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Guest Post from Halsted M. Bernard: Critiques, Counts, and Quests: Motivational Tools for Writers

ConversationsWhen I first became aware of BIC-HOK a few years ago, it enthralled me. I love a good acronym, and doubly so one that promises to whisper the secret to being a writer right into my eager ear.

Butt in chair, hands on keyboard became more than an acronym for me. It became a mantra. Show up, and the rest will take care of itself. My butt was in the chair, and my hands were on the keyboard. And I was writing, cranking out crappy first drafts, and feeling less like a writer with every one.

Motivation, as it happens, is beautifully and frustratingly subjective. Some of us are motivated by the simplicity of showing up every day. Some of us need a little external nudge from time to time. If you are in the latter group, I have some secrets to whisper to you.

Although writing is generally a solo endeavour, the power of a good writing group is not to be underestimated. Like-minded, similarly-driven individuals can help you hold yourself accountable for all those stories you say you’re going to write someday. And once you’ve written the stories, a good writing group can provide you with the constructive criticism that you will need to improve them. Groups that meet regularly and stick to a specific critique format are particularly useful because they provide structure for those of us who need that sort of external impetus to produce workable drafts. I found my first writing group on Craigslist, but if your time is limited or your locale is remote, you might prefer to join a virtual group like critters.org instead.

If you are intrigued by the power of group accountability, I have a magic spreadsheet to show you. No, really! It’s called the Magic Spreadsheet and it is an ingenious invention. Log your daily word count in the spreadsheet and it automatically gives you points for making your quota, going over your quota, and maintaining a writing streak. When your points add up, your level increases and so does your word count quota, so it never gets too easy. And if you relish a bit of competition, you can check out the leaderboard sheet to see how your counts stack up with the other writers who are participating. If you think this tool might help to motivate you, you can find more information in the Google+ community or the Facebook group.

Wrangling spreadsheets, even magic ones, might not sound all that thrilling to you. If you’d rather picture yourself slaying the dragons of procrastination with a magical morning-star, I’d encourage you to check out HabitRPG. HabitRPG is an open-source habit-building app that is structured like a role-playing game. It enforces good habits by awarding you XP and gold, and can be used to manage your to-do list as well. There are many groups, or guilds, in HabitRPG that are devoted to writing communities. These guilds create challenges for their members (like meeting a daily word quota) and also provide space to chat in real time with other writers. If you prefer to quest solo, you can use HabitRPG as your own, lone fantasy metaphor for all those real-life bits and bobs you have been procrastinating, including but not limited to your writing.

Remember, tools to spark writerly motivation can be helpful, but anything that detracts from actual BIC-HOK should be considered cat hoovering: any excuse to avoid writing, even vacuuming the cat.

BIO: Halsted M. Bernard obsessively archives the present, but cannot stop thinking about the world after this one. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, two cats, a few gadgets, several fountain pens, and many books. Find her online at http://halstedmbernard.com.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content 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.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.

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Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

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Guest Post: Michael R. Underwood on Five Tips for Cultural Worldbuilding Without Building a World Bible

Cover of science fiction novel ARIA by Underwood.Worldbuilding can be an intimidating part of writing science fiction/fantasy, whether it’s an epic fantasy or a distant far-future space opera.

There are many ways focusing on worldbuilding first can go awry, chief among them the possibility that worldbuilding becomes such a focus that the writer never moves on to the writing.

If you want to strike a balance between strong worldbuilding and not getting bogged down, here are some tips from my decade of experience writing novels and degrees in Folklore and Mythology before that.

1) Do I Have to Start with Mythology?

Culture is made out of small pieces and big pieces. And most of the big pieces are made out of small pieces. How people greet one another is a part of power dynamics. Formality, gendered language, social context, and more.

Thinking about everyday life can be a great way to start creating the small pieces that will make up the big piece OR small pieces that reinforce the big ideas you’ve already created. If you have a culture that worships a benevolent sun god, think about how little things in daily life reflects that practice. They’re likely to see the daytime as the time of goodness. Which may mean that breakfast and lunch are framed as more important meals because they’re done under the watchful eye of the sun. Or maybe weddings are always conducted in the morning to represent rebirth alongside the sunrise.

2) How Does the Tale of Prometheus Relate to Greek Conceptions of the Nature of Humanity?

Few cultural elements are created in a vacuum. Folklore about medical practice likely developed alongside folklore about agricultural practice. How are they interconnected? How do the hero legends of the culture reflect its ideas about what heroism means and what important technologies/blessings the culture needed to become who they are?

The Greeks tell the story of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity””an essential blessing. But they also tell of Prometheus facing eternal punishment for that theft. What does that say about how the ancient Greeks viewed humanity’s relationship with the gods?

Thinking about what elements of culture should resonate with one another and which elements make sense to be in tension can help develop a world that feels real.

3) How Do Different Forms of Power Intersect?

One of the best pieces of advice about worldbuilding that I can give you is to think about power. Who has power, who doesn’t, how people navigate the systems of power to achieve what they want when they have access to power and especially when they do not.

Cover o BORN TO THE BLADE by Underwood.It makes sense when worldbuilding to think about what groups within a nation or culture have greater access to power and which are excluded from holding or wielding power. And there’s a good chance that not all of the types of power are wielded by the exact same group. So sometimes you’ll have a character that has access to some power but is disempowered along another axis. An influential member of a minority/marginalized religion. A superhuman on the run from the law in a society where superpowers are outlawed. A male anti-imperial freedom fighter in a patriarchal society.

Characters like these can display the tangled, interesting, and scary interconnectedness and tensions between systems of power, and a story can show how these interactions play out in material ways””how people can and cannot navigate through social systems and access to resources (material, social, etc.).

4) Do I Have to Get It Right the First Time?

I think it’s okay for a first draft to be really messy, to include contradictions and continuity errors. Editing is a really good time to put all your worldbuilding affairs in order. It’s possible to bake in a fundamental flaw to a work if you make a big enough mistake in the first draft, but for the textual worldbuilding””names of places, material culture that doesn’t serve as the backbone of the plot, the local festival going on while the characters visit the city””all of that is well within the range of things that can be reconciled and corrected in the editing stages of working on a novel.

5) What Else Can I Do?

When in doubt, set yourself up with more tools before you even begin. Read fiction set in real-world cultures written from an insider’s point of view or from that of a well-researched, respectful outsider. Read histories and books on mythology, folklore, linguistics, architecture, and more. Learn to see the choices made in fictional worldbuilding that would otherwise go unnoticed as “the default.”

The more you grew up with your identity centered by majority culture (in the USA that’s white, Christian, straight, cisgender, middle or upper class, etc.), the more important it is to cast your attention more widely and to escape the default thinking that presents the USA or the UK or other global colonial powers as the protagonists of history.

Another way to put this””if you’re designing an element of worldbuilding, it’s easier to do so when you already know ten different cultures’ analog of that element than if you only know three.

The wider your view of the world and the myriad ways that people live in it, the better-prepared you’ll be to apply that pattern recognition through extrapolation and interpolation with your own work. This is the work of a lifetime, but it’s worth doing, and not just to improve your writing.

Final Notes

As someone who studied world cultures and how to study cultures, I definitely get the impulse to spend a lot of time rounding out a bunch of details and laying a ton of groundwork.

But I’ve found that my desire to write and finish books has pushed me toward less exhaustive prep and more toward improvising in the moment, relying on my training and my judgment, and in the fact that I can come back and make sense of things later if I really need to.

Everyone’s process is different, but if you find yourself wishing you could spend a bit less time on worldbuilding before you start your draft, I hope these tips will be of use.


Author photo of Michael R. Underwood.Bio: Michael R. Underwood is the author of over a dozen books across several series. His latest book is Annihilation Aria. Mike lives in Baltimore with his wife and their dog. He is a co-host on the actual play show Speculate and a guest host on The Skiffy & Fanty Show.

Find him online on his website, Twitter, and Patreon.

Buy Links for Aria:


If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

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(Guest Post) R.J. Theodore on Secondary Worlds Without Monocultures: POV, Cultural Perspective, and Worldbuilding

I cut my SFF teeth on Star Trek, and I credit The Next Generation as setting me on the path to becoming an SFF author. But I lament the monocultures encountered on those Starfleet missions as a missed opportunity. Monocultures may catch attention as a hook, but the believability crumbles when the reader has a lengthy stay and finds that they lack real depth.

My favorite part of writing SFF is inviting the reader to explore new worlds with unearthly mechanics, magic systems, or zoology that entrance the imagination. But what imprints a story on the reader’s soul is the ability to relate to the experience. The real world contains multitudinous experiences, cultures, and viewpoints. It’s important to reflect that in our stories, even if we are zooming in on a more intimate story.

Avoiding monoculture by creating characters who have different experiences makes a story feel vibrant, more faithful, and realistic. When those characters interact, it adds conflict, tension, and opportunities to create real magic.

Building this kind of depth is not hard! It just takes more of the thoughtful and intentional world-building the author is already engaged in. It doesn’t limit the author’s imagination, it gives it more opportunity.

The first book in my Peridot Shift series is told via my airship captain and ne’er-do-well, Talis. While choosing one POV tightened up the story considerably from earlier drafts where multiple characters took center stage, it was incredibly frustrating to describe the entirety of Peridot through the lens of Talis’s biases. Even as her worldview expands through the events of the story, there’s so much she still doesn’t know she doesn’t know. I was mindful of knocking her down a notch every so often, clearing the viewport of her fog so the reader could get a better view beyond it, but still, there was so much work to be done.

When it came time to write the sequel, SALVAGE’s editor, Ryan Kelley, immediately identified that there were other crucial stories here to tell. I approached a massive revision with giddy excitement. My editor had said those magic words every author dreams of hearing: More story. Here was the chance to expand the depth of my world by featuring the other denizens of Peridot!

Talis and her crew are still central to the story, but they begin in a subterranean Rakkar city where their plot to make a triumphant return to the life they knew leaves them far from bigger machinations that are turning. Machinations that threaten consequences for more than just a rag-tag crew of smugglers.

Additional POV characters let me open the map on the world I’d created. To show more cultures, and more viewpoints, including differing positions within a single culture.

Instead of waiting for book three to shatter the stereotype Talis presented of the Vein as a race of blind seers from book one, I got to give a person, Zeela, center stage moments in book two. She observes diabolical happenings and the path to become part of Talis’s crew is clarified, but Zeela also gets to smash the mystique of her people’s uncanny observations by revealing their use of secret, high-tech assistive devices. To normalize and personalize what seems strange and unnatural to someone who doesn’t share that viewpoint.

At the opposite end of the Cutter social spectrum, we follow the twisted thoughts of Hankirk, as well as the selfless aspirations of a young empress. Both people are the same race as Talis, but they live entirely different experiences and show us different ways of seeing the subtler moments of a grand story.

SALVAGE also puts the spotlight on High Priestess Illiya, a Bone priestess struggling to comfort and protect her congregation after their goddess is made mortal. In FLOTSAM, Talis introduces Illiya as more cutthroat and sinister than a pirate. Don’t get me wrong, she is! But in SALVAGE, we also get to learn of her pride, her empathy, and her anxiety.

Every character lives their own life, and each life builds more volume into what it means to be a part of Peridot.

Filling our secondary worlds with multiple cultures and viewpoints reminds us to look outside of our own experiences in the real world, to look past our first impressions so we can understand more about each other. Maybe as we go on a grand adventure to impossible realms, we also learn to see each other, here on Earth, as characters each in our own story whose viewpoints are as worthy as our own.

About the Author
R J THEODORE (website) is hellbent on keeping herself busy. No, really, if she has two minutes to rub together at the end of the day, she invents a new project with which to occupy them.

She enjoys reading, design, illustration, video games (she will take you down in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo), binging on movies and streaming series, napping with her cats, and cooking. She is passionate about art and coffee.

R J Theodore lives in New England with her family. With Kaelyn Considine of Parvus Press, she co-hosts bi-weekly episodes of the We Make Books Podcast (wmbcast.com).

In 2018, Theodore made her publishing debut with her self-published novella THE BANTAM, and her novel FLOTSAM, Book One of the Peridot Shift series, published by Parvus Press. Book Two of the Peridot Shift series (Parvus Press), SALVAGE is now available in print and digital.

Follow Theodore’s writing process, find her on social media, and subscribe to her newsletter at rjtheodore.com.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the online classes from 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.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.

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