Author: saramarian

Pet Peeves: Stereotyped Kid Characters

Posted by

4

Among my many pet peeves as a reader and writer, I can’t stand it when kid characters are just cardboard cutouts, are stereotyped, or act many years younger than their supposed age.

The last of these issues irritated me most when I was a kid myself and was reading books written by adults for kids my age.  Sometimes it’s downright insulting to a kid to read the crap that an adult author thinks you would say and do – and yeah, kids mature at different rates, but I don’t know any ten-year-olds who talk, think, or behave the same way six-year-olds do, unless there’s some type of developmental problem involved.

I’ve frequently heard people try to dumb down kid characters in other writers’ manuscripts, saying, “Oh, a kid wouldn’t say that,” or, “Kids don’t think that way.”  It always annoys me, because – again – every kid is different, and some kids are sharp as tacks.  Shocking as it may be to some folks, kids are people, too.  That means they have the same range as adult characters.  Some of them are selfish, stupid, bratty, ignorant, easily bored, or immature.  Some are kind, sweet, intelligent, logical, or fascinated with learning.  They have interests ranging from torturing insects to creating fossil museums in their playhouses to learning as much as they can about the American Revolution.  You never know what will strike a kid as interesting, or at what age.  So please, don’t dumb down your kid characters because other adults tell you that kids “aren’t like that”.  I’m an aunt to four younglings, have worked as a mentor with ages from seven up to nineteen, have worked with kids at a science museum and a bookstore, and trust me, there probably is a kid out there who’s a whole lot like your character.

Equally annoying to the dumbed-down plain-vanilla cardboard-cutout kid is the saccharine sweet angel child character.  I hate those as much as I hate the super-brat with no redeeming qualities.  Like adult characters, kid characters have to have some mix of good and bad to them if you want them to be good characters.  If your kid character is just wallpaper, background for your mommy or daddy character, and you don’t have any interest in making the kid a well-rounded, three-dimensional character, then take the kid out of the book altogether.  They’ve got to be important enough to make three-dimensional if you’re going to put them in – same as any other character.

Some books that have excellent kid characters / kid thinking are:

  • Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – for excellence at writing from the rather disturbing point of view of a child genius facing dark times
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury – for excellence at writing two three-dimensional kids who are the same age but see the world completely differently – and are best friends anyway
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – do I even need to explain why this is on the list?  READ IT, if you haven’t yet!
  • Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – burnt-out teenager with a heart of gold somewhere under the sarcasm?  Check!  A beautiful dichotomy of a character
  • Skinnybones and Almost Starring Skinnybones by Barbara Park – because, as a kid, I was crazy about these books, and the narrator cracked me up
  • The Ramona series by Beverly Cleary – another favorite series from my childhood, because Ramona was quirky and not always good, but she meant well (usually) and the other kids in the books kept things balanced out
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events series by Lemony Snicket – don’t let the weirdly pedantic (yet funny) narration (or the terrible Jim Carey performance in the movie) fool you, this is a great series with a trio of three-dimensional young heroes
  • The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling – while Harry gets on my nerves from time to time, he’s undeniably well-rounded as a character – and he’s certainly no angel.  The other kids in the books are well-written, too, and as the series goes along you “watch” them grow up.  J.K. Rowling does a stellar job writing that transformation for many characters over the course of many books
  • The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan – because Percy Jackson makes me smile.  I have yet to see the movie (and the trailer worries me that it will fall far short of the books) but the books are rip-roaring awesome, and the characters are wonderful.  Percy especially.

Making Connections

Posted by

4

One of the most common questions people ask writers (especially speculative fiction writers) is, “Where do you get your ideas?”  For me, the answer to that question is, everywhere.  The hard part is turning an idea into a story-worthy conflict with three-dimensional characters, and making sure the idea doesn’t overshadow the actual content of the story.

I’ve picked up the habit of keeping all my ideas (woefully unorganized), even the ones I will probably never use.  Notebooks with scribbled ideas in the margins, grocery lists with character concepts scrawled in next to the shopping, cut and pasted files in my writing directory on the computer, scrap files taken out of other stories…ideas everywhere.

Why?  Because having all that junk to look over helps me combine ideas, and combining ideas is fun, as well as useful for brainstorming full plotlines out of things that, alone, wouldn’t make much of a story.  It’s like going antiquing for a room you’ve only partially furnished – you browse around, find some good stuff, get ideas of what you do and don’t want for the room, remember something you saw over at the dollar store that would fit in perfectly, realize you want to re-paint the whole room, whatever.

The Life & Death (But Mostly the Death) of Erica Flynn, when I first came up with the story, was a combination of a dream, a question, an interest in mythology, and my desire to write something in a world where I could make all the rules from scratch but still have a modern, conversational narration style.  When I knew there was a book in my head was when this alternate-dimension dream I had combined with the hypothetical question, “What would you do with your last hour if you knew you were going to die?”  Once I had the basic setup in mind, I thought about what kind of book I wanted to write, what setting I wanted to spend a couple years in while I wrote it and revised it, and what kind of protagonist I wanted to spend all that time with.  The domino effect took care of most of the rest of the concepts for the book, since the tone required a certain type of narrator, the establishment of that character drove the action and events, the action and events would require these types of consequences in this world, etc.  It was really a very easy book to plot, for the most part, because I knew what I wanted the parameters to be before I even started it.

Now, the book I’m planning for NaNoWriMo is much more complicated – it’s not as linear, it’s a much broader scope, it’s in multiple points of view, there are interlinked subplots, and it’s the first of a trilogy.  Oddly enough, the first idea that sparked my desire to write it has now been cut entirely out of the book.  As it stands now, the things I’ve left in the plotline came from the following sources:  two characters I cannibalized from (terrible) novels I wrote as a kid (age 10 – 12), ideas from I Ching readings I did for my original character concepts, a brainstorm session of conflict mapping, research sessions on the historical scientific and technological effects on the development of societies, photos of Florence my mom brought back from her trip to Italy when I was young and impressionable, and – again – a clear idea of what kind of book I want to spend my time writing and what characters I want to spend my time with while I’m working on it.  Some of them, I want to spend time with the way you can’t help looking at a car wreck, but still, the fact remains that I’m drawn in by them.  If I’m still curious, even though I already know what happens to them and what choices they’ll make, I consider it a good sign that readers will be interested in them, too.  Let’s hope, anyway – haha!

Long story short (too late!) it’s not just where you get your ideas that’s the pertinent question.  A better question to ask a writer is, “How do you connect your ideas?”  Go brainstorm.  It’s fun.  🙂

Plottin’ & Schemin’

Posted by

2

Sorry, that just put the Beastie Boys song “Rhymin’ & Stealin'” in my head.  Anywayyyy, I had a mini writer’s retreat with Marian Allen last week to do some work on our respective upcoming NaNoWriMo projects this November.  I’m using NaNo to write the first book in a trilogy I’ve had in mind for ages now, so naturally our shop talk got around to plotting techniques.  I’m normally not much of an outliner, and if I do outline, it’s usually not in much detail, but (a) the plot of this trilogy is extremely complex, (b) there are a lot of characters, and their stories interweave and affect each other, even those who don’t know one another personally, and (c) it’s a trilogy, which means I want continuity between the three books, and I don’t want to get to book three and say, “Crap!  I wish I’d mentioned THIS THING I NEED FOR THE PLOT TO WORK back in book one!  Now I’m going to have to shoehorn it in and treat it like it’s been the case all along!”  Of course, that would only be a problem if books one and two were published by the time I was writing book three, but let’s give me some credit here and say that’s a possibility.

I know quite a lot of events that need to happen for the main plot and for the subplots (and there are times when my subplots directly affect the main plot, too), but the order of many of the events is up in the air.  At the suggestion of my writing buddy, I tried a more visual structuring technique:  Take a piece of paper and mark it off into rectangles – 9 columns and 3 rows.  In the fifth column of each row, write “Turning Point”, in the next-to-last rectangle write “Climax”.  Your first box is your setup, the last box is your conclusion.  Start filling stuff in.

Now, I modified this somewhat to accommodate a 3-book storyline.  For the trilogy, each book gets its own row, so there are 9 rectangles per book.  That means less nitty-gritty plot detail can go into it, but the general shape of all of it comes together in one place.  I have 18″ by 24″ paper (for painting, usually) and many colored pencils (for coloring books, usually), so I color-coded important characters and got busy.

While I don’t think this will be a solve-all for my plotting problems in this series, I think the combination of a list-form, all-just-text plot file  with this visual structure layout will be highly useful.  Already, there are times when my brain gets stuck with one format, and just switching to the other type of outline unsticks it.  The more tools you, as a writer, have, the better, because every single project is different, and a tool you never needed before may suddenly be really useful for your next story!

Random Inspirations

Posted by

2

Inspiration can turn up in the funniest places.  Whether it’s a spark of an idea or the reassurance that no story comes out perfect on the first try, writing can jump out at you from almost anywhere.  As Marian Allen recently wrote in an excellent post on her blog, “Everything is writing.”  I heartily concur.

Some of the odd places I’ve found inspiration in the past few months:

  • The special features on the Pixar movies A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and Toy Story 2.  The Blu-Ray releases of these films have a whole lot about the team’s writing and design process, with the writers and artists talking about how the story and characters evolved and changed in the process of working on it.  My husband and I are both Pixar buffs, both love the characters and the storytelling, and were interested partly because of that, and partly because, as writers, it’s always nice to know that work you admire didn’t work perfectly to begin with…that they, too, had to cut characters, scrap ideas, change stuff around, alter the tone, and all the stuff that we have to do, too.
  • Cookbooks.  I have recently been trying out new recipes, and as a result, noticed that a set of my cookbooks has highly useful information about the history of each cuisine in the introduction, followed up by a two-page spread about individual ingredients, their source, history, flavor, etc.  This is an awesome little tool for use in building my fantasy world up.  No, I won’t put all that history in, but the more you know, the better you can put yourself into the world you write about – and that authority comes through on the page, making it more believable to your readers.
  • My day job.  Working at a locally-owned coffee shop with a roastery here in town, I’ve found out a heck of a lot about coffee and how it goes from a little white bean to a cup of liquid life-force.  Since my NaNoWriMo project for this November involves a semi-Italian world, and coffee is Kind of a Big Deal in Italy, this is all grist for the mill (or should that be beans for the roaster?)
  • Just being present for real-life moments and experiences.  Paying attention to what the world around me looks like, smells like, how the air feels, who’s around, what they’re doing, how they’re interacting with other people, how someone I’m talking to thinks about things, what’s important to them, where their dichotomies are.  It doesn’t hurt that I went on a vacation to a beautiful place recently and had every reason to be paying wholehearted attention to the world around me!
  • Superhero movies.  For some reason, these always get me thinking about writing.  I don’t know why – the ideas I have while watching one have nothing to do with the movie itself, or heroes or villains, either.  But for some reason, superhero movies get my brain in gear to write.  Possibly because they’re exciting and usually beautifully shot, or the fact that the heroes and villains are generally parallels of one another, and I enjoy that in a protagonist/antagonist team.  Whatever the reason, I’m well aware that if I’m feeling blah about working on a project, I can watch a Batman movie or a Spiderman movie or a Fantastic Four movie (whether it’s a good movie or not) and I’ll be bouncing off the walls, ready to write.  Superhero movies may not do this for you, but be on the lookout for anything that does have this effect on you, whether it makes sense or not!  And then use it to your advantage when you find it.

Pet Peeves: “Bad Species” Fantasy

Posted by

2

One of the great things about writing fantasy and science fiction is that you can write all kinds of characters of all kinds of “races” or “species” and show how different ones are different ways even within the same race.  It drives me bonkers when a writer makes a species all one way – they all act alike, think alike, there’s no variation to their characters within that, and they’re all evil or all good (usually depending on how pretty they are).  Oh, and elves are always slender – that bugs me too.  Who says there isn’t a single fat elf out there???  Let’s have a chunky elven chick with a few vices, because I’m tired of reading about pure, slender ones.

I find that fantasy is much worse about species stereotyping than science fiction (on the whole – ha, sorry for the generalization!)  Even the original Star Trek, which relied more on personality traits to define the alien races than prosthetics and makeup (for obvious reasons), often focused on the crew finding their own generalizations about other alien races weren’t accurate on an individual level.  And don’t get me started on how incredible the Babylon 5 series is from a writing standpoint, particularly in making each species distinctive, but showing how different the individuals are at the same time.

One explanation that comes to mind for me as to why fantasy is guiltier than science fiction of demonizing or idealizing entire species is this:  fantasy is usually based in the past (or in a culture technologically or sociologically less modernized than our own time), and science fiction is usually based in the future (or, again, in a society that is technologically or sociologically “ahead” of us, even if Star Wars does claim to be a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away).  Well, we all know how well people dealt with other countries, cultures, races, philosophers – anyone different was scary, in most histories of most cultures.  People were very superstitious about each other.  I think that ends up reflected in fantasy, as something that is past-esque, whereas science fiction looks to the future, where many writers hope things will be better and people will be less divided by their differences.

End broad generalizations of writers of these two genres.  On to addressing the issue!

Now, I know you’re thinking, “But Tolkien had evil races in his books, and everybody reads him!”  I have two answers to you:  (1) Everybody, please stop trying to write Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien already did it once, and so far I haven’t read anyone who did it better.  Write your own world already! and (2) While Tolkien is guilty of the slender elven maiden thing, and the orcs are all evil, and yeah he did some of that stuff, there is at least some deviation between the elves (and you never know which way they’ll go on an issue – they’re pretty unpredictable in that regard).  The orcs were also explained as having been made by Sauron (big bad guy, if you live under a rock don’t know LOTR) by messing up elves somehow (sorry, I’m not so nerdy that I remember all the details of that) and killing off any that didn’t turn out vicious enough.  That’s a pretty solid basis for making a whole species evil, in my estimation.  So do follow Tolkien’s example on that score:  if you make a whole race evil, have a damn good reason why they’re all evil.  And a difficult history is not an acceptable reason – Ghandi came from a country with a difficult history.

It’s far more interesting, to me, to read fantasy with a varied landscape of characters, where individuals may be shaped by their racial heritage, but aren’t ruled by it.  If you take the pointy ears off your elf and he’s no longer interesting, he was never interesting to start with.  Sorry – harsh but true.

The world you build will also suffer from generalizing your races.  Fantasy is all about suspension of disbelief.  Amazingly, you can get people to suspend disbelief when it comes to dragons and magic and shapeshifters, but you have to write those things realistically – funny as that sounds.  If your world is rich and full and varied and fascinating, people will go along with almost anything.  Generalizations are like a badly-done background at a play – they make it obvious that your world is just a one-color wash on plywood.  Make your characters so different and so intriguing that people want to slip into your world and meet them.  (Babylon 5, curse you for making me wish I could go hang out with G’Kar!  It is an unfulfillable dream!)

If for no other reason, don’t make your species “Bad Species” or “Good Species” because it kills hundreds of opportunities for unpredictability.  If all your goblins are vicious, throat-slitting thieves, it’s going to be pretty obvious when one shows up that something will get stolen, and someone might get their throat slit.  If your goblins tend to be vicious and, culturally, they have very little understanding of “mine” and “yours”, but your readers have seen that some understand more than others, and some are peaceful and maybe even spiritual or something, they don’t know what will happen next!  Interest!  Worry!  Will this goblin steal something, or will the “good guys” treat him badly because they are stereotyping him, and will they turn out to be wrong, and the reader will be ashamed of them for their bad behavior when this goblin was trying to help them?  That’s the kind of stuff you want your reader to wonder about.  Don’t take that away from yourself by plugging in lame, stereotypical fantasy races where every individual member of that race is interchangeable with the others.

Okay, end rant.

Show & Tell

Posted by

2

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “show, don’t tell” lately – the oft-given advice every writer hears at workshops, critique groups, on writers’ and editors’ blogs, and…pretty much everywhere, really.

It is good advice, on the whole.  It’s much more powerful to be shown a character’s emotional reaction than told, “He felt sad.”  Likewise, it’s better to have a tense dialogue interaction than simply the phrase, “The two sisters hadn’t been getting along lately,” or whatever.

On the other hand, on some level, writing is storytelling.  It isn’t a film, where the action and dialogue all have to speak for themselves and no description is necessary because the audience can see the setting, the lighting and music can set the tone, and the actors’ expressions and inflections feed subtlety into the dialogue (if they’re talented actors).

To write, you must tell.  The trick is to tell in such an engaging way that the audience believes you’re showing them.  It’s a double-edged sword, because you don’t want to drone on and on about the setting or the way the characters look, but you also want to paint enough detail to peak the readers’ imaginations into visualizing the scenes you write.  You have to walk a razor’s edge between conciseness and detail in order to immerse your reader in the story world.

One of the best ways to keep that balance is to choose your words carefully.  There are many variants of a writing exercise that goes something like this:  Write a scene from the point of view of a man grieving the loss of his son, without mentioning death, funerals, or the son.  Now write the same scene from the same man’s point of view, in which his son is nearby, well, and healthy, again without mentioning the son.  I’ve seen so many versions of this exercise, I have no idea of its origin, but it’s a great one to try the different variants of – it really gets you thinking about how to convey much with very little.

As for “telling” – well, you’ve got to tell something, or you won’t write anything down.  Even if you use examples and body language to illustrate unnamed emotions or relationships, you have to tell the reader what that body language is, or what happened in that example event.  At some point, you’ve got to tell your audience something!

And frankly, there are some things that should be skimmed over.  You can’t be afraid to telescope when you need to, or you’ll end up writing down every damn step your character takes, like the scientist’s assistant from the Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, who announces, “I am moving my right leg, I am moving my left leg.  Now I am putting this down,” while everyone is standing there watching him, like they can’t see what he’s doing!  You don’t want to do that in your book, and certainly not in your short story.  If the details of an event aren’t relevant, but the fact that it happened is, then skip the details and just show me the results, the outcome, the ensuing dialogue between characters who were there, etc.  Tell me about that instead, and by telling the reader those things, you will show the reader the relevance of mentioning the event.

Basically, it’s another of those fine lines that writers get to try and walk so often.  Like many things in life, show & tell in fiction is just one more thing you have to learn to balance.

NaNoWriMo

Posted by

7

This November will be my first year participating in National Novel Writing Month – and I’m very excited about it!  Other than last fall, I’ve been working full-time every November for the last several years, and this past year I was well into the process of revising the rough draft of my novel during NaNo – didn’t seem like a good idea to switch gears and start something new right then.

So this year, I get to do it, and I’m trying to think ahead and prepare for it so I can get the most out of it that I can.

If you don’t know about NaNoWriMo, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel between November 1st and November 30th by writing 1500 words per day (at least!)  Correct me if I’m wrong about that word count, because I had trouble double-checking it on the NaNo website.  Of course, it’s going to be very rough, but that’s what I’ve been preachin’ about lately, right?  Write it down and THEN fix it.  NaNo has a strong online presence, too, and it’s a great way to connect with other writers and swap story talk.

I’m planning on writing the first book of a trilogy that I’ve been planning, plotting, fiddling with, rewriting, changing, doing research for, and generally screwing around with for the past 13 years.  I WANT this book to be written, dang it, and it’s time it was.  What better way to stop all the hemming and hawing and actually plunge into this story than NaNoWriMo?  That’s my plan, anyway.

In preparation for my month of glorious and frantic writing, here’s some stuff I want to do ahead of time:

  • get all my notes together and re-organize them, taking out all the discarded and altered ideas and putting those in a separate binder, so I’ll have a cohesive set of details to work from
  • finish my rough plotline for the various characters’ story arcs, leaving plenty of room for the story to change if need be
  • do more architectural drawings of the setting, to help keep my visuals consistent as I work on writing it
  • take care of as much mundane, real-world stuff ahead of time as possible to keep that month focused on writing
  • possibly do some writing exercises to draw out my ideas for the characters and the storyline – sort of a pre-emptive inspiration process
  • get some appropriate music together and make some work playlists for my writing time

Maybe it’s crazy to prep for something that’s all about keeping a sense of spontaneity, but hey, what Boy Scout doesn’t come prepared, right?

——

On a side note, I have just returned from vacation, which is why I haven’t updated this week, and hopefully someday I’ll post more consistently on this blog!

Drafts

Posted by

6

While I haven’t yet started the hopefully-final draft of my current novel, I’ve learned a heck of a lot in the process of writing this book.  The last novel I finished (six years ago) is a big wad of mistakes tangled around some good ideas, and it’s beyond me still how to extract the good stuff from the mess.  So when I started the first draft of my new book – The Life & Death (But Mostly the Death) of Erica Flynn – I took a very different approach.

In the past, I’ve agonized over rough drafts, trying to make them as close to final drafts as is humanly possible, the idea being to eliminate as much of the rewrite process as I could.  Truth to tell, that’s worked great with short stories, but a novel is a whole different animal.  The trouble with trying to write a perfect first draft is, it takes forever, and the content is not always as pertinent to the story as you thought it was at the time.  You get too focused on the details, and lose sight of the big story.  The details are much easier to go back in your rewrites and fix, though – mess up the big story, and you may never figure out how to untangle the good from the bad.

In addition to writing, I also dabble in graphite drawing.  One thing I learned from drawing is, if you get the whole picture sketched out and make sure that everything is proportionate and that the composition is strong, then when you add the shading, you’ll end up with an excellent picture.  If you start filling in shading before you’ve finished your outline, however, you’ll usually notice (eventually) that your perspective, proportion, and/or composition is off, and trust me, you will never get the picture to look right if you’ve already started the shading on a badly-done sketch.

So when I started my rough draft of The Life & Death (But Mostly the Death) of Erica Flynn, I applied what I learned from visual art to written art – I thought of the first draft as a sketch.  I did it quickly and stayed loose with it, making adjustments but not getting too attached to any one line, removed what didn’t work and didn’t fill in all the empty space (subplot) until I’d finished the main storyline.

My first round of rewrites was heavy work, but, for me, it’s much easier to add material than to cut it.  I had lots of ideas for subplots, and tons of notes about the secondary characters and their backgrounds that I didn’t know whether to include in the manuscript or not during my whirlwind first draft.  When I sat down to work on the second draft, I looked over what I had and made notes about what was needed, what felt like it was missing, where the characters came off flat, etc. and coordinated that information with what I had made notes about.  All I had to do was expand on ideas that had already occurred to me, figure out where it made sense within the story and how it would affect the larger plot, and shape the story accordingly with the new material.  Almost everything “missing” was accounted for in my notes, and although it was hard to come up with the stuff that wasn’t accounted for, it was muuuuch easier than cutting out the “extra” notes that I’d made for things that really wouldn’t have worked.

The third draft, which I just finished last week (weeee!), I had some beta readers’ feedback to work from.  The majority of the rewrites on that round were for clarity, consistency, maintaining the readers’ suspension of disbelief, pacing, and improving scenes that weren’t working or weren’t working well enough.  There were still a couple areas of major expansion, but for the most part, it was troubleshooting.  I imagine the next draft will be no expansion and all troubleshooting (though that may be wishful thinking – haha!) but I’ll have to hear what my theta readers (is that a term?) have to say about that!  *grin*

Research

Posted by

2

Research is a constant writerly debate in my household.  My husband will go to incredible lengths to avoid doing research for his writing.  I love research, although I have an odd relationship with it.  I research heavily for fantasy, but I’m horribly intimidated by the idea of researching for any kind of mystery or historical fiction, which is why I don’t write either of those genres, although I read both (preferably combined!)

That contradiction aside, why the heck would I do research for fantasy?  To my husband, especially, this is incomprehensible – fantasy is the perfect setup, as far as he’s concerned, because he can just make everything up and not worry about how things work in the real world.  I understand that sentiment, since I write (and read) partly as escapism from reality.

But it’s so exciting to do research for fantasy novels and stories!  It’s not that I can’t come up with ideas and inspiration just off the top of my head for fantasy, but finding out things I don’t know about history, food, inventions, other cultures, religious rituals, animals, etc. gets me thinking about things I might otherwise overlook.  Sometimes I’ll come across an idea and reverse it entirely, but even that reversal wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t found the idea to contradict in the first place.

Some of the things I’ve learned more about while doing research, I would probably never have thought to read up on if it hadn’t related to my story, but I’m always glad to have found out new information.  As a writer, the more you know about anything, the richer, more varied, and more interesting your basis for stories and characters becomes.  It’s like you’re collecting resources that are then, literally, right at your fingertips.

Because of my writing, I read up on a lot of psychology theory – especially Carl Jung and William James, both of whom were also passionately interested in literature and philosophy.  Some of their writings on those subjects have, in turn, expanded my views on fiction, both as a reader and as a writer.  I’ve read up on the historical impact of technology on society, the history of various inventions, traditional foods and drinks of places I wanted to inspire my settings, mythology and legends that cross all over the globe – and now all of that information is at the back of my mind every time I sit down to write.  If you want to be inspired, keep your brain well-stocked with ideas it can put together, pull apart, reverse, or just plain use.

That’s my philosophy on research, anyway.  Oh, and I’ve also become addicted to olives thanks to research, but that’s a side effect you may have to watch out for if you’re reading up on the Mediterranean.  Hah!  That’s one reason to write what you love – if you’re interested in something to begin with, “research” is a great excuse to obsessively read about it, and if you’re researching a place’s cuisine, it’s a great excuse to eat a lot of tasty food (and drink coffee spiked with brandy, if your subject of study is Italy).

Pet Peeves – Amnesia Openings

Posted by

6

All readers have pet peeves about storytelling.  There are some things that just irritate you when you see them in a story or a movie.  I think writers are even more prone to these kinds of tics than other readers, partly because we’re used to watching out for what does and doesn’t work in our own stories.

One of my own personal annoyances is with books that start out with a main character having amnesia.  Why does it bug me?  Well, partly because it strikes me as lazy writing, most of the time – like the character who always asks obvious questions for the sake of exposition via dialogue (*cough* Tasha Yar *cough* Next Generation Star Trek *cough*).  I don’t mind if the character develops amnesia later in the story, but to start out with it just seems like such a cheap way to get away with a long setup for your world and your characters, with an oh-so-obvious element of mystery.  The trouble is, it leaves me cold, and here’s the main reason:

99% of the amnesia beginnings I’ve read treat “amnesia” like it means “lack of personality”.  I’m sure that, without our memories, we’d all act somewhat different than usual, but we wouldn’t lose our personalities altogether.  You’d still think like yourself, you just wouldn’t know why you thought the way you did.  Aside from the fact that it makes no sense to equate loss of memory with loss of personality, there’s nothing duller, to me, than a book without good characters.  I latch onto characters quicker than any other story element, and so do many, many other readers.  Give me a lousy anchor, and I’m getting on a different boat, thanks all the same.

One thing I love, though, is finding stories that break my personal rules of reading and writing.  I’m delighted when a writer can do something I detest, and make me fall in love with his/her book anyway.  For one thing, it impresses me, and for another thing, I like to figure out why their book was different.  Why did this work, when dozens of other books didn’t (or at least, didn’t work for me)?

For my Amnesia Openings pet peeve, the book that shatters the rule is Nine Princes in Amber, the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series.  Why does Zelazny get a free pass when the very first page of his series starts with the main character having no memory?  Because, also on the first page, he shows me his narrator has a great deal of personality.  Within half a page, the reader knows he’s suspicious, calculating, tricky, and funny.  The narrative voice, the questions and doubts that cross his mind, the decisions he makes, and the way he handles his lack of knowledge about himself or what happened to him, work together beautifully to establish what type of person he is and how he thinks, and to simultaneously set up the first inklings of conflict and danger.  There’s nothing lazy about writing that can do all that with half a page.

The best writing makes the most of each and every scene – not just because it makes the book richer, although it does, but also because that’s the kind of writing that grabs people.  It’s exciting to open a book and be in another place, but more exciting to open a book and be in another place with interesting questions to be answered, mysterious events on the horizon, and a fascinating main character to anchor you in the world of the story.  A narrative hook, by itself, isn’t enough.  You need some bait, too – if I may mix my nautical metaphors here in my blog (I would avoid doing so at all costs in a story!)  😉