"Write what you know." That's advice given by writing teachers and writers the world over. Fair enough; it's easier to write characters that think like us, that talk like us, that act like us. It's easier to write about experiences we ourselves have had. Why do you think so many of Stephen King's heroes are writers? But I think there's something more to it than that. It's possible to go deeper, to dive under the surface.
Back when I was in 10th Grade, I wrote a poem that I shared with my English class. It was about a lower-class guy, very poor, living in a dirty, unfurnished room in the middle of a big, dark, anonymous city. It was written first person. I read it out loud to the class.
They hated it. The common refrain was, "You can't write about a guy like that. He's nothing like you. You've never experienced it. How dare you?" That stung a lot. After all, we'd just gotten done reading a book in which the main character commits suicide at the end, and they hadn't complained about that, though it's pretty unlikely that author knew what it was like to kill herself. One of my friends told me to shrug it off, saying, "If they don't know a metaphor when they see it, that's their problem."
He'd understood what I was trying to do better than I had myself. What I was really trying to get at was the feeling of intense loneliness and isolation I was beginning to feel. The window-dressing of the poem was the dirty urban environment, but what I was trying to get at was how it felt to me to be in that classroom, ironically, with people who didn't understand me. Overwrought adolescent angst? Probably a bit. But it was also a prelude to a bout of severe acute depression that hit me just a few months later. And depression was something I understood very, very well.
I think the idea of using metaphor and symbol to get at an underlying truth is very important to the fantasy genre. Obviously, none of us have experience with dragons, monsters, desperate swordfights, and sorcery. But these are the symbols, the language of fantasy. As far back as Beowulf, tellers of fantasy stories have understood that a dragon, by itself, isn't really anything. But Beowulf's dragon is symbolic of greed, of hoarded wealth, and of a lot of other things I don't know enough Old English to understand. The flames it breathes out, its claws and armored scales, represent the hero's greatest challenge--but it's a challenge that can translate to everyday life, where the biggest lizards we're likely to see live in terrariums or the zoo.
In Ember of Dreams, one of the characters compliments another on his courage. He tells him, "You have warred with difficult foes... Few men have the courage to face themselves so honestly." This, in the end, is what fantasy storytelling, indeed all storytelling, is about. Fantasy is about inner conflicts writ large on the fabric of an imaginary world. I couldn't take a sword and carve the depression out of me (though some people try, resulting in tragedy). But I could write a story in which strength of heart can truly overwhelm monsters of hate, rage, and evil.
I'm not that old or experienced in life, though every day and every year adds to my store of experiences. But I can still write what I know. I've noticed that a lot of my heroes are craftsmen, people who create things of beauty. This reflects my own hope that what I create can be beautiful and true. Some of my own experiences find their way into my writing: the too-serious, painfully earnest apprentice Robert in Ember has more than a little of my own adolescence showing through, and Luthor's weakness in the face of temptation is something I've struggled with in myself.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Inspiration
You all know the cliche writer's question: "Where do you get your ideas?"
Now, the interesting thing about this cliche is that the answer isn't cliche. The answer varies, from something deep and profound, to a joke, to no answer at all. I think that's because the answer is always different, for every author. Sometimes it's different for the same author for different stories, or different parts of the same story.
Creativity is one of the most inexplicable things in the human psyche. Personally, I think it's what the book of Genesis is talking about when it says people are "made in God's image." It certainly makes more sense than the idea that God is a big, white-bearded guy with a Greek physique, wearing a white robe. I think the desire to create new things, new ideas, new stories, is an almost holy thing. Not to say that everything that gets created is holy, of course. Like all virtues, it has a positive side, and a flip side.
Don't worry; I'm not going to wax all theological or spiritual here. What I'm trying to say is that creativity can't be fully explained. One moment, I'm going along with my everyday life, entering insurance data into my computer at work, the next, bam! Idea!
Howard Tayler, author of the (quite wonderful) webcomic Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/) wrote that ideas are, in and of themselves, completely worthless. It's what you do with the ideas that matters. Until you do something with them, they just float around without form or function.
My story ideas come from... well, gosh. I don't know! What I do know is that I don't get the whole story at once. A particular scene, anecdote, character, or conversation is where it starts. "Ember of Dreams" can be traced back to a mental image of a confrontation between a brave man and an enemy armed with an unstoppable weapon. There's a tableau on a dark, smoky plateau, two swordsmen facing each other. One is determined to destroy the other, while the hero is determined to... win.
The problem here, of course, was that this comes near the very end of the story. I had to write the story that got me there. Other little flashes of inspiration suggested themselves: a magical spell that would grant the user's greatest wish; a knight who didn't believe in fear; a young man who wanted his own self-respect more than anything else in the world; a young woman who could talk to animals; elves that were half-feral, rather than the noble, ethereal Tolkien creations; and so on.
I can sometimes trace these elements back to their original sources. The knight, for example, is based very closely on the manager I worked for in 2004; a big, strong ex-barroom bouncer named Tommy (he really did tell me once that he didn't believe in fear) provided the inspiration for Sir Thomas Southbrook, the greatest knight in the kingdom. The teenage guy with self-esteem issues, I'm sad to say, has more than a little of myself in him. The girl who talks to horses is based on a wish my wife has expressed.
And then there are the elves of "Ember". I wanted some sort of fantastical creatures for my heroes to interact with. Dwarves are... well, they're all the same. Short, grumpy, bearded guys who are good craftsmen and swing battleaxes around. They've become a parody of themselves. Elves? Well, maybe. But I didn't want Tolkien elves, or Tad Williams Sithi, or any of the other Fair Folk I'd seen. But then I thought about the old stone arrowheads that turn up in the British Isles. They're relics of stone age humans, of course, but they're called... elf-bolts.
Suddenly I was thinking about that. What if elves did use stone arrowheads? Well, that would mean they didn't work metal. But why not? Elves often are depicted as having an especially close relationship with nature. What if they viewed it as a matter of religious significance not to profane the earth by digging up ore, smelting it down, and turning it into tools and weapons? What if they didn't even like the idea of using fire, not because it was impractical, but because to them, it was morally wrong? The old stories of iron being a talisman against faeries suddenly made sense; it would drive them away by moral repulsion!
An entire fictitious belief system had been suggested on the basis of some old legends and nicknames. Now I was really rolling. At this point, I gave a phone call to my friend Andy. We talked for a good couple of hours and I laid out everything that I had in my head. He mostly just let me talk, bouncing ideas off him, but added some suggestions and clarifications.
So that was the process of inspiration, as far as I can remember it. Hindsight colors things, naturally, so I can't claim to be completely right about it. But that's pretty close to how it went down. Unfortunately, I still hadn't actually written much of anything. But that's a matter for later posts; I've written enough here for now.
Now, the interesting thing about this cliche is that the answer isn't cliche. The answer varies, from something deep and profound, to a joke, to no answer at all. I think that's because the answer is always different, for every author. Sometimes it's different for the same author for different stories, or different parts of the same story.
Creativity is one of the most inexplicable things in the human psyche. Personally, I think it's what the book of Genesis is talking about when it says people are "made in God's image." It certainly makes more sense than the idea that God is a big, white-bearded guy with a Greek physique, wearing a white robe. I think the desire to create new things, new ideas, new stories, is an almost holy thing. Not to say that everything that gets created is holy, of course. Like all virtues, it has a positive side, and a flip side.
Don't worry; I'm not going to wax all theological or spiritual here. What I'm trying to say is that creativity can't be fully explained. One moment, I'm going along with my everyday life, entering insurance data into my computer at work, the next, bam! Idea!
Howard Tayler, author of the (quite wonderful) webcomic Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/) wrote that ideas are, in and of themselves, completely worthless. It's what you do with the ideas that matters. Until you do something with them, they just float around without form or function.
My story ideas come from... well, gosh. I don't know! What I do know is that I don't get the whole story at once. A particular scene, anecdote, character, or conversation is where it starts. "Ember of Dreams" can be traced back to a mental image of a confrontation between a brave man and an enemy armed with an unstoppable weapon. There's a tableau on a dark, smoky plateau, two swordsmen facing each other. One is determined to destroy the other, while the hero is determined to... win.
The problem here, of course, was that this comes near the very end of the story. I had to write the story that got me there. Other little flashes of inspiration suggested themselves: a magical spell that would grant the user's greatest wish; a knight who didn't believe in fear; a young man who wanted his own self-respect more than anything else in the world; a young woman who could talk to animals; elves that were half-feral, rather than the noble, ethereal Tolkien creations; and so on.
I can sometimes trace these elements back to their original sources. The knight, for example, is based very closely on the manager I worked for in 2004; a big, strong ex-barroom bouncer named Tommy (he really did tell me once that he didn't believe in fear) provided the inspiration for Sir Thomas Southbrook, the greatest knight in the kingdom. The teenage guy with self-esteem issues, I'm sad to say, has more than a little of myself in him. The girl who talks to horses is based on a wish my wife has expressed.
And then there are the elves of "Ember". I wanted some sort of fantastical creatures for my heroes to interact with. Dwarves are... well, they're all the same. Short, grumpy, bearded guys who are good craftsmen and swing battleaxes around. They've become a parody of themselves. Elves? Well, maybe. But I didn't want Tolkien elves, or Tad Williams Sithi, or any of the other Fair Folk I'd seen. But then I thought about the old stone arrowheads that turn up in the British Isles. They're relics of stone age humans, of course, but they're called... elf-bolts.
Suddenly I was thinking about that. What if elves did use stone arrowheads? Well, that would mean they didn't work metal. But why not? Elves often are depicted as having an especially close relationship with nature. What if they viewed it as a matter of religious significance not to profane the earth by digging up ore, smelting it down, and turning it into tools and weapons? What if they didn't even like the idea of using fire, not because it was impractical, but because to them, it was morally wrong? The old stories of iron being a talisman against faeries suddenly made sense; it would drive them away by moral repulsion!
An entire fictitious belief system had been suggested on the basis of some old legends and nicknames. Now I was really rolling. At this point, I gave a phone call to my friend Andy. We talked for a good couple of hours and I laid out everything that I had in my head. He mostly just let me talk, bouncing ideas off him, but added some suggestions and clarifications.
So that was the process of inspiration, as far as I can remember it. Hindsight colors things, naturally, so I can't claim to be completely right about it. But that's pretty close to how it went down. Unfortunately, I still hadn't actually written much of anything. But that's a matter for later posts; I've written enough here for now.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Prologue: Or, How We Got Here
Ah, the blogosphere. For years I avoided it. However, like CDs, DVDs, laptops, FaceBook, and all those other 21st Century bits of software and hardware that have, as Andrew Carnegie said, done the business of capitalism by "turning luxuries into necessities", there was no escaping it in the end.
I expect anyone who reads this won't be terribly interested in the random minutiae of my life. The people who want to know those sorts of things already know them. Instead, I want to use this space to talk about my calling: writing and storytelling.
I don't write for a living. Thank goodness, because if I did, I'd be making an hourly wage somewhere in negative digits. Maybe Jackson Browne said it best: "Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive. Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive." I have lots of likes, but only a few loves: my family, pets, reading, and writing.
I've written stories almost as long as I knew how to hold a #2 pencil. When I was 8, I wrote an adventure story called "The Commando Raiders". I was reading about World War II a lot, and the Commandos sounded like a pretty hardcore bunch of guys, so I thought I'd write a great story about them. I illustrated it with Crayola markers, and the teacher got the class's books bound in totally inappropriate floral-print covers. It was a ridiculous story, of course, but on reflection, I've seen less realistic adventure tales in movie theaters since then, so maybe I was on the right track.
In Middle School, 7th Grade, I wrote my first really long piece of work. It was called "Facets of a Crystal Blade". Fantasy has always been a genre that's called to me, ever since my dad read "The Hobbit" to my brother and me when I was 5. "Facets" was about 95% derivative, copycat schlock, but hidden inside it were a couple of good scenes, some character concepts, and the idea of a magical sword with the power to destroy kingdoms. Looking back, I can see the faintest little hints of ideas that would later come out in more serious work.
Other stories followed. There was "A Matter of Honor", about a knight who sacrifices his life to strike down a demon-king with a magic sword. Then, in 9th and 10th Grade, I wrote a sci-fi trilogy ("Acceptable Risks", "Soldiers of Conscience" and "World Without Heroes") which went to some very dark places, and (with the benefit of hindsight) probably should have warned me I was drifting toward serious depression. I graduated high school, headed off for college--and stopped writing fiction.
This was mostly due to workload. I'd gotten used to being able to do my homework pretty quickly, and still having time and inclination for creative writing. But I'd also taken up tabletop miniature gaming, and my creativity got channeled into painting little metal-and-plastic soldiers for several years. But then, as my senior year worked its way towards its close, I took a poetry writing seminar.
Something came loose inside me. It was a lot like having your voice break as a teenager; you find after a while that you can still talk, but the voice isn't the same one you had before. I discovered my grown-up writing voice. It had been hiding in college essays and roleplaying game sessions, slowly developing. I wrote some poems that were trite and derivative, yes, but I also wrote some that were the best writing I'd done.
Life got in the way after college, and the next year was spent moving, finding a job, getting an apartment, and figuring out where things were going with my girlfriend (as it turned out, they went in the direction of marriage). But then I was laid off my retail job after the Christmas shopping season, and suddenly found myself with way too much time on my hands. Trying not to worry too much about my dwindling bank balance (and failing), I started thinking about writing again. But this time, I wanted to write a novel.
I had a basic idea: what if there was a magical thing, a sword maybe, that would give you whatever you most wanted? I also had some characters in mind. They were archetypes to begin with, but I thought I could make them real. A two-hour phone conversation with my best childhood friend got my pistons firing. I decided to write a page a day, 12-point print, single-space.
It didn't work out that way. Three years of writing passed, along with two more moves, a wedding, and all sorts of other real-life concerns. Then came another year of editing, going back over every one of the 263,000-odd words I'd written, chopping, adding, and modifying. And even then I wasn't done.
Everyone tells you to get used to rejection when you're trying to publish a book. But I didn't realize just how soul-destroying it can get, to look up an agent, carefully craft a query letter, send it off--if you're lucky, with a sample of the work itself--and then, a month or two later, to get back a single-page letter saying, in effect, thanks but no thanks. I lost count at about 40 rejections.
Finally, I decided to succumb to the modern era and try my hand at self-publishing. I contacted one of my best friends from college, a professional artist (http://www.halfsparkle.com/), and asked her to make me a cover and a map. While we went back and forth, making sure it came out just right, I worked out Amazon's Kindle epublishing.
And that's the end of that leg of the journey. "Ember of Dreams" went up for download July 9, 2011 (http://www.amazon.com/Ember-Dreams-Clarion-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B005BYX9NA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1312729861&sr=1-1), more than 5 years after I first started it.
I'm not done writing, of course. I won't be tinkering with "Ember" anymore. It's a finished product, and I'm not George Lucas, so I don't feel the need to go back and change things around. But there are plenty of other ideas out there, and I hope to move faster with the next one (more on that later).
Whew! This was originally going to be just a couple of paragraphs of introduction. J.R.R. Tolkien said that "dwarves' tongues run long when speaking of their work." In future posts, I'm planning on talking about the writing process itself, things I look for in writing, and hopefully garner some discussion from visitors. Welcome, anyone who's interested in talking about writing in a civil and courteous way. I look forward to the conversation!
I expect anyone who reads this won't be terribly interested in the random minutiae of my life. The people who want to know those sorts of things already know them. Instead, I want to use this space to talk about my calling: writing and storytelling.
I don't write for a living. Thank goodness, because if I did, I'd be making an hourly wage somewhere in negative digits. Maybe Jackson Browne said it best: "Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive. Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive." I have lots of likes, but only a few loves: my family, pets, reading, and writing.
I've written stories almost as long as I knew how to hold a #2 pencil. When I was 8, I wrote an adventure story called "The Commando Raiders". I was reading about World War II a lot, and the Commandos sounded like a pretty hardcore bunch of guys, so I thought I'd write a great story about them. I illustrated it with Crayola markers, and the teacher got the class's books bound in totally inappropriate floral-print covers. It was a ridiculous story, of course, but on reflection, I've seen less realistic adventure tales in movie theaters since then, so maybe I was on the right track.
In Middle School, 7th Grade, I wrote my first really long piece of work. It was called "Facets of a Crystal Blade". Fantasy has always been a genre that's called to me, ever since my dad read "The Hobbit" to my brother and me when I was 5. "Facets" was about 95% derivative, copycat schlock, but hidden inside it were a couple of good scenes, some character concepts, and the idea of a magical sword with the power to destroy kingdoms. Looking back, I can see the faintest little hints of ideas that would later come out in more serious work.
Other stories followed. There was "A Matter of Honor", about a knight who sacrifices his life to strike down a demon-king with a magic sword. Then, in 9th and 10th Grade, I wrote a sci-fi trilogy ("Acceptable Risks", "Soldiers of Conscience" and "World Without Heroes") which went to some very dark places, and (with the benefit of hindsight) probably should have warned me I was drifting toward serious depression. I graduated high school, headed off for college--and stopped writing fiction.
This was mostly due to workload. I'd gotten used to being able to do my homework pretty quickly, and still having time and inclination for creative writing. But I'd also taken up tabletop miniature gaming, and my creativity got channeled into painting little metal-and-plastic soldiers for several years. But then, as my senior year worked its way towards its close, I took a poetry writing seminar.
Something came loose inside me. It was a lot like having your voice break as a teenager; you find after a while that you can still talk, but the voice isn't the same one you had before. I discovered my grown-up writing voice. It had been hiding in college essays and roleplaying game sessions, slowly developing. I wrote some poems that were trite and derivative, yes, but I also wrote some that were the best writing I'd done.
Life got in the way after college, and the next year was spent moving, finding a job, getting an apartment, and figuring out where things were going with my girlfriend (as it turned out, they went in the direction of marriage). But then I was laid off my retail job after the Christmas shopping season, and suddenly found myself with way too much time on my hands. Trying not to worry too much about my dwindling bank balance (and failing), I started thinking about writing again. But this time, I wanted to write a novel.
I had a basic idea: what if there was a magical thing, a sword maybe, that would give you whatever you most wanted? I also had some characters in mind. They were archetypes to begin with, but I thought I could make them real. A two-hour phone conversation with my best childhood friend got my pistons firing. I decided to write a page a day, 12-point print, single-space.
It didn't work out that way. Three years of writing passed, along with two more moves, a wedding, and all sorts of other real-life concerns. Then came another year of editing, going back over every one of the 263,000-odd words I'd written, chopping, adding, and modifying. And even then I wasn't done.
Everyone tells you to get used to rejection when you're trying to publish a book. But I didn't realize just how soul-destroying it can get, to look up an agent, carefully craft a query letter, send it off--if you're lucky, with a sample of the work itself--and then, a month or two later, to get back a single-page letter saying, in effect, thanks but no thanks. I lost count at about 40 rejections.
Finally, I decided to succumb to the modern era and try my hand at self-publishing. I contacted one of my best friends from college, a professional artist (http://www.halfsparkle.com/), and asked her to make me a cover and a map. While we went back and forth, making sure it came out just right, I worked out Amazon's Kindle epublishing.
And that's the end of that leg of the journey. "Ember of Dreams" went up for download July 9, 2011 (http://www.amazon.com/Ember-Dreams-Clarion-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B005BYX9NA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1312729861&sr=1-1), more than 5 years after I first started it.
I'm not done writing, of course. I won't be tinkering with "Ember" anymore. It's a finished product, and I'm not George Lucas, so I don't feel the need to go back and change things around. But there are plenty of other ideas out there, and I hope to move faster with the next one (more on that later).
Whew! This was originally going to be just a couple of paragraphs of introduction. J.R.R. Tolkien said that "dwarves' tongues run long when speaking of their work." In future posts, I'm planning on talking about the writing process itself, things I look for in writing, and hopefully garner some discussion from visitors. Welcome, anyone who's interested in talking about writing in a civil and courteous way. I look forward to the conversation!
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