult questions,like 'who am I?', 'what do I think about how I'm living my life?', or 'what's my relationship to religion?'. For the secondary characters they can be a little less existential, maybe a bit more concrete, like dealing with teen angst. For the tertiary characters, the only conflict or issues that have to be resolved are the ones that have something to do with the main characters.

Rebecca Maccai talked about acting and how it can help you understand writing, a really interesting lecture. She talked about how every scene and character has to have a purpose, and that you should think about why you feel the scene is important. If you took the scene out and the story wouldn't make sense anymore, then the scene is serving a purpose. If your reason for keeping it is that you like it, worked hard on it, or maybe that it shows what a character is like, then it isn't essential. A good scene should do multiple things. She also talked about backstage decisions, which amounts to the writer knowing what's going on, the motivation of the characters, and also having done her research. You don't need to put all this on the page, so no info dumps, but if you haven't made the decisions, it shows as a hole in the story and makes it feel implausible. Another interesting idea she presented was that you can use the character's fears to inform these backstage decisions. They're linked to the character's desires, after all. She also reminded us to think about character physicality, so basically not to use the same tired physical gestures when you're using action beats instead of dialogue tags.  These are an opportunity to come up with something that reveals something about the character to the reader.

Margot Livesey was our third lecturer this week, and she talked about picking the right POV characters and exploring your options. Sometimes the reason a writer gets stuck with a story is that the POV she chose doesn't work for that particular scene or event. Sometimes bringing in another POV character can help.

This week's writing exercise was tricky: we had to use a group of three women at first and then bring in a fourth one and write about how her arrival shattered the status quo. We were supposed to just come up with characters and their motivations and not think about plot, just let the characters do what they would, but my brain just refused to work like that. After two days of drawing a blank I gave up and wrote the opening to a short story that I've been thinking about for a while. Guess I'm not pantser material, then?

How Writers Write Fiction: Storied Women 2

This week we talked about character desires, especially the big 'D' Desires. Your character needs to want something desperately, or else you have no story. 

Amy Hassinger talked about using character desire to create structure in a novel. Your character wants something, and obstacles get in the way. That's the way you get conflict. One example that she used was To Kill a Mockingbird, to illustrate how Scout's small 'd' desire (to make Boo Radley come out) is actually related to the big 'D' desire (to understand her community, to get them to 'come out,' so she can understand herself and her place in that community). I think that's an important lesson. The small 'd' desires build the plot, the big 'D' Desires the character's journey, and they need to be connected. I think this is the same thing K. M. Weiland is saying when she says that it's helpful to think of the plot as a metaphor for the character's inner journey. The character doesn't always even know what she wants. I think this ties into the concepts of the thing the character wants and the thing the character needs, two big 'D' desires colliding. That's how you get internal conflict. 

We also discussed point of view. It's a fairly major choice, story-wise. I prefer first or third person and try for deep point of view. Second person feels like a gamble for me, a good way to ruin a perfectly good story, and omniscient POV is tricky, because it can lead to head-hopping. The way they explained different types of POV felt overly complicated to me, so I'm not going to reference in here. If you know how to do first and third, you're pretty much good to go. 

Sometimes the POV character isn't the protagonist. One of the books used as an example was Wuthering Heights, a novel I really disliked, and the weird POV choice was a part of that. Both POV characters are fairly boring compared to the main characters, and the story feels very confusing because of the structure, in my opinion. The lecturer said that one advantage of having Nelly narrate the story is having two different timelines and another that she can speculate about the main characters, and I can see that. I just don't think it worked particularly well. Why make things more complicated than they have to be? Why wouldn't you want to get in the head of the most interesting characters? One of the reasons to use a narrator might be distance, or maintaining a sense of mystery. The Sherlock Holmes stories would be quite different seen from the POV of Holmes. 

On Mockingbird, I think it's worth noting that there are two Scouts in there, the older and the younger one. The older one can provide context that the younger one can't. That's a pretty good way to tell a story from the POV of a child without having to stick to only what the child can understand. 

This week's assignment was to write a story with a female protagonist who experiences a big 'D' Desire and have her act on it. A fun exercise, even though I got a bit overambitious and ran out of word count. 

New MOOC from the University of Iowa: How Writers Write Fiction 2016: Storied Women

New MOOC, coming up! Here's the info:

"October 11-November 21, 2016: The International Writing Program at the University of Iowa will open a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on fiction writing, centered on female authorial voices and female literary characters. This online course will be offered completely free to all participants and will welcome writers of all genders."

 Every University of Iowa MOOC I've taken has been awesome, so I'm definitely going. Maybe I'll see you there? You can read more and sign up here.

How Writers Write Fiction week 7: Revision

                         


So, the last session of How Writers Write Fiction has come and gone. Whew! I'll be glad to get back to my regular writing schedule. But first, a few words about revision. 

Revision is just that, re +vision, seeing the text with fresh eyes. We talked about layering, as in adding layers of depth to your description, and on the other had doing several passes over the text for different aspects of writing, like grammar, character arcs, using all the senses, and dialogue. 

You can edit all you like, but the hard truth is that you need feedback from other people to move forward. Taking criticism well is hard, and I'm glad the session had some pointers on that and how to get the most out of your critiques. I think that participating in a critique group helps with developing those skills (and to develop a thicker hide, chitinous carapace, whatever). 


While the session was titled "Embracing Revision," it had a lot to do with subtext. A part of our required reading was "The Secret Life of Subtext" by John McNally.

Here's a quote: 

If the story itself is a lake, then its subtext is the Loch Ness monster, dipping in and out, keeping mostly hidden, but sometimes rising up and scaring the bejesus out of you. Or sometimes the subtext is the main story's doppelgänger: it looks like the main story, it has the same cast of characters, but it's acting in peculiar ways, and (more frighteningly) it has its own agenda.Revision is the act of teasing the Loch Ness monster out of the water or drawing the doppelgänger out from the shadows so that we can take a good look, see it more clearly, and perhaps understand why it's doing what it's doing.

Something to think about. (And I do love a good Loch Ness monster metaphor.) 

Great course. I'm happy I took part. I hope they do another one next year; I'll definitely join in the fun.  

How Writers Write Fiction: Weeks 5 and 6: On Setting and Description

                          


I grouped these two sessions together, because they both focused on setting and description.

 For week five, we talked about voice and setting, with interesting lectures from Naomi Jackson and Horacio Castellanos Moya.    A lot of this was familiar stuff, and most of it was directed at literary writers, once again.

Jackson talked about research, living in the place you're writing about and picking up those little things that make your story ring true, like special words people use, what they eat,  and what customs they have. These things are useful for building your fantasy and alien cultures, too, and understanding what makes a real-world culture tick helps with building your own.

Another useful tip was to use of real-world maps to track where your characters are going, and if you can't do your research in person, Google Earth is a useful tool for "seeing" your surroundings.

Using all the senses was familiar advice, but it was a good reminder to also think about filtering your description through your character, remembering that his or her state of mind, her age, etc. will affect how she sees the environment, what she notices, and how it will make her feel and react. Different characters will notice different things.

Another thing that stuck was Jackson's talk about the language of home, the language of the schoolyard, and the language of the kitchen; all of these languages are different and have their own vocabularies. An interesting way to look at it.

Week six focused more on description. Leslie Jamison offered an interesting exercise: try to describe the same setting or object through characters in different emotional situation, like a man whose wife has just died, a girl on the first day of summer vacation, or an elderly woman who has just heard that her children aren't coming to visit her for Christmas, for example. You'll get very different description of the same object from all of them. So a scene has to have emotional and physical textures to the description.

Paul Harding spoke about the similarities of detail in paintings and in prose, and how you can use a similar process to do some word painting. I found his ideas of scale and contrast interesting. He said that you should always put the light next to the dark, the large next to the small. An example he gave was that any thunderstorm can be compared to the storms on Jupiter.

He also talked about being specific, using specific detail, and mentioned Anton Chekhov's short stories as a good way to study this. Another volume for the to-be-read pile.

The exercise for week six was interesting, as it began with doing a description exercise where we took half an hour and just wrote description about our surroundings. I did this on the train back home from Helsinki. As you can imagine, a train carriage is about the most boring environment to examine, but I was surprised by how much vivid detail I came up with. I did a similar exercise in the workshop at Archipelacon last summer, and it's very useful, especially for someone like me, for whom overly abundant description usually isn't a problem. I'm a bit jealous of those people who can just fill page after page with description, making it look effortless.

Lots of food for thought. It's a good thing the course ends this week. I think my brain is full.

 

How Writers Write Fiction Week 4: Using Character to Produce Frame and Arc

                    

This week we talked about how different points of view affect a narrative. There's lots to consider when choosing your POV character. To illustrate this, we wrote the same scene from two points of view, a useful exercise. Some of the peer reviews were actually pretty difficult, because we were asked to pick the scene we thought worked better. For many of the critiques, both viewpoints worked well, and it was a matter of where the story was going rather than which scene was better. That's the fun part: you get to pick whose truth will be told in the story. Unreliable narrators are quite fun to do.

Another thing I liked was how the different characters focused on different things. Some objects became significant (or charged), but they weren't the same objects for both of the characters. They didn't notice the same details, or interpret the same situation in the same way.

We also discussed the point of telling, or where to start your story. That can be a tricky thing, but I can see how the story can act as a frame for an idea, or how the story arc can feel incomplete if you pick the wrong point in time to start your tale.

Definitely something to think about.

So much to learn, so little time...

How Writers Write Fiction Week 3: Plot

What did I learn about plot?

Well, the main thing that stuck was that literary writers are apparently really, really scared of it, and as the class is directed at literary writers, that was the main perspective that was offered. For them, plot seems to be a necessary evil and not something to strive for.

A quote that came up a lot was this:

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow   

So, basically only the pantser (writing by the seat of your pants) perspective was shown, not the plotter one, which I think is a shame. Particularly the advice to just write the whole story without planning anything and then do a bunch of drafts over years and years to dig out your plot seemed kind of ludicrous to me.

Okay, fine. You want to do it the hard way, go right ahead, but I prefer to have a roadmap before I start out, and I don't think that should be made to feel cheap or tawdry, "something only genre writers do." I'm a genre writer. Yes, I'm a bit offended by your tone. 

I think outlining and learning about structure can be a great tool for writers, even literary ones.

Maybe this is why I struggle with reading literary novels?

How Writers Write Fiction Week Two: Cast and Dialogue

For week two we continued working on character, but the focus was on how to handle a larger cast. A concept that came up was interiority, meaning how deeply we get to see into the character. For the main character, we can see his emotions and thought on a deeper level, while for secondary or tertiary characters we don't go that far. If we go into the POV of a tertiary character, we might only see thoughts that tell us something about the main character. The secondary character falls somewhere in between.

Another thing that I learned to use is degrees of conflict. The conflict for the secondary and tertiary characters shouldn't be as big or complicated as that of the main character's.

We also talked about dialogue and how to differentiate your characters from each other using word choice, speech patterns, accents, dialects, emotional reactions, and the content of their dialogue. It's harder than it sounds. The ideal thing would be that the reader can always tell who is speaking just from the dialogue. That's what I'm aiming for, but I'm afraid I don't always succeed. I usually try to stay away from phonetic spelling. A word here or there is fine, but if there's too much it just becomes a pain to read.

The assignment was fun; I got to play with lots of different voices.

I'm loving the course so far, even though it's mainly meant for literary writers.

Up next week: plot!

How Writers Write Fiction Week 1: What I learned about Character

I'm doing this online course from the University of Iowa, and I though I'd share some of the stuff I learned this week.

Here are some the questions we had to answer about other people's work for the peer reviews, but I think they are a really useful way to think about your own characters, too, so I jotted them down for future reference:

Who is this character?We had to come up with five adjectives to describe the character and explain how we got there.
Where is character development strong?We looked for the parts where the writer shows rather than tells and the best telling details.
Where could this piece strengthen character development?Suggestions on this.
(All questions from Novoed.com)

I might add this to my Critters template for critiques. Hmm.

Christa Frasier did a teaching video about character, and introduced me to the concept of the particle self and the continuum self. The particle self means the person we are in a single moment, and the continuum self is the bigger picture, who we are as we move through our life (or our character arc:)). This encompasses the idea that everything we see and hear encompasses all our memories and associations, so an apple is never just an apple, it's every apple you've ever eaten and all the people and memories and feelings associated with it. And it's not the same at different points in our life. Our reactions will be different depending on if we're four or forty, if we're sad or happy, just had a baby or  if we are at a funeral. So the particle self is a snapshot of us at a particular moment of our timelines. This is why a character needs a past.

I find the idea fascinating, and I'll definitely be exploring it in my writing.

We also did writing exercises. The first ones had us write about an object as character, and then use it in a story. A fun exercise. I might share the results at some point, we'll see...