Vocalizing Magic

When I was younger, I thought certain physical things were magical. Coins, keys and locks, playing cards and games, candles and mirrors, clocks. I still do, it’s not that I’ve stopped; even more things are magical for me now, like the flashdrive I keep my work on. The difference is that I’m starting to assemble more of the why.

When I was a kid I couldn’t have expressed the reasons for my visceral feeling that these things had a special power. Some of it is obvious, like candles; contained fire, a light in the darkness, something you see in old places, in mysterious places. Mirrors seem obvious, because they’re such a part of western folklore — Snow White, Bloody Mary — but of course then you have to ask yourself why they’re so popular in folklore, why they were used.

These things come with their own set of rules, which are sometimes inexplicable in themselves. Why do playing cards have worth? Did you know that the face cards have names? Not king or queen, actual names. I’d have to go look up my notes, but they’re named things like Alexander and Arthur. Coins have a very simple worth wrapped in very complicated imagery. Keys fit certain locks; locks are safe or unsafe, and like clocks are intricately built, difficult to understand.

They’re also multiple in their purpose or construction. They combine the practical and the mystical. Coins can be used as offerings, and they crop up in a fair few fairy-tales as well. A key has no use without its matching lock, and a key found on the ground is an eternal mystery. Mirrors can show us what we look like, but they hold an entire separate backwards-world inside them. Clocks tell time, but are also works of mechanical wonder, some of the earliest automata that exists, and they’re based on timepieces that used the sun and earth to regulate the world. My ridiculous flashdrive is a thin little stick, practically an adornment that hangs on my neck, but it contains whole worlds I’ve made up.

It seems to be that these things are crafted, not just made; they contain mysteries, and their rules are different to the rules of the everyday.

Ordinarily this wouldn’t perhaps be important, and understanding them certainly wouldn’t be wise; the essence of magic is mystery (viz the old saying — Magic is just Science we don’t understand yet) and solving the mystery kills the magic. But part of the job of being a writer, particularly one who deals in magic in their writing, is to understand things others don’t, and to poke at mysteries until they’re not mysteries any longer but tools. There’s a reason I opened The Dead Isle with a coin; I didn’t understand at the time, but I felt I had to include it. I understand better, as I get older.

The process of writing is sometimes the process of breaking down symbols from our culture, not just from our own heads. It’s an oddly un-artistic activity, quite analytical. Perhaps that means there’s no more magic for us, but to be able to wield those symbols skillfully makes us magicians, in a sense. That’s pretty powerful.

The mundane is full of magic, and magic is made out of the most interesting mundanities. That’s an elemental aspect of both steampunk and magical realism. It’s really no wonder they attract me; they engender a sense of wonder at the world.

 

When In Doubt, Ninjas Attack

Er, warning, there are spoilers in this for a book I haven’t actually written and may never be completed. Just as a friendly note.

There’s a saying about writing that I think originated with National Novel Writing Month: if you don’t know what happens next, or if you have a writing block, make ninjas attack.

It’s not actually a bad way to go about things in the theoretical. I’ve used it several times — not literally with ninjas, mind you, but similar. Attacks, bombs, someone bursting into the room with sudden horrible news. The immediacy of a new and dangerous threat is a great way to drive action along. I have a tendency to write a lot of talking heads or a lot of contemplation as I try to move from one scene to another, so send in the ninjas is a constant theme in the back of my head.

Take Pirate Country, for instance. Pirate Country is a sequel I intended to write for The Dead Isle, one that I planned in my head even before Dead Isle was finished.

I’ve been fascinated by Jean Lafitte ever since I first encountered his stories during a stay on Galveston Island, off the coast of Texas; he was a pirate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it’s rumored that he buried treasure somewhere along the coast of either Louisiana or Texas. He spied and fought for America in the War of 1812, and for a while he had his own country on the coastline of the US: Barataria, which has always enchanted me. I wrote it into The Dead Isle because the idea of a country run by pirates was just too good to resist, and I made Purva a Baratarian by heritage so that I could write a sequel where she went home: Pirate Country.

I’ve been playing around with it now, because I finished The Dead Isle‘s rewrites a month early and I’m a bit compulsive about always having writing projects to hand. It opens with Jack Baker back in Australia, saying his final goodbyes before he and Purva depart for Barataria. They’re attending a farewell party thrown for them by the Harrison Automobile company, and I had to get some necessary exposition in during the conversation between Jack and James Harrison (who was a real person) and then the conversation just…stopped. If it were actually happening, there would be an awkward pause while the participants shuffled their feet.

But I hate awkward pauses and I don’t like writing small talk so, instead, I set off a bomb.

Which was good for about four thousand words, and turned the time period between the farewell party and the launching of the airship into a thrilling exercise in espionage!

You have to be careful when you send in the ninjas, and not make it an excuse for sloppy writing: you have to have at least a vague idea of where you’re going and exhaust other avenues before you make something exciting happen, because if something exciting happened every time you hit a wall your heroes would be traumatised into catatonia by the end.

But, just occasionally, a fictional bomb is a very useful device.

Well, we seen Colonel Jackson come a-walkin’ down the street
A-talkin’ to a pirate by the name of Jean Lafitte;
He gave Jean a drink that he brung from Tennessee,
And the pirate said he’d help us drive the British to the sea…
– The Battle Of New Orleans, Jimmie Driftwood

The Part Where I Hate The Damn Book

Writers — okay, some writers, and on judgey days I think mostly bad writers — like to wax poetic about how crazy they (we) are. There are a lot of ways to do it, because there are almost limitless ways to be crazy, or pretend to be crazy, when you’ve set yourself up as someone with the power to create entire worlds. Worse, writers tend to think they have the right to create entire worlds, because they have the capability.

Not that we don’t, but you can see how that kind of unconscious arrogance can open the door to a whole flood of self-assumed crazy.

Writers talk about being driven crazy by ideas, by creative compulsions, by writer’s block, by the creative process. Not to stomp on anyone else’s process (he says, stomping on it) but I tend to think about ninety percent of it is self-indulgent bullshit. I’ve never had any patience for people who claim their creativity controls them rather than vice versa. I have every sympathy with people who struggle to create, but if I see one more film about someone who’s spent the last two years suffering from writer’s block, I will throw something heavy at the screen.

I didn’t write for the first thirteen years of my life. I loved reading, but I wasn’t interested in that form of creativity. I actively avoided it — you would not believe the sulks I threw — and when I was in my twenties I chalked that up to well-meaning teachers trying to force creativity rather than just letting kids be creative. With more perspective, knowing that I’ve always been a shy person, I think I found the written word too revelatory. I wasn’t okay with sharing that much of myself. In some ways I’m still not; I’m embarrassed to write compelling scenes and strong emotions because they risk showing too much and it’s too easy for other people to use them to get to me, if they know how to go about it right.

The better you are at writing, the easier it is to hide all the weird emotional crap that everyone has but nobody wants to admit to. In inexperienced writers it’s easy to tell the part of the story that really gets them off, but the definition of a skilled writer is someone whose writing isn’t obvious. The thing is, that weird emotional crap is still there, and the writer knows it’s there. A fetish doesn’t have to be sexual; it can be narrative, and revealing that a certain situation or scene strokes your ego or satisfies your lizard hindbrain can be much more embarrassing than the stigma attached to having a kinky thing for exhibitionism or feet or whatever. People are much less squeamish about using emotional desires to manipulate or harm than they are about sexual ones.  Some people don’t care if their freaky is public and visible, and that’s a very well-adjusted way to be because freaky is a dumb social construct meant to keep people in line, but I will be honest: I am not that well-adjusted. My kinks, literary, sexual, or otherwise, are private, and I like them that way. There are absolutely deep, messed-up reasons that I’ve spent a lot of time studying masks.

Every time I work on a book, sometime during the edits I start to just hate the hell out of it. There are plenty of reasons; boredom with prose I’ve read too many times, weariness of beating the same dead literary horse I’ve already spent months on, eagerness to be on to something new. I could talk a lot (and have) about the discipline a writer needs in order to serve the story, and the discipline to grit your teeth and push through the edits is a part of that, but I think the biggest reason I spend a phase hating my book is that I think everyone can see everything that’s wrong with it and thus everything that’s wrong with me.

Which is nonsense, and eventually I snap out of it. Most people who read my prose don’t notice the flaws I notice and wouldn’t give a sweet goddamn if they did, because they’re not actually out to get me. They might find flaws in the book, but they’re highly unlikely to be the same ones I see.

The first novel I went through this with, Nameless, I was genuinely worried I’d never like the book again. I did like it by the time I was done, and a few months ago I read it and was surprised by how much I still like it. Since that first time, I’ve been okay with hating the book. I know soon enough I’ll be done with that and I’ll have something really good on the other side. And frankly, I’d rather hate the book than hate myself. Seems more productive in the long run.

I don’t write to bare my soul — I think most good writers don’t, for the same reason they don’t talk about how crazy they are: they’re not interested in being obvious — but it tends to happen anyway. When it does, I’m grateful for the years I spent not-writing, because those years made me reasonably sensible, and that gets me through the messed-up parts of the process, so I can get back to the fun parts.

The Subtle Art Of Rocktumbling

I’ve read a lot over the years about how writers work, everything from how they sit down and get out their daily wordcount to how they find inspiration or handle the ghastly business of actually getting published. As with any subset of artists, lots of writers have different, personalized ways of doing things.

Geoff Dyer, a British novelist and essayist, has said: Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.

That’s not quite what I do, but I do usually have a number of projects going at any one time. When I decide I don’t want to work on one for a while, I can work on another.

I don’t often get blocked; usually it’s just that I don’t want to write this scene or that scene that I know I have to write in order to move a story forward. Especially when I’m editing, as I’m doing right now for Dead Isle, I feel like I should be done with writing new scenes. The thing is written! And now I have to write more? What gives?

It also helps to have a diversity of work that I can pick from, because most of the long stuff I’ve written has come out of short work: suddenly an idea will catch fire and for a few months I’ll live and breathe that single project. Every novel I’ve written has happened that way: Nameless took four months, Charitable Getting took one, and the original novella-length version of Trace took I think about two weeks.

So I usually have at least a couple of long works, a couple of short works, and a couple of ideas going at any time. I think it’s especially important to try and have ideas that haven’t come to fruition bouncing around in one’s head. This should probably best be termed “background processing”, but I call it “rocktumbling” — just keeping a concept in my mind until it starts to take form, turning it over and around until I can figure out where to get my hooks in. I think this is one of the most important skills a writer can develop, the ability to be patient with something that needs more time before it’s ready.

Sometimes it takes years. I used to want to write action stories about spies and thieves, about pursuits and how two intelligent people would play that game with each other, but I could never figure out quite how the nuts and bolts would work. One of the reasons I’m so very proud of certain fanfiction I’ve written is that I did it — it took ten years to learn how to write a story where the pursuit was the focal point, but eventually I made it happen. And now that’s a skill I can call my own.

At the moment I have a novel in edits, and that’s really my primary project, but I also have about half a dozen fanfics in various stages of completion, two novels waiting in the wings for me to play with, one really good idea I’ve been rocktumbling for a few weeks, and a couple of interesting but still not fully-grown ideas that I’ve been rocktumbling for months or years.

They’ll get there eventually, but it’s okay that they’re not there yet. I’ve got plenty to attend to while my subconscious plays around with those.

Cover Me, I’m Going In

I think it’s a rule all selfpub websites have to do at least one article on cover design.

I had someone get in touch with me a while back about my opinion on the success odds of a website that provided design assistance for selfpub covers. I had to be honest that I didn’t think it was very high. Most selfpub authors essentially fall into two camps — people who can’t design a cover at all, and people who are competent enough with Photoshop or some other graphics program to do it themselves. There’s a small middle area of people who think they’re better than they are, and those people do tend to produce hilariously ugly covers, but they’re few and far between.

The folks who can’t do it at all usually use the built-in cover designer at their selfpub website, and honestly you can produce some pretty slick-looking stuff there. A cover-design service is a useful thing and something a lot of self-publishers need, but the niche is already essentially filled by the self-pub websites. Especially since most selfpub sites offer pro design services as well, and that’s where the sites make their bread-and-butter: professional design, proofing, and marketing services authors can buy as an optional package to help make their book more salable.

I’m not going to get into the aesthetics of cover design, because frankly it’s not my specialty and when I manage to make a slick-looking cover it’s more happenstance than it is talent. But I did want to provide some resources for people who are considering making their own cover.

I work exclusively with lulu.com as a self-publisher, but I believe their setup is pretty much universal: you can use their cover designer, upload your own image to the cover designer, or do a “one piece” cover — in other words, if you ripped the entire front-back-and-spine cover off a book and flattened it out, that’s what the one-piece would look like. They have templates and careful measurements they can give you to help with your one-piece cover, but a lot of the time for images, fonts, and ideas, you’re on your own.

Fortunately, there are several good places to get those, if you know where to look. It can be difficult to find stuff online that’s not mildly-illegal or downright-stolen, but they are out there, and the professionals know about them, so why shouldn’t we?

Two locations for genuinely free (as opposed to bootleg) fonts are dafont.com and fontsquirrel.com. Don’t anger the hipsters by using Papyrus!

A great place to go for images — though sometimes they’re too low-res to use — is university library image collections. Usually the images are either out of copyright or owned by the library, and lots of places have disclaimers saying they’re free for use as long as the original source is credited (ie, “Cover image courtesy of the University Library” with a link attached, in your front-matter copyright page). When browsing archives you should always check for “copyright info” or “terms of use” on the front page, but at least they’re large, diverse resources. One of my favorites for just plain cool stuff is The Fantastic In Art And Fiction at Cornell. There’s a good one at Duke dedicated to old-timey ads. The New York Public Library even has one.

The more you learn what a useful free stock image gallery looks like, the easier it is to separate out galleries that are trying to rip you off. And by far the best free stock image gallery I’ve ever come across is remarkably public: Flickr’s Creative Commons. Anything marked “Attribution” on Flickr’s Creative Commons is free for you to use, as long as you credit the individual who posted the image. It’s fun to browse, relatively easy to search, and lots of the images are posted with deliberately high resolution, so that they’re easy to use for book covers, which demand a fairly high-res image to produce professional-level quality.

At any rate, there’s a start; I could list off half a dozen other stock-image websites, but I’ve never found them especially useful, so why pass them on? The best thing you can do when looking for images is to chase the idea of the site — the image gallery owned by a not-for-profit or the artist licensing their work out to other creatives in return for credit.

It’s important, if you believe strongly in not being plagiarised, that you not rip someone else off for the very first visual your book presents!

Beats Sound Dumber Than They Are

I never trained as a writer, in the sense of taking classes or going to workshops. This explains a lot about my commas.

I don’t know if people who actually train formally as writers learn about beats. They must learn a lot about structure, so I imagine they do; possibly they call them something else. The reason I learned about beats has more to do with my theatre training as a director and dramaturg. Intro to Directing was a lot about diagramming beats, though I’m not sure how much attention I paid at the time because I was busy designing sets in my head. Something must have stuck, anyway, because beats, despite sounding kind of silly, are pretty awesome.

A beat, in a play, is a moment of specific emotion or a segment of a scene concerning a specific theme; you pull apart a script based on its beats, and that’s a very basic way of charting the emotional flow of the play. It’s not a generic technique; a lot of directors don’t like to break down an emotional function with something so coldly analytical, and many others are so experienced they see the flow naturally. But beats are a good crutch for a beginning director, and especially in writing they’ve served me well.

I’m still pulling apart The Dead Isle and reassembling it, and for the most part it’s been instinctive — I’m more experienced than I was two years ago, so it’s like grading an essay by a very smart student. The problem is that a lot of the Australian content of the book is intertwined with itself; I’m pretty proud of how related everything is, because complexity like that takes skill and work, but it can also be a detriment when you need to lose something. The Australian portion of Dead Isle is literally half the book, and probably about twice as long as it needs to be. There are a lot of dead threads that start something but end up going nowhere, and in this case removing one of those threads — a specific character — means erasing an entire expository scene which both explains the political situation and motivates emotional reactions in the characters, which in turn drives a change of setting. So ditching him is kind of a big deal, and the ramifications of removing him involves drastically restructuring about thirty pages.

It’s a little overwhelming, trying to untangle what I tangled up two years ago, and finally I broke down and made a list of a) information to be conveyed and b) later actions that require present motivation. Even that only helped so much, and the end result is that I couldn’t just whip through the next to chapters. I had to take them apart into beats — a fight beat, an expository beat, a beat that needs to be removed for totally different reasons. In all, it broke down to about fifteen beats in thirty pages, which is pretty average, and now I get to figure out how to fit them back together, one at a time.

I really enjoy talking about this stuff, the nitty-gritty of how I actually go about writing, because it’s what I longed for as a young writer and rarely got. I didn’t know how professional writers achieved what they did. There’s plenty of writing out there about how to metaphorically wrestle with literature, but not a whole lot of nuts and bolts talk about how to rework a scene or invent a character or make a setting seem real. I don’t think it’s deliberate — I just think writers evolve these things for themselves so naturally that they don’t consciously look at how they build (or rebuild) a story. Half the time I don’t either, until I look at what I’m writing and go “HUH. BLOG POST!”

BLOG POST!

 

 

Motherf***king Watch Me

I was once in the print room of the Royal Ontario Museum when a curator giving a tour brought out a pastel sketch of red lines radiating against a brown background (I don’t recall the artist) and said, “What can anyone tell me about this?”

I said, “Well, it looks spontaneous, but it’s not.” I pointed out that pastel is messy, and to maintain the crisp borders between red and brown, it had to have been done with considerable care and skill. The curator looked surprised; she knew that already, but I don’t think she expected anyone else to.

I’m a little wary of people who “write because they have to”; I believe in control in art as in any other part of life. Not that things should be rigid and regimented — as Joe Orton says, there has to be room for both Apollo and Dionysus in the work — but because if you don’t control your skills, don’t have mastery over your talent, then the work rules you. That rarely means good work.

Associating a creative impulse with the terminology of compulsion implies that control isn’t possible. Slippery slopes.

That said…

I write for a handful of reasons. One of those is to entertain myself, because I bore easily. Another is to communicate beliefs and values that I hold and think other people should hold too. A third is that I get an idea and it sounds like fun. A fourth, and perhaps this should be listed earlier, is that I am challenged by something — a person, a concept — to produce something difficult. And I won’t deny that the challenge is a little compulsive.

As a child, I used to roll my eyes when my teachers said “don’t use the word can’t! You can do anything!” No thanks. Even then, I knew that nobody else but me should be allowed to define my limits, but that it was rude and counterproductive not to respect my limits when I defined them.

Teachers aren’t used to nine-year-olds knowing their own minds, so of course I got in a fair few tussles about it, not all of which went my way. Oddly enough, all this battling about whether I could or could not do something led to a certain “motherfucking watch me” sentiment:

I can’t write a story about LOLcats? Motherfucking watch me.

It’s not precisely the classic response to reverse psychology; tell me I can’t do algebra and I will genially agree with you. But I’ve tried doing algebra, so I’m aware of my inability. Until I write a story that seems unwriteable or challenging, I don’t know if I can do it or not. But if someone says I can’t, well. Watch me try.

I suppose the point is that every artist, no matter how controlled or how much they believe in control, has their compulsions. Mine is the challenge, but as impulses go I guess that one’s not so bad.