Lilith Saintcrow

Cross-posted to The Midnight Hour

So I’m posting late today, mostly because I was out with the kids and the Selkie. There was a book sale, one that we had high hopes for but were kind of let down by. But it was nice to get out of the house and further nice to see once more that my little ones (not so little anymore, the pair of them) function very well in the Real World. They are mannerly, quiet when they need to be, content to spend a little time doing Big People things, and generally little joys that I can feel good about taking outside the house.

But you’re here for the regular Friday writing post, aren’t you, dear Reader? Today there’s not much, my head has been effectively hoovered clean by a number of things requiring lots of emotional energy and a fair dollop of physical work. I’ll take the liberty of just giving Five Random Bits of Writing Advice.

1. Get the Prom Queen to the dance before cutting her up. Or, as I like to call it, get everything out so you have a whole corpse to perform surgery on. This means nothing more than just writing the damn piece, no matter how bad you think it’s going to end up being, before you start cutting and chopping on it.

A lot of new writers (and even some old hands) get in the middle of a book/piece of writing and then decide to go back and change the beginning. Over. And. Over. Again. This is pure timesuck fueled by fear, and most of the time it isn’t necessary. Getting the whole book out, no matter how crappy you think it is, means that you have a view of the whole story arc and can then go back and prettify the beginning with an eye to punching up the end.

Now, this is different than realizing that a book just isn’t going to go anywhere, that it’s dead on the vine, or deciding to work on something else for a while. One should hopefully learn to differentiate between all those different, seductive little speedbumps. But try not to go back and endlessly revise unfinished pieces; or if you do, be very conscious of what you’re trying to accomplish and whether or not it’s timesuck.

2. Kill those %$#@&ing passive verbs. Passive verbs are weak and wishy-washy. She was sitting or Cathy was running? No. She RAN. Cathy SAT.

Passive verbs often creep in when the writer is unsure, either of the material or of the total wordcount. Unless you can make a good case for absolutely needing the passive verb, kill it. Step on its head before it breeds and get an active verb in there. You want your stories to breathe and move and flex. Burying them under an avalanche of passivity is not going to help.

3. Send in the man with the gun. Can’t figure out what happens next? Kill someone. Rough someone up. Throw in vampires or zombies. Make it worse for your characters.

Often you do know what happens next, and are avoiding it for some reason. A good zombie attack (or other disaster) will shake some things loose, and if all else fails it’s fun, when a piece isn’t behaving properly, to add some screaming and combat. You can always take the screaming out later, if you really want to.

Don’t worry about pacing so much in the first drafts. It is easy-peasy to slow a book down. Descriptive phrases, a bit of reflection on the hero/ine’s part, a little bit of passivity. Getting a book to move faster is the hard part, and if you have a choice, opt for action. You want your reader wondering what the hell is going to happen next, not yawning and thinking “this is a good place to put this hunk of paper down so I can go call Grandma.”

Also, a lot of new writers are afraid to be too mean to your characters. Don’t fall into that trap. If there is not a real risk to the characters, how is the Reader going to connect with them, feel their anguish, fear for them? If there’s no real danger, there is no real emotional reward for a hero/ine, and no place for the Reader to connect. Rough ‘em up. Beat ‘em down. Make those damn characters WORK.

4. Readers, dear Writer, are smarter than you are. If you find yourself saying–or even thinking–”But you don’t understaaaaaand!” to your critique partner, reader/reviewer, editor, etc., take a deep breath and go soak your head. When you come back, realize that it is YOUR job to communicate clearly. If nine out of ten readers don’t get your Deathless Genius, you have not done your job.

Now, there are always going to be folks that don’t “get” what you’re trying to convey, and there are always going to be naysayers and doom-monkeys who won’t like any piece of fiction they didn’t personally stamp with their Purple Velvet Seal’s Ass of Approval. That’s just the way it is, and your work is not going to be for everyone. There is no “one size fits all” within genre or without.

But if more than three people tell you a scene or a motivation ain’t workin’, honey, you need to reconsider. Even if it’s your most-favorite-est scene in the whole damn piece, even if it makes you sigh and cry every time you read it, even if it’s survived numerous revisions. You may just have to murder that darling. Put it in a dump file and you can possibly resurrect it later, or just reread it in the dead of night when you need a little pick-me-up because the world’s not in love with your heartbreaking, staggering genius.

If I sound sarcastic and sharp here, believe me, it’s for Your Own Good. (And mine, too.) Writing is hard enough without letting an overblown ego make it harder. If those hoi polloi you’re expecting to fork over cash for your prose don’t understaaaaaand, then you need to find the way to communicate more clearly. No matter how much you think you already have.

5. Believe, believe, believe. Never doubt that you do have a story to tell. There are stories lined up around the block for you and only you–stories that have chosen you to tell them. Some of them are promiscuous little buggers (fairy tales, hero tales, tragedies, myths) who still want your stamp of originality, the nuance and attention only you can give. Others are weird little children who have your eyes, your nose, and your quirky half-smile, and they’re waiting just for you to put your fingers to the keyboard and give them breath and life. The stories are always there, crowding in around you, peering over your shoulder. Part of the discipline of everyday writing is so they know you’ll be there, same bat-time, same bat-channel, so they can form an orderly queue and wait their turn.

Don’t worry if a million other people have done the same thing. If you quit worrying about being derivative you have more energy to devote to making the story your own–giving it the emphasis only YOU can give. Who cares if fifty million people have written and rewritten Beauty and the Beast? I’m going to have fun writing MY version, thankyouverymuch, and I invite and enjoin you to write your own. If nothing else, it’s good practice for structuring a story.

You have a right to write, and you have a story to tell. Sometimes the head gets so crowded with naysaying thoughts that it might not seem like there’s much of value in there. But do not ever buy into the notion that you don’t have a story to tell. There are stories lurking behind every saltshaker, every blade of grass, every raindrop. Relax. They’ll come out and play–if they can trust you to sit down and spend time listening to them.

As a bonus, I think I’ll throw in an extra word of advice. Whenever you find the word “that” in a manuscript, STAB IT AND KILL IT. 9.9 times out of ten, “that” is unnecessary and just weighs a sentence down. Argue with each and every “that” you find. There will still be plenty of them left over–I’m of a firm belief “that”s are like cockroaches. They breed. Just like wire hangers and solitary socks.

And that concludes the Friday ramble. Good luck out there.

So Weasel Boy (which is, I’ve not yet said, a category romance containing were-wolverines) hit 40K recently, and I’m thinking of how I’m going to wrap it up. I am struggling with the urge to go back and excise bits that might not be working quite right. I can pretty much tell it’s a timesuck work-avoidance mechanism. The book is resistant, like they always are (for me) in the middle. The only way through is just to put one’s head down and get the damn words out.

In other news, I know I promised two winners to the Night Shift ARC contest. There is a winner for the short fiction contest–it’s Carla Demich’s smoking-hot short about Danny and Doreen. Unfortunately, I have so many other entries to go through for the other part of the contest, and such a tough choice to make, that I’ve narrowed it down to three and have to have a blind taste-test by the Teen to help me out. I’ll post later today with the winner–and congrats, Carla! All the short-fic entries were great, but Carla’s really blew everything out of the water.

It’s a lovely gray rainy day here, and I’ve finished a couple of books. The first was Mao, The Unknown Story.

This is a biography of Mao, but not your usual “the man was a Red saint” bio. For one thing, the picture presented of Mao Tse-Tung is that of a smart, functioning sociopath whose quest for power sacrificed literally everyone in his way and a great deal of his fellow countrymen as well. I could have done with a little more analysis of how such a military noob got control of armies, but I am well aware that it would have made an already-long book into a doorstop.

Mao seems to have risen to the level of his monumental self-love, double-dealing, and thirst for power. I have little difficulty believing the man was, for lack of a better term, an asshat. I also have little difficulty believing the controversy over the somewhat un-academic nature of the book’s structure and sources. But truth (or so-called objectivity) isn’t solely found in academia, and when you’re dealing with a repressive regime that will still kill to keep its founding myths endorsed, of course you’re not going to name your sources so the bloody hatchet men can find them.

I would have like a bit more about how exactly Mao kept power in the Party, but I’m not familiar enough with the Communist apparatus exported in the 30s-50s or with Chinese social norms and strategies during that timeframe either to pick up on what the authors could have given me contextually about that issue. That area of study will have to wait until I finish with Charles II, the French Revolution, and Disaster Capitalism. (So much to find out about the world, so little time…)

Pretty much the only difference between Mao and Stalin is that no Kruschev has yet arisen who finds it expedient to lift the curtain on Mao’s transgressions against humanity. And Mao seems to have been slightly better than Stalin at using the resources of the state to starve and terrify the population–or maybe his statistical “pool” was bigger so he could kill more with the same strategies. It’s a toss-up.

In any case, the book was a good read and I was interested all the way through. Though it was seriously depressing, and it’s led me down many a mental primrose path contemplating the connection between the majority of people who thrive in politics and the psychological profile of the criminal sociopath.

The next book, kind of a palate-cleanser, was Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. True to form, Robbins has served up another looping foray into philosophy, thinly disguised as a novel. While the pedophilic subtheme was enough to squick me a little (Robbins is no Nabokov, but sometimes even Nabokov was no Nabokov, if you know what I mean) the book was still incredibly enjoyable, and I devoured it in two days when I should have been writing more and reading less. I particularly enjoy Robbins’s idea that a sense of humor (and a refusal to take oneself seriously) is a hallmark of evolutionary advancement, and any book that marries the idea of neutral angels, the CIA, the Third Prophecy of Fatima, and a South American witch doctor with a pyramid-shaped head is bound to be a good time. Especially in Robbins’s hands–he fiddles Dame Grammar like a man who loves Her, and gleefully violates story rules with a sort of puppylike abandon that’s hard to shake a disciplining finger at. Other readers might get exasperated with his run-ons and digressions, but I’m more forgiving of that sort of thing when the author has my attention and is performing interesting hat-tricks. Oddly enough, I cannot read Palahniuk (except Fight Club) but I really have a great time with Robbins, and their looping sentence structures really strike me as very similar. Go figure.

If my review of Fierce Invalids seems a little light on plot, that’s because trying to boil down the plot of a Tom Robbins book without trying to rewrite and explain the whole damn thing is useless. I’ll content myself with saying the book follows its hero, Switters, around through a series of events that are logical in their own way and yet extraordinarily fantastic (in all senses of the word).

The only problem I have with Robbins is that women are a mystery to him. But I think I’ve only read one or two male writers who can really write a female character, and it’s no shame to admit that a boy is mystified by the Female. (It is, after all, our prerogative to mystify.) Plenty of male writers end up using the female as an Other, a receptacle for all sorts of weird sexual dreams thinly covered with social commentary or philosophical hogwash, and completely overlook the fact that women have an interior life/exterior existence of their own, divorced from the male gaze. I suppose you can do that when your gender is considered normative and the other half of humanity’s considered the aberration on all sorts of levels, primal and otherwise.

Still, there’s a big difference between a male writer who genuinely likes women and is okay with being mystified (Robbins) and a male writer for whom women are a dangerous mystery that must be controlled or beaten down so the male psyche can survive (like, for example, Bukowski, especially in his more misogynistic moments). The quality of work may be superlative (I really enjoy reading both Robbins and Bukowski) but the differing treatment of female characters is sometimes enough to make a girl wish for some literary dynamite and a grammar bazooka, not just a room of one’s own.

Okay, I’m dragging Woolf into it, so it must be time for me to end the ramble. I’m kind of eyeing my TBR pile and wondering what to dive into next, and I pretty much have it narrowed down to the bio of Charles II OR another attempt at Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, which both the Selkie and Make_Me say is superlative.

Choices, choices. In the meantime, it’s back to getting Weasel Boy in trouble. Wish me luck and lots of vampires, and I’ll be back later today with the other winner of a Night Shift ARC!

The awesome Maggie Stiefvater made an interesting comment on my Spec vs. Organic post last Friday.

But you forgot the funny combination of those two — which is when you sell a two-book deal where only the first “organically written” book is completed. Then you find yourself in the funny position of having to write an organic novel almost to spec.

So I think that even organic writers need to acquire the discipline that romance writers practice all the time.

I’d actually not thought of that, because I rarely write stand-alone books. Most of my organic stuff is in the context of a series, and my to-spec stuff is mostly in series form too. I guess I’m just most-comfortable with the series-novel form–I find short stories very, very difficult; they take a lot of planning. So any organic novel I do is almost certainly meant to go in a series, and I have an idea of how long the series will go and what will happen at each stage.

As for the discipline, I consider it something any professional writer needs. You’re just not going to get better without the discipline to practice and to keep learning (and taking what one can from the critique of one’s editors, betas, readers, and self requires discipline too). Discipline is such a core component of art in general and writing in specific–but we all know how I feel about that. *grin* I won’t bore you with repeating myself.

Something new: I’ve got my serenity back after the weekend. It’s taking me less and less time to bounce back after something like that. It’s funny, but a while ago at the end of a long jag of insomnia, I heard birds singing as the sky began to lighten outside and suddenly this wave of calm broke over me. It was like someone tapping me on the head with a magic wand and saying, “Everything is going to be all right. Relax.”

Since then I’ve been possessed of an amazing sense of serenity about stuff. A few minutes of closed-eyes and deep breathing per day seems to run that serenity engine just fine, and recharge it.

The past weekend strained that serenity, but it’s back now. I don’t know from whence it came, but as long as deep breathing will keep it around, I’m not going to ask too many questions.

Oh, and another cool thing: chili! I finally found out how to make chili! It’s a two-day deal.

Day One: In the morning, put beans in water with a little bit of salt to soak. Around 10PM, turn your crock pot on low. Put the beans in, cover with water, add some seasoning (go easy on the salt), garlic, and a bay leaf–and (secret ingredient) drizzle some unsulphured molasses over ‘em. Go to bed and forget about it.

Day Two: Stir the beans in the morning, don’t worry about how they smell. It’s okay. Brown whatever meat you’re using (I use stew beef, myself) and toss it in with some onions. You can chop up some celery, too. Throw in some tomatoes and a can of tomato paste (I used about five Roma tomatoes for a pot o’chili) and some cumin (half a teaspoon, more to taste) and a little bullion base. (Beef. Chicken just doesn’t work well, I’ve found.) Turn it up to high at about noon and stir occasionally.)

Here’s something I’ve found out about chili: don’t add your cayenne until about a half-hour before serving. That way you can control the spiciness much better, since it will get spicier as it cooks down. Best to add your cumin, garlic, thyme, tarragon, etc., at the beginning of day two and wait on the spice, especially if you have picky eaters who like it bland (like my little, darling Sir Pewksalot.)

Turn it down to low at about three o’clock (make sure the beans are nice and soft) and season to taste. You can serve it at about six–and here’s another thing, grating up some smoked gouda and dumping it on the bowls for your less-picky eaters is a Good Thing.

I serve chili with cornbread and Cheez-Its. (Dude. Cheez-Its on chili is teh awesome.) I used to date a guy who chopped up Oreos and put them in at the last second, a la Martin Riggs. Plus, I usually put the cayenne and garlic powder on the table so everyone can fine-tune their Chili Experience. It’s also good over brown rice with a little butter and just a touch of brown sugar. The possibilities are damn near endless.

And there you go. I can’t believe it took me this long to come up with a workable chili, and it’s kind of time-intensive, but very Worth It.

Today I’m doing a pork tenderloin with some coconut milk and basil. If it turns out well, tomorrow we’ll have another recipe. If it doesn’t…well, at least I’ll have a good story.

You know, the type where you look back over the weekend and think to yourself, man, I could have done without this sort of thing for the rest of my life? Yeah. Like that. So I’m not my usual sunny (or at least verbally-athletic) self this morning. I did get a lot of work done, but unfortunately it was housework, not work-work. So I’m aching to get back into the swing of things, and longing to write–but I’ve got timecrunch revisions to get done, and it’s going to be a while before I can work on what I really want to work on. Publishing is so much feast-or-famine it’s not funny.

No, I’m not complaining. This amount of work makes me feel like I’ve got something to accomplish, as well as like I’m contributing to the household in some way.

So, I’ll be announcing the winners of the most recent contest on Wednesday (man, there is some GOOD short fiction in my inbox!) and I’m going to dive back into revisions this morning. A couple of days should knock off this draft, and then, I take over the world.

But first, more coffee. And GOD, but I really want to kill these characters. Right before a book achieves its final form is when I most want to strangle the protag and antagonists, as well as any bloody subplots who won’t behave. (tongue in cheek) Is violence toward your own fiction acceptable? (/tongue in cheek)

Eh, off I go. Wish me luck. And a bazooka.