Nine Ways to Rev Up For NaNoWriMo 2015

Today’s wordcount: 6011
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 108569
Total word count for the week so far (day 1): 6011
Total word count for this retreat: 37380
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, “Poppy”
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: an hour

Classes that are coming up soon and still have room! All times are Pacific Time.

• July 15 (Wednesday), 7-9 PM ““ First Pages Workshop Section 1
• July 17 (Friday), 2-4 PM ““ Writing Your Way Into Your Novel, Section 2
• July 19 (Sunday), 9:30-11:30 AM ““ First Pages Workshop Section 2

Got up early, fed the chickens, ate my yogurt and drank my (overly-trendy kombucha). For those following along with interest regarding the sourdough adventures, the pancakes were divine but the bread was densely textured to the point where it sat in one’s stomach like wet gravel. I do know what I did wrong — I tried to adapt my no-knead bread recipe to use sourdough starter and I need to go back to square one and try a traditional recipe like this one or this one.

Those pancakes were awesome though. Here’s the recipe I used.

Here’s today’s excerpt, taken from Hearts of Tabat:

The Duke’s bedroom has pieces in it that are over 300 years old, imported from the Old Continent on the original Duke’s ship, so long ago, and were old even then. There is a little cabinet made of silver and a dark wood that no longer grows anywhere in this world, for sorcerers eradicated it. There is a table inlaid with opals and in its center a great crystal, once used by the sorcerer Baltazar to spy on his enemies, and looped around it the crystal Baltazar’s general and queen, Aiofe, had worn until the day she was destroyed by grinding the bones that were all that were left of her between two great millstones. That dust had been released far out to sea, and no one had ever heard of Aiofe again, so perhaps her soul was at rest now.

There is a single armchair, a great brooding red thing of velvet, with gilded arms, its echo of a throne not at all accidental. There is no accompanying armchair, just a little stool onto which someone could sink if necessary, but the message is clear that one stands in the Duke’s presence. This room is an entire floor of the south-east tower “” above it is only storage, and things that he prefers stay hidden. The windows on the floor above have been blocked off, secured against entrance, and where they are physically stoppered, the windows here, on all sides of the chamber, are spell-warded, invisible barriers that will halt any intruder, strong enough for even the most intrusive magic.

On the floor is a medley of beast skins: manticore and hydra leather seven-timed tanned into a buttery suppleness, the splotched palomino hindquarters of a Centaur (its human section elsewhere), a Unicorn’s pearly hide, the curls of its mane like sea foam; pelts dark-furred and light, enough of them that the stone floor is not visible. They are cleaned whenever his Grace is not in his chambers, a hurried cleaning, beating the hides out in an inner courtyard and combing out the long-pelted ones, stroking the undersides with sandalwood incense and then putting down a layer of sweetgrass below the layer of hides, so they gave underfoot.

The aetheric light hanging in the center of the chamber is one-of-a kind, a chandelier of liquid light, flowing back and forth between the arms of the light, the light the clean crisp blue-light of the lanterns lining the streets of the city far below. Most spell work cand be seen in that light, and that is another layer of protection for the cautious Duke.

The bed itself is like a massive shelf, also pelt-covered, a zoo’s worth of spotted and speckled, striped and solid, the barest hint of hair over hide next to shaggy mats of black and moonlight. A canopy hangs over the mass, swagged in Tabat’s blue and gold, both shades darkened past the norm, to navy and amber, and sagging downward as though to caress and envelop the sleeper.

On either side of the bed, in narrow vases made of slanted angles of crystal, are sprays of jasmine, hot-house forced and luxuriant as only a plant that has never known insect can be. Perfume seeps from them, and contained by the canopy and back curtains, is contained so the sleeper lies in a pool of scent.

There are shelves of things, trophies and ornaments, little demonstration machines created by the College of Mages, which this Duke has sponsored more heavily than any Duke before him.

There is not a single book in the room. Nothing of paper, not even a map, though there are pictures on the wall, heavy oil canvases, all of the Duke, in a variety of attitudes, all of them flattering. There is a common tone to all these pictures, a palpable obsequiousness and eagerness to please that deepens the eyes, making them see wiser, and clefts the chin just a notch, in the way that is currently fashionable. There are six of these portraits.

I’m finishing up the Moving from Idea to Draft class, or rather finishing up the writing phase and still need to shoot a couple dozen little videos, ugh. But I wanted to share this from the introduction to the class because I thought it might be useful for some people plus maybe tantalize a few into trying one of my on-demand or live classes.

I begin with some basics of story mechanics. Quite probably much of it will be familiar — feel free to skim if you feel like you’ve heard all of this before.

A basic part of a story is its arc. The arc, graphed out, is a roughly slanted triangle, with the slope on the lefthand side usually significantly longer. I’ve provided a diagram of it, also called Freytag’s pyramid, or sometimes his triangle.

The X axis of that diagram is story tension; the Y axis is the story over time. As the storyline progresses, while there may be momentary lulls or dips in tension, the movement is upward. Tension is increased by things like complications, reversals, and raising the stakes.

But more than that, something in the story must change. The problem must be resolved in some fashion, even if it’s only to show that there is no resolution. The change provides the resolution; without it, we have only a scene or static moment, which is generally an unsatisfying thing for a reader. Often (I might go so far as to say usually) there are two changes, an internal one inside the protagonist and the external one taking place around the protagonist.

The change can, in some circumstances, take place outside the story by occurring in the reader’s understanding of the story. What seems innocent (or vile) at the outset turns out to be the opposite. This sort of subtle change can be beautiful when it works. If you look at Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love“ for example, you can see this sort of shift at work as we learn more about the circumstances behind the story and move from light-hearted to deeply sad in a story whose emotional core is — for me at least — the power of fantasy as a temporary escape, but only a temporary one. This sort of change, taken as far as it can go, is a twist ending and is best suited to flash fiction, but it can and does work at greater length, as with Ian Banks’ The Wasp Factory (I don’t want to spoil the ending, but urge you to find the book and read it if you haven’t.)

Do you need to understand what will change before you begin to write the story? No. But some story origins will have signs and clues leading to the change, while others will require you step back and consider it in various ways before moving on.

There are multiple forms in which an idea for a story can present itself to a writer. What I’ve done is try to present each, along with examples drawn from my own and other authors’ writings, with some tips and tricks for expanding them into a complete story.

Ways into a story are separated into structures, fragments, and directives. I’ve split them into these groups for the purpose of talking about them more easily, but each group has similarities of approach and possible issues that may make it useful to, after finishing an overall group, spend some time thinking about the material and trying to apply it to one or more stories before moving on.

• Structures include plot, technique, stealing from other writers, culturally determined structure, and conceits/devices. These are the paint-by-numbers kits of the writing world, or at least they are ways to start a story that give you a great deal to work with.
• Fragments may yield considerably less information. They include characters, dialogue, setting, scene, beginning, ending, title, images, or objects.
• Directives give you little information but are more about the form in which you will shape the story: its flavor or flair, if you will. They include narrators, point of view, historical moments, concepts/issues, emotion, imitation or tribute, theme anthology, research, genre, and collaboration.

No matter what your starting point, at some point in the process of writing, you will need to think about the emotional core of your story, its heart. You can think of this as the “message” of the story overall, what it (not you) is trying to say about the art of being a self-aware, autonomous creature. That can vary, but examples are:

• Life is complicated
• You can’t always get what you want (but if you try real hard you can get what you need.)
• It’s important not to lie (or insert the ethic of your choice).
• Economics affects circumstances.
• Karma is a bitch.
• Etc.

You may not know this core going into the story, you may not know it in the middle of the writing or even at the very end. But before the story can be called finished, you need to figure it out.

The point at which you figure it out will affect your writing process. You may even use it as your starting point. I can only think of one time I’ve done this, which was the story “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen”, which I wrote for the anthology Beyond the Sun. I had been thinking about the idea that people accumulated grudges and slights and that sometimes those got in the way of communication and even healthy living. I took that idea and literalized the metaphor by creating creatures who consisted of such layers and turned out to have entirely different entities at their heart.

The point at which you realize the emotional core is the point at which it will begin helping you organize the story. It often happens to me that I do not reach the stage at which I think about this until after the first draft is done. In that case, this is part of the rewrite process, and involves my going back and reading the story in order to try to figure this out.

These are often the stories that are the most self-revelatory, because the moment we as author understand the message of a story, we begin constructing plausible deniability. Stories that are raw and full of emotion are rarely understood until after the fact of their construction, in my experience, unless you are deliberately sitting down to write about a painful experience in order to process and/or explore it.

Once you know the heart of a story, though, you know what to remove or add, because you can tell what’s getting in the way of the heart of things, and where it is not getting communicated sufficiently clearly.

A crucial point about this is that sometimes it can take time, and it’s very hard to force it. Usually you should let it steep a while. It’s my belief that your unconscious mind takes some time to turn it around and consider it from a few angles before delivering up something worthwhile. You can force it through focused timed writings, sitting down and just writing within constraints, but you will do a lot of thrashing around creating superfluous verbiage that you cannot use in the final version of the story.

Want more of this sort of thing? Check out The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers.