Last week I encountered someone behaving…let’s call it “unprofessionally” at work. The behavior snowballed throughout the week and took on a kind of arrogance, and it affected a number of good, hardworking people. Incensed, I devised this elaborate metaphor for what this person had been doing. It was something to the effect of a toxic spider spinning a web of bullshit and needing someone to come along to be both a boot and the anti-venom to stop these antics and squash the perpetrator.

Then someone asked what I thought of this situation, and all I could manage to say was “pissed. poop web.”

Which brings me to my next – only? hardly a? – point: don’t spend forever concocting a metaphor or description of such mythologically-proportioned cleverness that it’s either unintelligible or sends readers skimming onward to escape it.

I’m guilty of it and, perhaps worse, I’m exceedingly aware of it with other writers. I recently finished an acclaimed fantasy by a very good author telling a large story rather brilliantly. Well, the first half of it anyway. The second half devolved. Less forward progress with the large cast of characters. Most authorly tricks and twists of language. Did that make the story better? The first one or two might have added. By the tenth, I’d grown weary and irritated.

Never let the words get in the way of a good story.

I’m working on things. New things. Related to other things found here.

Stay tuned…

Photo from: International-critics

Real life has the terrible habit of inserting itself between you and your goals. There are bills to be paid, illnesses to endure, the crises of family and friends. There are small spaces filled with loud little people and long commutes that carve hours out of your personal clock.

And eventually you look up, and months or years have passed and you’re no closer to your goal, whether it’s to bike across the state, restore the hardwood floors in your house or write a novel.

This isn’t how it has to be.

Sometimes it is difficult to insert the concept of a large goal into the small pieces of free time in your busy life. That doesn’t mean the goal is impossible. It just means that it needs to be reconfigured. Real life isn’t going to go away, but your goals don’t have to cede to it.

Take writing that novel. Writing and editing eighty to a hundred thousand words is a daunting task. But what about ten thousand? A thousand? Two hundred and fifty?

250. That’s a single page.

But, by writing that mere 250 words, that single page, each day, you’ll have a novel complete inside of a year. How long does it take to write that? That, of course, depends on the writer. But if writing a novel is your goal, and you find yourself stealing time in order to do it, I’d wager you would write that page inside of 20 minutes.

Sometimes making the time and space to follow your dreams comes at the price of your dignity. Deal with it.

Where will you find that time each day? That’s one and one third coffee breaks, for those who take them. That’s a notebook on the lap for the bus ride there and back. That’s the kids in the tub at night or sitting at the Laundromat waiting for the spin cycle to finish.

There are 20 minutes in each day that you can shape until they belong to you. And it doesn’t matter if the house is full of people or kids. There are coffee shops and benches and stairwells all over the world, waiting to welcome you for that repurposed time. All you have to do is decide you’re going to take it.

Photo Attribution

Cross-posted at Here Be Magic

Some of my favorite authors, in an attempt to please and destroy me, regularly post snippets and scenes from their WIPs (works in progress). The teasers – for if they come from series I enjoy, they tease relentlessly – are almost always good. Dramatic, tense, funny, brilliant.

They are also often flawed. I’m not criticizing them for that. The draft and early revision stages of novel-writing are about getting the story down. The precise moments when, if something were to go wrong, it would achieve maximum effectiveness. The exact line of dialogue needed to steam or sting. The best balance or interplay of plot threads and characters. Storytelling is a skill, and storytelling is an art.

After that, it’s time to clean and polish. To check for errors and consistency. This is the point at which I, as a writer, have the most difficult time. When you’ve had a story living, breathing, growing and evolving inside your head for months or years, there’s no neat way to extract it. The words don’t fall cleanly onto the page, in order. They have to be extracted, hammered into shape, then smoothed back out.

Unfortunately, sometimes the story consumes the writer so wholly that insignificant things like “words” no longer matter. I can’t spell. I write “table” instead of “door” because I’m picturing the scene and there is a table, but it’s in front of the door, so that’s what gets written. Luckily, I don’t lose track of all words. I’ve started a list, in fact, of those I most commonly fail to write correctly, so that I can do a quick edit of my most obvious weaknesses before critique partners or editors have to see them.

Following, in no particular order (but with the help of two dictionary sites) is a list of the words I cannot, for the life of me, spell on my own:
Silhouette

Unnecessary

Camouflage

Vacuum

Bureaucrat (removed from the list effective 1/27/2013 – achievement unlocked!)

Me (I know, I know. It’s not a difficult one, but I, nine times out of ten, write is as “my”)

Icicle (I spell this correctly the first time, then proceed to delete and misspell it five or six times before returning to the correct spelling. It just looks weird, okay?)

I can never understand what my dentist is saying. Well, except for that one time she told me one of my molars was shattered, and keeping itself together only through habit, but I only remember that because I made her repeat it three times because it was such a fantastic thing to say.

I went in today for two small fillings and, while I didn’t record it, I’m pretty sure it went a little like this:

Now it’s time to seat the orsch.

A lemur and a sendar are no good match.

You might want to cut back on the rocks and gummy spores.

For the record, I stopped eating gummy spores in 1997 after the Attorney General came out and said they make all testicles within a five kilometer radius harden and fluctuate at a rapid pace so that, everywhere you go, it sounds like tiny drums are being played within the pants of men.

When I get busy, I tend to cut back on sleep. Then, even when sleep deprived, I have trouble falling to sleep. Someone suggested that I learn meditation in order to settle my mind before going to bed. Unfortunately, I’m terrible at it. I’ll settle into a comfy position, take some deep breaths, and clear my mind…

…which immediately results in every possible thought – wanted, unwanted and WTF – rushing in to fill the void. So, I resorted to setting up an external noise on which to focus. It helps if it’s a low, repetitive sound. The following should have been ideal. But things don’t always go according to plan.

For reasons unknown, I find myself busy, busy, busy at the end of the year. So, because I don’t have time to properly reflect on the year and spin my thoughts into something borderline profound, I offer you some of my favorite cocktail recipes. Consume to a quantity sufficient to make your own thoughts appear profound:

Lemon Rosemary Infused Vodka Topped with Prosecco

Strawberry Champagne

Basil Vodka Gimlet

Moscow Mule – Russian Standard Edition

Happy New Year, readers.

Stay safe. Stay smart.

I’ll see you on the other side.

cross-posted at Here Be Magic

I’m often asked by new and aspiring authors, how to write a villain. Not a stock figure with a dark mustache stomping around kicking puppies and doing obviously Bad Things, but a credible or sinister or surprising villain.

It’s a good question and my answer is always: don’t write a villain; write a person.

Construct the villain as you would the heroine. She has a body, a mind and a heart. She has pet peeves, deep fears and strong desires. Her past contributes to, but does not overpower her. While she is full color, her past – culture and heritage, important relationships and moments of strong emotion – trails her like a dimly-sketched river of ghosts.

She does what she does because she believes she must and she also believes, in the end, that it is right.

Here’s the kicker: so does the villain. The bad guy can’t exist only because the heroine needs a force to butt up against. And, while some bad guys – particularly in fantasy – can be beings of pure evil, it’s difficult to get much mileage out of that. If the bad guy is PURE EVIL, the heroine doesn’t have to be very complicated to oppose him. So, the villain believes that what he is doing is right but, unlike with the heroine, the reader does not root for him because his values are twisted. He is twisted.

He isn’t just greedy; he believes he is owed or deserves his ill-gotten gains.

He wasn’t born hating a group of people or creatures; he believes they did him insufferable harm or will turn his world into an unbearable place.

He does not hate the heroine; he is envious of her. So envious that he loathed himself for his jealousy, and that self-loathing made him lash out, and the more he struck down others, the more he believed he was building within himself something of the power he perceives the good guy as having.

That’s a little bit scary.

The most insidious kind of villain is the character that is present throughout a book without the reader knowing he is evil, but the moment that fact is revealed, things become clear. The Usual Suspects is a great example of this. The villain is masterful, so intent on his goals (the only thing, in my mind, not well-revealed in this movie) that he disguises his brilliant mind and allows himself to be penned up with criminals who, if they discovered he was the cause of their incarceration, would likely kill him.

Author Raymond Chandler was also a master of the insidious villain. For one, he juggles fleets of distinct suspects without ever dropping a red herring, but he also allows the suspect to exist among the rest of the players. Chandler, of course, was writing mysteries so the emphasis is on discovering the bad guy rather than having to work against or defeat him, but I do recommend reading him. His stories are lessons in how to hide a bad guy as well as how to write a memorable character.

The exercise I use when I get stuck with a flat villain is to write from his point of view. If I’m halfway through a story and can’t seem to get any further, I back up and write the most conflict-heavy scenes from the bad guy’s point of view. It isn’t always comfortable to step sideways into the mind of a monster. However, the less comfortable it is, the more compelling the character will hopefully be. And doesn’t everyone love having someone to root against?