lizvogel

Came across this whilst back-reading Pat Wrede blogs that I missed last year:

All stories start from some sort of seed: an idea (what if the moon exploded?), a character, a setting, a plot, a theme, an opening line, a closing line, etc. That seed needs to grow before it is ready to produce story-fruit. For some writers, the growth process is fast, methodical, and/or deliberate; for others it takes place mostly under the surface, over geologic time periods. However it goes, the first things the story-seed grows are usually related to the type of story-seed—an idea-based seed will sprout more ideas, a character-based seed will sprout more characters and/or their life stories, and so on.

This is normal. Trying to force a story-seed to grow in a different direction is like trying to make a just-sprouted pumpkin vine immediately produce rose flowers.

This may explain a lot about why some story ideas never take off for me, and why most how-to-develop-your-story advice bounces off me so hard. Because I will get story-seeds that are concepts, or world-building, or what-ifs, or even themes, and they may generate more of the same, but what they don't generate is characters. And I've long since figured out that while all that other stuff is important, if I don't have characters, I don't have a story.

(Also, that "under the surface, over geologic time periods" bit? I feel seen.)

Example: I have a title, "Love and Non-Transparency". The title was inspired by my cat placing herself between my eyes and my laptop screen, but what could it really be about? Obviously, it's a romance with a ghost, who becomes solid but still dead. This to me is a cool idea. I'd like to do something with it. As an experiment, I tried kicking it around with the housemate to try to develop it enough to write. There's a very dark direction it could go, but that seems too easy; I'd rather do something else with it, even though dark fantasy seems to have more markets these days. I got that the ghost is probably from the 1920s or '30s: Prohibition and pin-stripe suits, because that sounds like fun. But beyond that... the answer to far too many questions was “I don’t know; that’ll come with character, and I don’t have characters yet.” Trying to force-develop the characters stopped everything cold. I think somebody's name is Claire/Clare, but whether that's his last name or the first name of the living woman, (or the Matt Pond PA song to play while writing it), or someone else entirely, I've no idea.

And that makes sense, because I'm trying to force roses from this pumpkin. Perhaps at some point it'll mutate, but for now I guess I’ll just have to shove this one into the back-brain and hope someone materializes out of the mist to carry it back to me.

In Memoriam: Janet Reid

I was never active on her blog, but I learned a lot from her, and she was kind enough to answer my question about how to handle my then-upcoming first publication in query letters. Her generosity with her time and knowlege was a tremendous resource to aspiring authors.


This comes a couple days after my trusty auto mechanic passed away, and while I'm deep in dealing with Mom's estate and all that entails. People need to quit with this dying thing, dammit.

Linked mostly for my own reference, but others might also find it useful: Patricia Wrede on business plans for writers (more interesting than it probably sounds).


While I'm at it, you've all read Neil Gaiman's post on IP wills for writers and why you should have one, right?

A comment elsewhere by Deep Lurker nailed something so fundamental that I don't think I'd ever fully realized it before, when brainstorming story ideas and rejecting what seem like perfectly reasonable suggestions:

When I have a Cool Idea as a story-starter, I really don’t want it to become the Story Problem. It might be the Cool Solution to the problem, but I don’t want it to be the problem itself, and I really don’t want “Something goes wrong with Cool Idea” to be the problem. Instead, I need something else adjacent to be the problem.

This isn't every story idea I get... but it's a lot of them.

For example, I have this idea for a novel about a war criminal who joins an FTL colonization ship in order to make a fresh start. That's an intriguing character and a good scenario, but it's not a plot. And the thing is, I don't want it to be the plot; doubtless his past will come out at some point, and it's certainly going to influence some events, but whatever the plot is (and I have no idea, yet), it's not about his past. It's about something else entirely; at most, something "adjacent".

I'm still processing how to incorporate this into my ongoing quest for plot discussion, but I wanted to get the concept down for reference.

Patricia Wrede has a post up about character goals, and specifically story-level goals vs. scene-level goals and how each might be helpful (or not) for the writer at various stages.

Although it's a character-oriented post, and I've ranted many times about how I get character stuff when I ask for help with plot, I think this might actually be useful in my ongoing quest for tips on How To Do Plot. Because it seems like people usually want to talk about plot as it pertains to story-level goals, and what I get stuck on is plot as it pertains to scene-level goals. I'm hoping that pointing them toward this might clarify what it is I'm looking for.

So, test drive: If I were to show you that link and then ask you how to Do Plot, what kinds of things would you be inclined to tell me?

XKCD is hit-or-miss for me, and I generally only read it when someone else links to it. But this one... yeah. A couple of the panels were so good that housemate & I scared the cat laughing. And the mouse-over is one of the more inspirational things I've read recently.

Found via network: John M. Ford's books are being republished!

I haven't read a huge amount of Ford's non-Star Trek work (old copies being rather hard to come by), but what I have read was mind-blowing. Very pleased that his books, and assorted apocrypha, will soon be more readily available!


(Also, for the completist urge: a collection of various Ford comments, as linked from the article above but worth perusing in its own right.)

Tell me, oh internets, can you recommend some music? I'm looking for something with a similar feel to the "chanty monk bits" of Carmina Burana (aka, "Fortune Plango Vulnera" and "O Fortuna"). Not that I necessarily want more chanting, but something with the same brutalist-architecture swirly energy would be great.


I've spent about a week being obsessed with Ringo Starr's "It Don't Come Easy". Which is somewhat inconvenient, as this is a song I don't own, but it turns out YouTube can be quite useful. (If one can stay the hell away from the sidebar links, of course.) I ended up making a mix of other songs that fit with the same mental settings. (And yes, the chanty monks are on it. It works for me. Let it never be said that my tastes aren't idiosyncratic.)


(The title refers to the fact that putting in the good headphones and cranking the volume seems to be the one thing that'll get me going when the words otherwise refuse to come. This is a useful thing to know, but I'm starting to feel like I've just been to a rock concert.)

Okay, this? Is brilliant.

How to Fix a Lenovo Laptop that Won't Turn On / Freezes at Start Up / No Power Repair

(Short version: Clear power-surge build-ups by unplugging & pulling battery, then holding down power switch for a minute.)

I'll see if it keeps working, but the elderly ThinkPad I use for writing just booted happily after about a dozen repeats of acting like it didn't have any drives to boot from. /*is happy*/

There's an idea floating about writer-dom that if you've had critique from multiple sources but never really gotten any critique that you could take on board, the problem must be with you. Now, there's something to be said for looking at the common factor, and maybe sometimes it is you. But that blanket assumption ignores that (a) critique is very individual, and just because what works for one person doesn't work for another doesn't mean that the another is a prima donna, and (b) giving good critique is a skill, and there are a lot more people doing it than doing it well.

So I was very pleased a while back when somebody linked to one of Maggie Stiefvater's periodic critique partner match-ups, and I read the following: "I wanted to be critiqued, and yet I never wanted to act upon the critiques I got."

It's okay for her to say it, because she's a published writer. When an unpublished writer says something like that, they're just a whiny little wannabe who needs to learn to take critique and realize that they're not a special snowflake who shits rainbows onto the page. ;-) But when a published author, especially one with decent sales who wins awards and stuff, and who can point to her current trusty group of beta readers, says it, it becomes a home truth. Which she goes on to explain with: "It took me a long time to realize that I needed to find critique partners who enjoyed the same sort of story-telling that I did; critique partners who weren’t always suggesting that I turn my novel into the sort of novel that I didn’t want to write. Also critique partners who communicated in the same way as me".

Critique partners who enjoy the same sort of story-telling that I do. Therein lies the obstacle that I have yet to overcome, critique-wise. I have had brief bursts of it -- and when it's worked, it's been brilliant, and just what the then-stories needed. Unfortunately, those instances have been non-repeatable for various reasons. What has been repeatable is people who wanted something very different than what I was trying to achieve, or who were working at a so much shallower level than I was that it really wasn't getting to anything I needed. (Or as Stiefvater puts it in the link below, "Ultimately I realized that I needed to find readers with the same story-telling priorities as mine, or it was never going to work.")

And communicates the way I do -- that's another big one. The content has to be there, but it also has to be expressed in a way that computes in the author's brain. This applies both to critique-group methodology (I need discussion; clarion/Milford or Dunning simply do not work for me) and also to interpersonal styles. (I've mentioned before that while I'm all for understatement-for-emphasis by characters and I'm prone to it myself, when it comes to critique, I need people who can baldly state what effect the text had on them.)

Unfortunately, Stiefvater's match-ups aren't a good fit for me; aside from the challenge of navigating Google Docs, where she now seems to be doing it, most of the respondents are writing YA. Which makes sense, since Stiefvater's a YA writer, and more power to 'em, but not my tribe. However, some of the things she asks people to provide are definitely pointing in the right direction, and I should keep them in mind for future use. Genre, and a small sample (I'd go with more than one line, but that's me), agent/publishing status, etc.

I particularly like that she asks for "the last book you read that you loved and also the book you feel epitomizes you as a reader" -- which are not necessarily the same thing. Not that I ever expect anyone to match me on those, especially the latter.*

So what does all this tell me? Mostly it gives me another way to phrase what I already knew, and an established author to point to when I need to back it up. How to find those critiquers with the same story-telling priorities as mine, and compatible communication styles, remains a mystery.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~

* For the record, the last book I really enjoyed was Paige Orwin's The Interminables -- really compelling characters, along with cool worldbuilding and solid writing -- I kept wanting to get back to it when I wasn't reading it, which is something that happens all too rarely these days. And the book that epitomizes me as a reader? I think that honor has to go to Tea With the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy. I love that book, and nobody but me seems to understand how marvelous it is.

If you can spot the common trait between those two, do please let me know what it is.