Documents of Tabat: Arriving in Tabat

There’s plenty of room left in my upcoming online classes.
The big news is that I will be guest-editing the Women Destroying Fantasy issue of Lightspeed. We are still working out details, but it will be open subs.
I provided a teaser from WIP Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?
I made it onto this list of women horror authors you need to read. (Here’s the book they suggest, which is serendipitously 2.99 as part of promotion for next week!)
I talked about good things on the 27GoodThings Blog.
I sold a story to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, huzzah! Also, ten stories completed so far this year, which feels terrific.

For Writers:

• If you’re writing a character who is experiencing a particular emotion, this article may be useful.
• Great post from Teresa Frohock about Being a Woman and Writing Dark Fiction
• Bud Sparhawk talks about our recent collaboration
• Please consider supporting this Kickstarter of bisexual fiction.
• A writing book Kickstarter worth supporting.
• Mary Gordon on writing by hand
• Kurt Vonnegut teaches.

Books I Talked About for You Should Read This:

• My favorite YA novels of 2013, including books by Holly Black, Chelsea M. Campbell, Sarah Beth Durst, Em Garner, Lydia Kang, Cori McCarthy, and Sean Williams
• Science fiction classic Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Things of Note:

• Victoria Strauss writes about a recent SFWA controversy in On Petitions and Flame Wars: My Thoughts About SFWA and Change
• Charles Coleman Finlay also talks about some aspects of the controversy.

Timewasters!

• Kids read to shelter cats. Heartmelting.
• Photos of a dikdik, the world’s smallest antelope
• Pictures of rats with teddy bears

We talked last week about story shapes and arcs as well as what gets set up in the beginning of a story. This week we talked about characters and dialogue, and how the first shapes the story. One of the points made was that a character is not something you stick in a slot of a story – the character shapes the entire story. For example, the story of someone encountering a werewolf is very different if your protagonist is a little old lady who hates dogs because they’re messy than if that protagonist is an emo-teen determined to become a werewolf in order to get revenge on someone that wronged them.

The main character usually changes in some way over the course of the story, but that change must feel organic and natural. You can set up a big change of mind with foreshadowing and having them change on some smaller matter, showing that such change is possible, so it doesn’t throw the reader out of the story when it occurs.

We discussed approaches to learning more about your characters. I recommended the book Writing The Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, which talks about writing characters who are a different sex, race, or class background than yourself. I also recommended people-watching and reading pop psychology (or even more sciencey stuff, which will provide all sorts of story ideas.

One of the quickest ways to turn an editor off is with improperly punctuated dialogue, so learn the rules and use them. We went over things like speech tags, how to punctuate internal dialogue, why you don’t need to come up with a bunch of synonyms for “said,” and how to make voices distinctive. I suggested that people watch the wonderful adaptation of Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” – here is the original text, and here is the film made from it.

If you really want to focus on dialogue, read good plays, which are pure dialogue. If you want to write in a particular historical voice, one of the best ways is to read deeply in that period so you absorb it. Doing so may make you aware how much what we read and watch creeps into our writing – that’s one very good reason to read some high quality stuff now and again.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.