Questions are the building blocks of writing. The answers to the questions that you ask are what builds your story.

When it comes to non-fiction writing – journalism in particular – there are the famous 5 Ws which need to be answered in any given news story: Who, What, Where, When, Why. And then, sometimes, it is instructive to add an H – How.

In fiction it is not THAT different. These are the fundamental questions which you need answers to in order to create a story.

And the most basic questions are the three which, put together, define Character.

On the face of it, the first two questions – Who and What – might seem to be dangerously similar. Ask somebody WHO he is and WHAT he is, and watch that person struggle with those concepts. I come to it from the point of view that is almost Nature vs Nurture – WHO a person is depends on the stuff that’s inborn, inside, instinctive; WHAT he is depends on the circumstances that have shaped that particular human being.

For instance, WHO I am is a writer – because that is what I do, it’s an instinct and a vocation, it’s something that I have to do and which drives me, and it’s something that I seem to have a certain amount of talent for. WHAT I am is an author, which is a PUBLISHED writer, and for that I have had to learn my craft, and practice it, and work with others in order to make it happen.

It doesn’t have to mean that the “who” is the personality trait and the “what” is the linked profession, at least not directly –  perhaps if you answer the “who” question with “I am somebody who likes people” it might merely lead to something like “…and therefore I am a philanthropist”.  Some things can mean both – there are people to whom the phrase “I am an aristocrat” covers both WHO and WHAT they are, and in some specific cases the WHAT informs the WHO rather than vice versa – for instance, “I am the Queen of Ruritania” might mean both WHO and WHAT but if treated as the “who” part of the equation, if that is something that you were born to and therefore which has shaped you all your life you might add the “what” along the lines of, “…and therefore I am the person on whom the responsibility for her people’s well-being ultimately rests” (please note that it’s the title, or the profession, that now builds the personality trait…)

You can have fun with this when you are building characters in a novel, in either direction. Most will do it in a forward direction, like the rest of us do, living their changes, starting with a WHO AM I set of characteristics and then developing those into a WHAT AM I personality as it accretes the trappings of their world. But sometimes it’s instructive doing it in reverse – a character who starts out as an evil wizard (technically a WHAT) can be deconstructed backwards to the roots of that, until you reach the bedrock of WHO that wizard was before he turned evil and wizardly. J K Rowling did something of the sort with the flashbacks about the early Voldemort.

One way or another, the WHO/WHAT dynamic in a character is very much about a character’s growth and changes while that character is engaged in a central problem which is the raison d’etre of a piece of fiction. But there is one other crucial piece of evidence that’s missing from the picture at this point, because none of this happens in a vacuum of intent: characters in fiction – like real people – must have a reason for doing something, for changing something; the bridge, if you will, between the WHO and the WHAT. And that bridge – it’s called “motivation” – is the WHY.

This character had a lousy childhood (WHO) and turned into a serial killer (WHAT) because they were paying back old debts from their salad days (WHY). That character is an orphan girl hated by her widowed stepmother (WHO) but who grows up to marry a prince and become a princess (WHAT) because she had a fairy godmother (WHY) (hey, I never said the reasons had to be completely rational…)  It’s an equation. It kind of balances out in the end. Characters are supposed to grow and change within the frame of their own story, flipping between their WHAT and their WHO – but the reasons for that change keep them grounded, and make those changes relevant and believable.

It’s the WHY that centers them. And it’s a WHY that has to remain overtly silent – because if the reader is putting the book down and asking, frustrated, “But WHY did he do that?” you’ve lost the battle for that reader’s willing suspension of disbelief and the fabric of your story falls apart. The trick to the WHY is to supply the BECAUSE which your reader never realised they were asking for, or thought they needed to ask. A good writer poses the WHY question in the form of the BECAUSE answer, and the reader is given all the building blocks of that necessary bridge within the narrative framework itself.

This is hard to even write about never mind do it, or do it well. Characters who change believably within a motivational framework are the characters who are most remembered, though. It’s worth the struggle. The prize is a great one.

Next time we will discuss the When, Where, and How.

And I’m not scheduled for a  full post here this month. One is in the works for March; in the meantime, if you want to read the answers to a bunch of writing-related questions that a fan sent me and that I”m serially answering on another blog, you can read them here.

Off to a busy March full of deadlines and conventions and events – see you at the far side…

“This soap box is not big enough for the both of us.”

I asked readers for topics they would like to see me address in this blog, and I got a slew of great responses, something that will keep me in columns for a few months to come.

Here’s the question that got top billing for November:

“How you can address an issue you want to discuss without beating a drum for it or being too subtle to be realized – and CAN you make it too subtle? What is your target: conscious or subconscious?”

There are three different people involved in any given story at any given time.

There is the writer, who brings to it all of their own pre-conceived notions, ideological dogmas, clutural prejudices, and all that goes into the baggage that any average living human being carts around with them all their lives.

There is the reader, who brings  a different set of baggage to  the interpretation of the story.

And there is the character through whose agency the story is being told.

Let’s leave the reader out of it for a moment, because the things that the readers bring to the work are not remotely in the writer’s bailiwick – that is between the reader, and the story. But the other two people involved – the character and his or her creator – can sometimes square off in epic battles which the reader will often never know anything about at all.

Before I get into that, let me tell you what Patrick Stewart once said in an interview. He had just given a performance in a role which required him to portray a gay character, and the interviewer, ineptly enough, brought it up couched in awkward inquiries as to how the heterosexual actor could play a gay role, and how it affected his approach to that role. Stewart said, somewhat testily, that he had also played a starship captain at some point in his career, and nobody had ever asked him how he had approached THAT role.

By implication, you know, anyone at all can know exactly what it takes to play a starship captain, and what a starship captain feels, in an era of human developments where each and every beloved starship that ever existed only lived in our minds and our hearts and our imaginations. But being gay… that was something that really did exist out there, in the real world, in a way very much unlike those starships. Starships could be dismissed as being non-threatening, because they were impossible. Being gay could conceivably be interpreted as threatening, because it was POSSIBLE. And as a real-life issue, as perceived by that interviewer and many like him, apparently an artist is supposed to approach it somehow differently from the things rooted purely in the imaginary realm. As in, the artist was supposed, even expected, to have a personal opinion about something like this, about being gay, in a manner that would never have been expected when it came to playing imaginary captains of non-existent starships. Real-life issues have real-life agendas, and are thus subject to heated polemics.

And it is entirely possible that a character will have strong opinions about such matters. A character who may (unlike the writer who created him or her) actually BE gay. Or fat. Or black. Or Muslim. Or a Communist. Or simply a foreigner who comes from a place that someone else, reacting to him, may not understand or fears because it is seen as unfamiliar, odd, or strange. Worship a different god, and you’re suspect. Have a relationship with your body and your sexuality which is at odds with what is considered by society to be “the norm”, and you are suspect. Follow a different ideology than your neighbour, and you are suspect.  Is it surprising that characters labouring under these burens would have strong opinions about them, and about the society that created them?

The strongest, the best, characters will not be mealy-mouthed about these things, either. They will, or should, be outspoken. Someone fighting in the Russian Red Army may believe heart and soul in the Soviet, and is willing to die for those beliefs in a place like Stalingrad of apocalyptic reputation. A Muslim girl from an immigrant family may be reviled for wearing the hijab to a secular school. The Big Girl in the corner, who gets catcalls along the lines of “hey, Thunder Thighs!” every time she walks into her college  cafeteria, might have exttremely strong opinions about the people who are doing this, and about the body that she is wearing. That attitude towards her body can be an abysmally low self-esteem, a defiant acceptance of her shape, or a complex psychological elixir

which contains both of these things mixed together in explosive proportions.

For that matter, a Starfleet officer who screws up chain-of-command or standard protocol because it clashes in some impossible way with that officer’s own alien culture and mores will have a certain amount of defensiveness, a certain amount of triumph, a certain amount of anguish or mortification or… or… fill in your own feeling, as you think fits…

The point is, these characters will have thoughts and feelings about the circumstances in which they find themselves and the way they present themselves to and interact with their worlds. They will have opinions. These opinions – and pay attention now, this is important – MAY BE COMPLETELY AND DIAMETRICALLY AT ODDS WITH THOSE OF THEIR CREATOR AUTHOR.

Some authors find it impossible to keep their own ideological opinions in check, and will use stories – and characters – as mouthpieces for their own beliefs, be they faith or ideology. The temptation is there to simply assign villain roles to those characters who happen to disagree with the author. The trouble with this scenario is that it is painfully obvious that the author is the one on the soapbox, NOT the character, and that the character is either a limp ventriloquist’s dummy or is fighting valiantly against the muzzle bound on him by the author.

The soapbox is not big enough for both of them.

And in the best stories, told in the best manner, it is the AUTHOR who steps back, and leaves the characters to live their lives according to what the characters themselves believe.

This is a hard thing to do, because it requires, literally, carrying somebody else inside your head while you are writing the character who is not-you. The onus is on you to make that character live and breathe and not merely serve as a convenient place to hang the blackest villainy of your world. The best villains are not those who are mindlessly evil, but rather those whose thoughts and feelings you, the reader, can see and feel and understand and even empathise with – without EVER being asked or required to sympathise with them.

In the Changer of Days books, “The Hidden Queen” and “Changer of Days”, I had to portray a bastard prince who took a kingdom into his hand when it was offered to him on a plate – and who nearly destroys it because of what he perceives to be the slight given to his mother (whom the King bedded but did not marry) because she  was not, as was valued in that land at the time, gifted with certain kinds of powers – which the legitimately wedded Queen was. And that, of course, would have been the only reason, COULD have been the only reason, that the King had spurned the mother of his son… who then grew up with a chip on his shoulder, and turned on the bearers of the gift possessed by the Queen but not by his own mother. He swore to destroy them all before they blighted any more lives in the manner in which his own had been blighted. He was a black villain indeed, and did some deeply, desperately, terrible things. And yet, in the end, I aimed not for implacable hatred in the reader… but for pity. Because they would have understood, in the end, what had driven him. And it would have been very much a reaction along the lines, of, “Well, but what would I have done different if I had been in his shoes…? There but for the Grace of God…”

In a different book, “Embers of Heaven”, I portrayed a pair of star-crossed lovers who had violently opposed ideological and moral values. I gave them both EQUAL STAGE TIME. I took no sides. It was up to the reader, eventually, to figure it out. That’s because neither of those characters was purely right or purely wrong – but acted according to their own lights and their own faith, in the best way they knew how. Again, no black villains. Only real people with real pain.

And I let them ALL speak for themselves. Not an opinion amongst them was something that I had climbed up on the soapbox to expound.

The soapbox was not big enough for the both of us, my character and myself, and I was just the amanuensis, the hand that wrote down the words of the story – but the story did not belong to me. It belonged to its protagonist. The opinions therein are the protagonist’s, not the author’s. It is not the author’s place to reveal their own withint the auspices of that story.

I, as the author, have had to learn to listen, have had to learn the art of silence. I have had to learn how to raise a character well, like a mother would raise a well-behaved child, and teach that character all that needs to be known in order for the story to happen. But after that… I step back, and off the soapbox. If I have opinions on something, you will find them on my blog, not here. The story I am telling does not belong to me; it is the starship captain (whether or not he is in fact gay) who decides in which direction to take the ship, and which stars to aim for.

All I do is provide the ship. As for the rest… it’s over to you, captain. If the story, if the faith, if the beliefs, if the ideas are strong enough to shine through… they will. I have never in my life written a tale which was meant to “educate” the reader in any kind of overt way, or to be obvious propaganda aimed at changing that reader’s own set of ideas and beliefs. The basic concept is this: what I do when I write a story is that I create a character to carry it, and then allow that character to develop a personality (which consists of ideas, and thoughts, and feelings, and faith) which is the best possible fit to the story in question. What that character then tells the reader who reads that story… is between the character and the reader. By the time it gets to this point the writer is – or should be – back in the crowd of listeners, listening to the character speak his mind, and if that writer has done the job properly the writer’s voice and opinions and ideas (whether or not they match that character’s) will never intrude on what the character has to say.

This soapbox is not big enough for the both of us.

September 26 – October 3 is Banned Books Week.

BANNED BOOKS week.

As a writer, I look at this and shake my head. The thing is,  the books are “banned”, as in, prohibited…but they are certainly not unavailable. There are lists of “banned books” everywhere, and so you KNOW which books are to be shunned, and these lists are… are… mind-boggling.

Here’s one, a list headed “Books Banned at One Time or Another in the United States”:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Christine by Stephen King
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth

(full list at http://www.adlerbooks.com/banned.html )

Judy Blume? Madeleine L’Engle? Harper Lee? John Steinbeck? Margaret Attwood? Walt Whitman? Mark Twain?

For that matter, Greek tragedies written in something like 400 BC? Medieval writers like Boccaccio and Chaucer? Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night?

The WEBSTER NINTH NEW COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY???

Are they serious? What possible criteria could be used for these selections? And what’s left to read – Dan Brown…? (Oh, wait…)

In a piece entitled “Books Suppressed or Censored by Legal Authorities” (read it at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned-books.html ), more jaw-dropping examples are given. James Joyce’s Ulysses, selected as the best novel of the 20^th Century by the Modern Library, was banned in the USA for 15 years as “obscene” (oh really? The guy who found it so was actually able to understand it…?). Obscenity was also cited in the banning of Voltaire’s Candide (satire, people. SATIRE. Go look it up.)

The article cites not only Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron – but apparently, also, “…various editions of The Arabian Nights [were all] banned for decades from the U.S. mails under the Comstock Law of 1873. Officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, this law banned the mailing of “lewd”, “indecent”, “filthy”, or “obscene” materials. The Comstock laws, while now unenforced, remain for the most part on the books today…” (In the case of Lysistrata, at least, we have an alternative explanation – the thing is profoundly anti-war. And being peace-loving is somehow… unpatriotic. Oh, wait…)

They banned Leaves of Grass, the defining work of Walt Whitman, because of the use of “explicit” language in some poems. South Africa banned Frankenstein as “indecent, objectionable, or obscene”. (Fine, the South Africans also banned Black Beauty – possibly nobody actually figured out that the thing was about a HORSE…) Lady Chatterley’s Lover (have you READ this thing? Do you realise how TAME it is compared to some of the more fiery literature of today…?) has been the subject of obscenity trials both in the USA and the UK for years, well into the middle of the twentieth century.

In some cases it is teachers – TEACHERS! – who fuel the fires – as late as 1999, the dawn of the 21^st century, a teacher in a Savannah high school was reported as requiring parental permission slips for students to read things like Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear (citing “adult language” and references to sex and violence… uh, no kidding… let’s just ban history from the high school curriculum entirely, shall we…) and another school pulled Twelfth Night from the curriculum citing a prohibition of “alternative lifestyle instruction” (they thought Twelfth Night was going to turn all their Junior High students into instant transvestites?!) California – enlightened, liberal CALIFORNIA – apparently banned Little Red Riding Hood… because… because she was taking WINE to her GRANDMOTHER. Shock, horror.

Here’s another list of Banned Books. Aside from a bunch of books explicitily (as in, mentioning this in the title – I of course have no idea how “explicit” some of these things are between the, er, sheets of the book itself) concerned with GLBT themes, including things like AIDS, and knowing that such things get people of a certain mindset to get upset even without remotely knowing what the books are actually ABOUT, other than their theme, there is the usual crop of double-take “What were they thinking” responses. A few of them:

Paula, Isabel Allende

I know why the caged bird sings, Maya Angelou

One more river, Lynne Reid Banks

Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Giver, Lois Lowry

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

(More at http://www.abffe.com/bbw-booklist.htm.)

And once again, I am left clutching my aching head. Maya Angelou is objectionable for WHY? Lois Lowry’s book is objectionable for WHY? The Joy Luck Club – are you KIDDING me?

Here’s a few more, from another site:

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (a 1932 book, ferchrissakes. Does it offend your modern sensibilities? Well, please, by all means, simply don’t read books written before 1999. Oh, wait. Harry Potter’s a-coming…)

Catch 22, Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies, William Golding (We had this one as a set book, required reading, at school, at one point. I HATED it, but that’s neither here nor there – the Toronto School Board (Oh, Canada!…) banned this from its schools claiming it was racist for using the word ‘nigger’…)

Perhaps the most wildly appropriately of all, the book which is the poster child for censorship, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, got caught up in this net. Here’s what they say about it at the site: “This book is about censorship and those who ban books for fear of creating too much individualism and independent thought. In late 1998, this book was removed from the required reading list of the West Marion High School in Foxworth, Mississippi. A parent complained of the use of the words “God damn” in the book. Subsequently, the superintendent instructed the the teacher to remove the book from the required reading list.”

Picture me sitting here holding my head in my hands.

Who are the people who think they ought to be in charge of what I am and am not allowed to read, know, learn, understand?

Here’s a partial list of acknowledged censors and bookbanners – present and past – in the United States:

Anti-Defamation League
Barnes and Noble, bookseller, San Diego, California
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Christian Voters League
Columbus Metropolitan Library
Comstock, Anthony – special agent for the U.S. Post Office
Concerned Women for America – Beverly LaHay, president
Drake, North Dakota – school board
Dworkin, Andrea – feminist writer
Educational Research Analysts – Mel & Norma Gabler, founders
Graves County, Kentucky school board
Lake Lanier Regional Library system in Gwinnett County, Georgia
MacKinnon, Catherine – feminist
Marion High School, Foxworth, Missippi
McCarthy, Joseph R. – U.S. Senator
Meese Commission
National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored Peole (NAACP)
National Assn. of Christian Educators (Robert Simonds, founder)
National Federation of Decency (Rev. Donald Wildmon, exec. dir.)
National Security Agency (NSA)
New England Watch and Ward Society
Olathe, Kansas – school system
Parade Magazine – national magazine
Rafferty, Max – CA superintendent of public instruction (1963)
Rib Lake, Wisconsin – school board
Roberts, Cokie – ABC News Commentator
Roman Catholic Church – Index of Prohibited Books
Sixty Minutes, CBS News Program Feature Story on Internet
Stahl, Leslie – 60 Minutes News Commentator
Talmadge, Eugene – governor of Georgia (1941)
U.S. Bureau of Customs
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
U.S. Information Agency (USIA)
U.S. Justice Department
U.S. Postal Service
U.S. Treasury Department
West Marion High School in Foxworth, Mississippi by School Superintendent

And here, just for comparison value, is a different list of bookbanners – the company these concerned Americans are keeping:

Alan Dutton, C.A.E.R.S – Canada
Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran
Canada Customs at B.C. border crossing (1998)
Canadian government
Canadian Jewish Congress – Canada
City of Westminster, London, England
David Matas, B’nai Brith – Canada
Franco of Spain
Frederick William II of Prussia
German Communists and Nazis
Greek ruling military clique (1967)
Irish government
Mayor Linda Larson, Town of Oliver – Canada
Sol Littman, Simon Wiesenthal Centre – Canada
Soviet Union government
Supreme Court of Australia
Synod of Canterbury at St. Paul’s, London, England
Ujjal Dosanjh, Attorney General, British Columbia – Canada

So what I am I to take home from this comparison? That when Ayatollah Khomeini practises book banning, it’s just another piece of kindling for the stake at which the man is to be burned for his many sins. But when a “concerned parent” somewhere in the more devout counties of the American South starts squawking about his or her kid having access to “The Origin of Species” in the school library… that’s okay?

I don’t think so.

If you believe in God, believe this.

He gave us brains. To think with. To analyse with. To make our own decisions with.

He gave us free will. To do what we thought best. If it damned us, it damned us – that is the point of it all. Where, explicitly, in any organised (or disorganised, for that matter) religion is it written that any human being is responsible for the eternal life and salvation of any other human being…? To the point of enforcing action or thought perceived to be conducive to  it in this lifetime…?

Here’s something to think about. Worried about indecency or obscenity in books? Worried about “inappropriate language”? Worried about the “fact” that if your kid reads a Harry Potter novel they will acquire – for REAL – the enthusiasm, knowledge and aptitude to run around your back yard waving a willow twig at piles of autumn leaves and screaming “Wingardium Leviosa!” and expecting the leaves to take wing and fly?…

Don’t read them.

But nobody has a right to ban a book, to stop ME from making up my own God-given mind, exercising my own God-given free will. I was not born a slave to any (wo)man, to be subject to other people’s whims, fancies, aberrations and terrors. What scares YOU does not scare ME. What scares me, quite frankly, is willful ignorance, the arrogance of thinking that one human mind knows “best” what’s good for everyone else, the snuffing out of knowledge because it doesn’t fit dogma, the self-serving fear that enlightened minds will choose something other than what those in positions of power might want.

Free the books. Free the human mind and the human spirit. If you believe in God, trust his creation.

And go read at least one “banned” book this week. Just because.

Welcome to Storytellers Unplugged. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I recently did an interview for Book Talk (you can read the whole thing at http://booksbypickles.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-with-alma-alexander.html – it was a good interview!) and their last question was whether I had any questions to ask of the readers. So I did – I asked,

“What makes you, the reader, call something a “good” or a “bad” book? What makes you call a book unforgettable? What makes you throw it across the room?”

Last month I wrote about what the commenters to that blog post did NOT want to see in the books they were reading. But there were some things that they DID want to see, and last week’s article got away from me, so I kept the good news for later.

So, what was the good stuff?

You can read the full comments to the original interview, from which all of this sprang, in last months’s post – but, in summary, the “good stuff” included: characters who are good enough to feel as though they might live if allowed out of their current novel milieu; well-thought-out settings and backgrounds; drama, intense emotion; a storyline that is meaningful, insightful, or that has something to teach; the kind of ending that makes you want to pick up the book and start reading it again from the beginning.

Eh. You guys don’t ask for much, do you?…We writers just have to write about real people in real places who feel real emotions and learn (and therefore teach) real life lessons, and then wrap it all up all pretty with a bow on top before we hand it over.

Uh.

Okay.

One of the books mentioned in the original comments was Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Tigana”, a book which I myself have called possibly the best book I’ve ever read, EVER, in or out of genre – why not use that to illustrate some of the points raised above. And yes, it will probably be a little spoilery – inevitably – so apologies, and if you want to scurry away and buy a copy and read it before you come back here, that’s just FINE, this post will wait, and that book will just get another fan…

Characters who are real enough to feel as though they could step out of the book and shake your hand…? This book has them, in spades. These are people who have lived their lives, every second of them, and who bear the scars of it, and the scars are there even when they try to hide them. Nobody here is Superman, with super powers world-without-end kind of caricature creature. Even the most powerful characters have their weaknesses, and those weaknesses are found and ruthlessly exploited – conversely, even the most harshly used and weakest characters have unexpected and soaring strengths which they can and do use to survive things which might otherwise have destroyed them. Even if nothing else at all worked in this book its characters are towering accomplishments – some of them, like Dianora, rise to true tragedy, the kind that squeezes your heart with sharp claws while you learn to get to know her, to understand the things that shaped her, and then broke her… and how, in spite of all of that, she somehow manages to remain whole and true to herself. Oh, that woman. She makes me weep and cheer at the same time. The writer who created her is a god.

The setting and milieu and background of “Tigana” are another extraodrinary accomplishment. There is nothing in this book that breaks the spell, nothing that makes you believe for an instant that this world has never existed, can never exist. It is all perfectly, sublimely, completely real. You have the strangest feeling that you could reach through the page and touch a brick wall, a trembling leaf, the quiet surface of the sea, a horse’s sweaty flank… and you could actually feel them there. They are that close. That real. That perfect. The history and the geography of these lands are ancient and deep, and bear its fractious present – the point in time at which we join the novel – with elegance and grace. This is not a world created lightly or shallowly. You enter here, and you will become a part of it all. There is nothing that is out of place; everything is thought out, set out, a puzzle piece in the correct setting and with perfect fit. If you’re a writer and you have trouble with worldbuilding, read this book – because this is how you do it. Precisely like this.

The story is so full of drama and of intense emotion, so packed with meaning and insight, so full of epiphany and of places where you (the reader) are taught things you never knew about yourself simply by empathising with the characters in the story, that it is entirely possible that you might find yourself overwhelmed by it at times. For myself, the thing that broke me was Alessan’s toast – “Tigana, may the memory of you be a blade in my heart.” I do not know how Guy Gavriel Kay knows what it means to lose your country and your soul – but I do, and this pride, this grief, this bottomless well of passion NOT TO FORGET WHERE YOU CAME FROM, where your bones were knit and the bones of your ancestors were buried, this is true. This is TRUE. If you read “Tigana” you will understand this pain. Of course, for different readers there might well be a different emotional trigger – but this was it for me, and this book and I are now bonded forever through this shared emotion. This… is pure magic.

For all the emotional storms, for all the wrench and drama and laughter and tragedy and triumph of this tour-de-force of a book, you bond to this story in ways you don’t even begin to understand. And this is a book of the kind that you turn the last page, scream and cry because it is over, and feel as though someone has just thrown you out of your own heart’s home – so you flip the book over, and you start again, because you don’t want to leave this world, you don’t want to leave these people, you don’t want to LEAVE.

Period.

There are few other writers, and precious few other books, which have hit all the high notes this well, and this consistently.

And yet… many readers simply expect this as a given, and still seem to think that achieving this – or at least some of this – is relatively easy.

As a reader myself, I am profoundly grateful when I come across books like this, because they become part of the building blocks of my life. As a writer… some day, when I grow up, I will write a novel like “Tigana”. Until then, I have to hope that I have climbed enough of the peaks for my readers to agree to ignore the deep shadows of the valleys where the monsters of my faults lurk in the twilight.

I’ll keep a list of these things – of the things that people have said that they are looking for in a book they would describe as “unforgettable” – next to my computer, so that I can see them while I write, so that I can be reminded of what I am reaching for. There are always new peaks to climb, and I hope I’ll have readers who will follow me up mine.

What about you? If you were to describe a book as “unforgettable”, what factors would be part of that accolade? If you could pick ONE book to exemplify your choice, what would it be?

I recently did an interview for Book Talk (you can read the whole thing at http://booksbypickles.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-with-alma-alexander.html – it was a good interview!) and their last question was whether I had any questions to ask of the readers. So I did – I asked,

“What makes you, the reader, call something a “good” or a “bad” book? What makes you call a book unforgettable? What makes you throw it across the room?”

Here’s some of the comments that turned up in answer to that (the emphasis on certain bits is mine):

Karen H said,

”I can tolerate pretty much anything in the books I read but the two things that will make me throw the book at the wall are:

1. TSTL* heroine (or hero) and
2. Characters not written true to the time period of the book

I’m not talking about flaws in history (or research) but let’s say it is a book set in late 18th century and the heroine is suppose to be the illiterate, virginal daughter of an innkeeper. Her conversation is written as a well educated, sexually liberated 21st century woman. Just doesn’t fit! I tried to read a book written like that by a rather well-known author. I couldn’t finish it.”

(*Too Stupid To Live)

Victoria Dixon said:

“Things that make me throw books against the wall, hmmm? I’ve done that on two different occasions and for two very different reasons.

1. The end of Tigana. I threw the book, screamed, cried, then picked it up, hugged it and read it again. That type of ending (hopefully) echoes in my own novel’s conclusion.
2. The end of Anne Rice’s fourth Vampire book in the Interview with a Vampire series. I forget the title of the book. I’ve probably blocked it from my memory. But the likeable, mortal character (David??) has stated throughout that he does not want to be turned. That he’ll never forgive (whoever turns him) if it happens. He is turned into a vampire and is oh so happy! Of course I wanted it! Yeah, I considered glueing the book face down to the dryboard, but I wanted to redecorate in a more traditional method. Plus I had no desire to keep the book. I LOATHE it when a writer lies to me about who their characters are. I haven’t read Anne Rice since, either.

Kami said:

”I find it interesting when people talk about throwing books against the wall. I don’t think I’ve had that reaction. Lots of times, though, I get this feeling like I’d rather poke my eyes out than keep reading, mainly from character stupidity. The other thing that gets me these days: female pov characters who are so enchanted by their own snarkiness and cleverness and who are so self-involved they don’t even seem like real people. Many of them don’t give any value or credence to anyone else, which creates problems for them at best, or worse, they turn out to be right and everyone else is wrong. Even the ones who create problems for themselves have the same issue as a cheesy romance–if they just pulled their heads out of their a$$es for two seconds they’d solve the problem. Ugh!”

BrigidsBlest said:

“Something that makes me throw a book across a room? Bad writing. The last one was “Fool’s Tavern”, which bragged it’d been written by a 15-year-old. I could tell.”

Julie B said:

“[As for throwing a book against the wall I don't remember ever doing so.] Sometimes I will give up on reading a book especially if it has too much potty humor or stuff that reads like it is written by a 12 year old boy. The other thing that bothers me is incongruence. I have read some books by well know authors that have been filled with glaring lack of continuity. it is as if the author forgot what they wrote two chapters before. I want to read a story not just the current fad in how to shock the reader.

Someone who just went by Anonymous said:

“What makes a book unforgettable for me is that I learn something from it, even though it’s fantasy.

Fenix (BLN) said:

“In answer to your question on what causes me to call a book ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – realistic characters with strongly consistent dialog is, by far, the hook for me. The scenes, storyline, and history are also considerations, but I must be able to identify, empathize, or feel compelled to ‘know more’ about the ‘people’ in the story.

The thing that makes a book unforgettable for me is when the combination of character, dialog, and story come together to deliver more than distraction and entertainment — when the lessons they learn and the experiences they have reflect something meaningful and insightful about the human condition.

The thing that makes me want to toss a book across the room is when I can predict

what’s going to happen… and I’m right.

“Any More” said:

”Unforgettable book is when the author grabs you from the first page with drama, intense emotion that can be seen while reading the words. Throw against the wall…ones that leave you hanging in the end knowing there is no other book coming out. I love mystical, fantasy, vampires and books that just keep me going through each sequel.”

Sue said:

“ I would call a book “good” when the characters stories captures my attention so much that I don’t want to stop reading. It is also when the characters background are so well-thought out that they seem like real live person. I also consider a novel “good” when I cannot predict the plot twists and the plots keeps me guessing. I would consider the book “bad” when it seems like the heroine is a Mary-Sue and her characterization is quite flat. Also, if the language the author employs are so horrendous that I cringe every time I read a sentence.”

So – couple of threads that can be pulled out of this particular set of comments, then. On the “bad stuff” front: character and/or plot idiocy of high degree; inconsistency and incongruity; predictability; lack of closure; dishonesty on the part of the author about the true nature of their characters; out-of-period characters who talk or behave as though they belong in a different time or place than the one in which the author has placed them; bad or just immature writing skills on the basic language level.

“Good” stuff: characters who are good enough to feel as though they might live if allowed out of their current novel milieu; well-thought-out settings and backgrounds; drama, intense emotion; a storyline that is meaningful, insightful, or that has something to teach; the kind of ending that makes you want to pick up the book and start reading it again from the beginning.

I’m sure I missed some – but as there is a limited scope to an essay like this anyway, let’s just go with those to start with.

Let’s start with the bad news. Authors, take note and avoid – if you want your books to remain unacquainted with readers’ walls;

1. “I Don’t Care What Happens To These People” – a phrase known as the Eight Deadly Words, and something that encapsulates a fair number of the complaints on the list above. It’s character stupidity in an idiot plot. It’s characters who pretend to be things they are not, until they are “rumbled” somehow and the author gleefully points in quite a different direction entirely and says oh look over HERE because that’s what I really meant for this character to be – but because they’ve already pretended once, and thus lied, the reader finds that the characters are now pretending to be the things that they are supposed to be, and it’s just as unbelievable. It’s characters who manufacture drama where there isn’t any because the storyline of the book needs to be drawn out, and, well, being dumb and getting into worse trouble than ever they needed to will drag a character kicking and screaming through a few more pages of plot.

Not the reader, apparently. A savvy reader will NOT follow an idiot character into a complete quagmire without a decent reason to do so – a reason that gives at least a hope that the character in question will basically do something intelligent enough (or believable enough) to justify their existence.

No, this does not mean that every character you ever write has to be deeply sympathetic and full of sweetness and light (oy, Mary Sue moment, beware) – dark characters with deep flaws are more than welcome to apply for a residence permit in a decent novel, but they have to be able to engage the reader somehow. Perhaps not outright sympathy and complete self-identification – in fact that is damn near impossible anyway – but at the very least a glimmer of understanding as to those characters’ motivations, and a basic contract between writer, character and reader that the troubles and travails that the character is being put through are actually there to MEAN something, and not just to (a) prove that the character is an idiot, (b) prove that the author hasn’t thought the plot through to a plausible conclusion, (c) the author is a sadistic sod who actually hates those characters with a cordial passion and is itching to punish them for existing at all, (d) prove that the character is so flat and two dimensional that it cannot change, no matter WHAT is thrown at it, and comes out of the worst of wringers with exactly the same set of attitudes and convictions with which it went in, or (e) all of the above to some degree.

A story is about change. If there is no change, if you cannot tell the beginning of the story from the end of the story and the characters have learned NOTHING while you’ve watched them blunder through the plot, why did you bother reading the story at all? You just know that at some time in the future you are going to want to have those couple of hours back. And you don’t care WHAT happens to those characters next, because you’ve figured out that they won’t learn anything from that, either. They’re stuck there in limbo, left hanging. Trust me, the worst of fates. At least if a character is loathed it’s a valid emotional response. If a reader is left feeling merely annoyed or irritable, the character is doomed to a particular circle of hell called Oblivion.

2. I was just entertained hugely by a still photograph where a carefully reconstructed movie set full of     lovingly selected vintage cars was thoroughly wrecked by the unsanctioned presence of a modern vehicle visible behind one of the antiques, displaying a saucy rounded rear with amber and red rear lights, all quite out of character with the period in question. Authors, do your homework – movies get combed for things like this by continuity editors, and books ought to have their own continuity plans in play. If you truly honestly can’t remember that your character lost an arm in an epic battle upstream in the plot somewhere, WRITE IT DOWN AND KEEP IT HANDY – it will help when you suddenly realise that you have him enfolding the lady of his dreams in a passionate two-armed embrace at the end of your book. If your broadsword in chapter 1 turns into a black-powder blunderbuss at the end of chapter 5, you’ve got problems. Keep it straight. This is sometimes much harder than it looks – big books with big story arcs have lots of niggly details which can get lost through the cracks but seriously – it is SO worth going over that MS just-one-more-time, even when you think that you cannot stand to look at it again, because every one of these niggles that YOU find and fix is one less potential trouble spot for your readers down the line somewhere. Yes, in certain paths to publication you will be treated to a copy-edit before the book is released for general distribution (and if you’ve never seen a copy-edit stage MS before, brace yourself, this is scary stuff) – and this is a copy editor’s job, combing the MS for niggles. But you cannot allow yourself to rely on that. Be as thorough when you’re writing and pre-vetting your own MS as you possibly can.

Let me tell you just how easy it is to get caught up in it all. In “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, an early draft thereof, I handed the sheaf of pages to a friend and beta-reader to look through. She did, and then stopped, stared, and asked if she could ask me a question – and pointed to a line in the MS which said: “Summoned by the noise, the deaf servant ran into the room…”

I had WRITTEN THAT. Two readers I trusted – my husband, my agent – had both read this version of the MS… and had failed to have their eye snag on it. There but for the grace of God goes an author with serious egg on her face, if that had been allowed to slip through. Yes, it’s funny NOW – I would have been cringing about it if I knew it was still there in the published book…

3. Predictability – oh, the cardinal sin which leads, eventually, to the a certain incarnation of the Eight Deadly Words. It’s a version of the Idiot Plot which inadvertently includes the reader in the definition of “idiot” – as though a savvy reader is incapable of extrapolating from clue and circumstance. Trust me, if the reader can figure it out six pages in advance… SO CAN YOUR CHARACTERS. Or should. If they don’t they may be too stupid for your plot. If your reader can flip through the book like a flat stone flung at a pond, skipping along the surface barely touching the water except at one or two points, why would they bother reading the stuff in between? If I can read page six and close the book and tell you what happens in the next two chapters… and then open the book again and prove myself right… just what is my incentive to read those two chapters? What is my guarantee that they will bring me anything of value… except possibly the conviction and certainty that I can tell from them exactly how the book ends (and can then put it away and call it read…)?

The corollary to this, of course, is pretentious twaddle which wraps the plot in so much secrecy and cotton wool that it simply becomes too much work wading through it all on the off chance that something might actually be hiding at the center. Finding the right amount and the correct level of foreshadowing plot points without giving them away or using them to confuse the reader into babbling in tongues is a difficult job. Think balance-walking across the Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Without a safety net.

4.  Lack of closure – make an end. Leaving your reader floundering at the back of the book trying to find a missing last chapter is just bad form.

5. Out-of-periodicity – this one gets filed under two headings, really. One is the basic one of Doing Your Research. If you know that you will be writing about a specific period of history (even if you are just basing your story on such a period) keep it straight in your head.

You cannot write about clockwork – or have your characters have knowledge of clockwork – if you happen to be writing about a nomadic horse-riding hunter and warrior tribe whose general level of technological civilisation is how to build a superior travelling tent which can be quickly and easily put up at night and dismantled the next morning when you move your camp on. You will not be telling time by a wrist watch under those circumstances. You will be looking at the stars and having a basic knowledge of telling how far the night is advanced just by lifting your eyes to the heavens.

You can write a plucky and feisty heroine – but if she lives in certain cultures she will still be treated like a girl, and you have to make a DAMNED good case for it if she is not. Women in Marie Antoinette’s time did NOT have the vote. Women of certain classes in certain cultures had a very limited number of careers open to them (and again, if you flout that you better make a damned good case for it). Upper class Roman matrons grew up in a world where it was perfectly okay to own slave girls – and they would not, under normal circumstances, be agitating for emancipation of those slaves. Neither would most of the slaves – in those days it was called a slave rebellion, and you DO remember what happened to Spartacus, don’t you…? If you foment unrest amongst the slaves, be prepared for the price you might have to pay. Others – others rooted into their time and milieu and mores with more verisimilitude – will have a vested interest in the status quo and will probably take a dim view of a 21^st century social conscience. (Which, of course is all fine… if that is the story you INTENDED to tell…)

You cannot have modern idiom in the mouths of people who would not have a CLUE about the meaning of the thing they had just uttered. Certain words and phrases had a pretty well documented advent, and you can research this. They will also have a certain concept of time which is equally well documented Please don’t have your dark-ages cobbler look up from his work and tell his woman he’ll be in for tea in five minutes. Minutes were not exactly something that could be accurately measured back then.

6.  Bad Writing, and Bad Storytelling. Oh, la. Nothing helps here except a willingness to learn from your mistakes, and the need to accept the fact that you can only get better at it with practice. The good news is that the actual CRAFT of writing can be fairly adequately taught in class – even if you do self-study. Grammar has rules. If you know you’re a bad speller and spend some time double checking your work (or find a willing beta-reader who can do it for you – do NOT rely on your writing software’s spellcheckers…) this is not an insurmountable problem

But that’s just one kind of Bad Writing. The other kind – the Bad Storytelling kind – is the kind that is much harder to cure. The kind that is just Bad Story. Nobody can give you a good story to tell – they aren’t handed out on silver platters. You have one, or you don’t have one. There are plenty of people who THINK they might have one and are hard to convince otherwise – but sometimes there really is no there there, so to speak. Go hunting for another plot bunny.

One of the things that came out in the commentary was that sometimes Bad Writing looks like “something written by a 12-year-old… and you can tell”. Sure, there are 12-year-olds out there who are geniuses. THEY ARE RARE. Most of the time the writing of the young… looks like the writing of the young. You cannot write about life – even about a fantasy life – until you’ve had just a LITTLE bit of experience in living it.

If you’re fourteen and reading this and think I am picking on you… don’t. I was fourteen once, too. I got over it. So will you. And if you keep practising, so will your writing. The years that are gathered into the folders of our lives bring their own gifts – they bring knowledge, understanding, subtlety, sarcasm, the sting of loss and the fireworks of triumph. Sometimes you just have to wait for them.

Sometimes it never comes. Just because a human being can speak does not mean that they can use language with a sufficiently adroit hand to write – writing is a very different beast.

There are those of us who are willing to let the gifts of the written word possess us, so that we can give them back wrapped in story; there are those who think they are willing, but scratch and claw against surrender all the way even while believing that they remain chosen and will fight to the death anyone who might try to tell them that the symbiosis isn’t working; there are those who don’t want the writing bug, and step back, and are content with learning about it (both its triumphs and disasters) at second-hand from those of us who carry its mark. That’s as well; those of us who write absolutely need those of us who only sit and read; without one another, neither could survive. Those in the middle – those who think they’re doing well but who commit the sins which the readers have brought up and which were the basis for this tale – be warned. There be traps in the road. They be lined with pointed sticks. Take the wrong turns of the writing game at your own risk.

Eh. This turned out rather long.

We’ll do the “good stuff” next month….

Writing is hard enough, it seems, when you’re doing it in a story set in the “real” world, the world of our everyday experience, the world which you-the-reader could step outside your front door at any moment and more or less experience (no, fairly obviously you cannot find yourself being a brain surgeon or a jockey, but both are occupations which you know about in terms of your own quotidian reality and you can fill in the blanks in the worlds surrounding those two characters fairly easily). When it comes to writing fantasy, the writer is faced with a whole other can of worms. The reader cannot assume anything about the world in which a particular story is set – anything at all beyond the things that the author tells them about it. Worldbuilding from scratch is a pretty intensive process – but things get nuttier faster when there’s magic in the mix.

You know, magic. The point-your-want, wave-your-arms, perhaps spout-faux-Latin kind of, well, MAGIC. Stuff that makes interesting things happen.

Turns out there’s quite a discussion going on about that very subject in a newsgroup which I frequent. Without naming names, a few things that have come up include:

- a [moderately solid] idea of what magic can and cannot do is important in generating plot twists. If magic can do “anything the plot requires” it doesn’t generate any plot. If magic can do anything for anyone, it’s mere handwavium. Anything that works just as the character needs it just when the character needs it (and that doesn’t work equally well for the villain) is not [an enjoyable] story.

(This is partly what is involved in what is otherwise known as the deus-ex-machina plot – things get sticky, and presto, someone somewhere manages to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and you know, nobody seems the slightest bit perturbed about it. I remember coming across it in a book which was part of a fantasy series, by a writer far too well known for me to mention his name here – let us just say that there has been a particularly nasty and evil war going on for, oh, some 300 pages of the book, a war in which most of our characters – including a high-falutin’ mage – have lost people they loved. And lo, after these 300 pages of war and angst and suffering, the high-falutin’ mage floats out above a bloody battlefield and raises his arms and says, “This stops now”. And you know what? It does. More or less instantly. My aggrieved demand in the aftermath of this was simply that if the mage in question had been able to do this all along then why hadn’t he done it before all those people (including the ones he loved) had to die – and if this was absolutely essential at THIS plot point, why wasn’t it at least hinted at that he could do it at all? Magic works in certain worlds in certain ways – except that this felt rather the author had painted himself into a corner and had used allashazam to blast his way out. And I, as a reader, resented that.)

- [the author] needs more knowledge of magic to write a good story that doesn’t read as if things ‘just happen by magic’…[need to know]whether there’s a price for using (or misusing) magic, who can use magic and how powerful they are.

(Utterly important point – everything has a price, and magic perhaps more so than most. The author HAS to remain aware of this fact if the story is to have any credibility.)

A good friend of mine from that group explains it in these terms:

“There’s a world of difference between magic that works every time -

switch on a current, and your light bulb glows – and magic that works

only some of the time (turn the key in your old banger. Mostly it

starts. If it’s been dry. Sometimes it doesn’t start, and there could be

five or six reasons why not. And sometimes, if you go away and try again

ten minutes later, _exactly the same action_, it works.)

Knowing which of these your magic falls into *will* have an effect on

the story. Your guy can light a fire that’s been laid. Can he set fire

to a tree with the same ease? A house?”

…and I think she is completely right about this. Magic may be wild but it has its rules, and how it functions in a given context is utterly essential to telling a coherent fantasy story involving fantasy.

- the “need to know” principle. This reared up in quite a few discussions where two writers who work in very different ways are arguing whether knowing far more about the magic in your story than ever actually makes it into the story as any kind of exposition or elucidation is a prerequisite for writing that story, or whether knowing what happens in the story is moot until you hit the point of the story at which it happens. An important idea is that it is (at least sometimes) impossible to know if a certain kind of (magic-drive) event occurs in the story or not, unless the author starts out with a minimum amount of knowledge in advance. Without that, the rules are not set up, cannot be broken consistently and believably or with any kind of acceptable motivation by the characters, and the resulting story has been described as “thin” by people taking part in this discussion.

Speaking of motivation – it came up in the discussion. People were arguing about whether it is enough for a reader to know that a character, for instance, carries a gun (or can do magic, insert motivational basis of your choice…) or not – or even if the reader actually needs to know that the gun is being carried at all. A lot of interesting discussion was born out of this, because several people argued that they may not NEED to know about the gun, but they might WANT to know, because the carrying of said gun might influence all sort of a character’s reactions and attitudes which will, in their turn, drive the plot of the story. People wanted to know what KIND of gun it was (colt? Flintlock? Derringer?) and the reasons behind the character’s having it (business? Self-protection?) as well as the character’s level of skill with said weapon, which I could quite easily see as having a profound effect on a character’s demeanour – heck, if I was out in the street and I knew I had a gun in my purse and an I knew that my chances of actually hitting a specific target with it – with any kind of accuracy that would make that matter – was at best 50-50, well, I would be looking and acting rather differently than if I was Jane A. Bond who was a cool and trained shot and who could whip out a gun, aim, fire, and drop a man at a hundred paces.

Magic works in much the same way. A particular person in the discussion spoke of how he might draw conclusions from a character’s actions and demeanour which would throw light on the attitudes and the expectations of that character’s society where magic is involved. He said that if a character appears hesitant while casting a spell and that character’s behaviour appears to suggest that (s)he is aware that there is going to be a price if (s)he screws up the spell-casting attempt, then the writer in question didn’t feel as though he needed to know exactly what would happen when a spell is improperly cast until it was actually cast and he could see the consequences of that action for himself. Conversely, the same writer said, if a character was acting confident and self-assured just before casting a spell, if there is no, uh, apprehension visible – then this author draws the conclusion that HE KNOWS that any negative consequences of failure aren’t going to be a “big deal”. He goes on to say, “I didn’t need to work that out in advance; the character

explains via his actions and attitudes what I need to know.”

And here is what I said on the matter in reply:

No. A character acting nervous might simply mean “YIKE! I’ve never

done this before”; “Oh my God, the Magister is watching ME, and not

anyone else at all, I’d better not screw up” (it is my experience that

the thought “I’d better not screw up” usually triggers such screw-up

more or less instantly). Conversely, not acting nervous might denote

bravado, arrogance, smugness, pride-cometh-before-a-fall – it doesn’t

always mean that the character knows there won’t be consequences. In

fact in good writing there almost always are – just not the ones the

character expected. You can rely on your character’s outward demeanour

only so far when it comes to judging motivations – and if YOU, as the

writer/creator/God of that Universe, don’t know what at the very least

MIGHT happen next you’re drifting.

I felt that assuming that the only reason that a character might act scared or not scared at the point of casting a spell might revolve on whether or not that character feared imminent punishment afterwards was far too simplistic. And from where I stand… I would need to know, myself, as an author of this story, how the spell casting works and what would happen if rules were broken. If the characters then go ahead and break the rules, that’s fine, that’s what a good story should do – it should take the reader for a wild ride, that’s its purpose. But to quote another participant in this particular debate,

“I need to have the feeling that the _author_ knows.

And often, this is most easily achieved when the author does know.”

So, then, how does magic work in a fantasy? Do we as the writers need to explain it? Do the readers absolutely need to know?

The answer is that thankfully there are as many kinds of readers as there are writers out there and no doubt the proper connections (through a simple process of elimination where the readers gravitates to the kind of thing that they would wish to read) will eventually be made. But from my own point of view, this is what you will find in my own books.

Magic, if it exists, exists in a set of rules that circumscribe it. It is not and cannot be all-powerful because there is nothing which an all-powerful force can be fought with (at least in order to reach any kind of satisfying conclusion) – if the attempt is made it is merely a rush to suicide by a writer’s characters and it is hard to imagine why any reader would wish to identify with characters so clearly doomed from the outset. There have to be limits. Limits may be breachable by virtue of heroic effort and/or virtuous sacrifice – but it has to be understood that there WILL be a price for achieving any kind of victory. Characters who don’t have a weakness at all, or who are simply not willing to pay such a price in the context of the story, are extremely difficult to make sympathetic to the reader – and if the reader doesn’t care what happens to your protagonist that reader won’t care about finishing the story you are telling.

The reader does NOT need to know precisely what the source of all magic is. It is sufficient to know how it functions in a given world, what makes it stronger, what limits it. And THAT, the author has to have an inkling about before the characters are flung willy nilly into the fray. A good magic-invested story does not mean planting a surreptitious top hat for your character to pull a rabbit out of at the eleventh hour. Sometimes, the character might have to BE the rabbit, to be sure… but the point is that it has to come from somewhere consistent, believable, unshakeable, or else the world you have built has been built on sand and the foundations will not stand.

The first rule of breaking rules is to know what they actually are. The second rule is that a character should have a reasonably decent reason to contemplate breaking those rules in the first place, because more often than not they are there for a damned good reason. The third rule is… that none of this, of course, is gospel.

I’m just telling you this – if you want the magic to be real, to play any kind of role in motivating your characters’ attitudes of motivations, you have to make it real. YOU have to make it real. You, the author.

Before you can ask anyone else to do it, you yourself must believe.

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve been down with a majestic case of con crud for the last few days, and my positive vibes are finding it hard to cope with my cotton-wool-and-swiss-cheese brain right now. But for a while now I’ve been in something of a state, and that’s got nothing to do with whether or not I can stop hacking any time soon or unblock my sinuses.

You see, for the first time in something like five years… I’m without a contract in the pocket.

Over the last, oh, eight years or so – pretty near the duration of my full-time writing career – I’ve had a good-to-damned-brilliant contract in my pocket for all the books that came out in that time period. Working backwards, the Worldweavers trilogy was sold on the basis of a synopsis ALONE, for a good and decent sum of money even given that it was three books’ worth of contract – but the last of that money was paid out to me in February, and the last book is in its copy edit instar on my desk right now, and pretty soon these books are going to be part of my personal publishing history. Before that, I sold “Embers of Heaven” on the strength of a synopsis, for a REALLY good sum of money (given that the contract was in pounds sterling and I live in a country where those are worth practically twice whats written on the contract in terms of cyphers alone). Before that, the various foreign editions of “The Secrets of Jin Shei” basically kept on popping into the hopper – we’re up to twelve languages and counting now, and all of those brought in good-to-middling amounts of money (more often than not in Euros) trickling into my account. You might say that I wrote “Jin shei” itself on spec initially, as it were, but that spec was only at the beginning – it helped me to get a fantastic agent who then did all the rest while I sat back without worrying and wrote the book. It was the agent who re-sold the “Changer of days” books (“The Hidden Queen” and “Changer of Days” in the USA) during this period, too – if you want to run down the actual chronology it was 2001 and 2002 for the initial NZ editions of “Changer”, 2004 for the US hardcover edition of “Jin Shei” followed by the other foreign editions straggling over the years including the UK/Aussie/NZ edition, and the Spanish incarnations which are still ongoing with a pocket edition due this year. Then 2005 for US paperback of “Jin Shei” and the fantasy duology in the US. Then 2006 for the UK release of “Embers”. Then 2007 for Worldweavers #1, 2008 for Worldweavers #2 (“Spellspam”, released just a few weeks ago) and 2009 for Worldweavers #3, “Cybermage”.

Good run, eh? Any soul out of there will tell me to go away and quit whining. How many people get this blessed?…

The thing is… I did not do a Rowling, or a King, or a Dan Brown. I sell thousands of books, tens of thousands of books, maybe hundreds of thousands of books when all is totted up – but I did not “break out”, I did not hit millions or get on Oprah or hit the New York Times lists. I did not prove myself to the bean counters. And I have a lot of stories left to tell… but it is the bean counters who get to decide whether I will get to tell them, because I may now be in a position worse than any dewy-eyed newbie who walks through the doors. I am a writer with a record. And if my record is judged wanting, it will no longer matter that I have stories left to tell or that I can tell them well. I am midlist, and I am left singing the midlist blues.

I am writing another novel right now. Of course I am – I cannot quit, any more than I can decide to survive without a heartbeat from now on. But I am writing it because I am writing it and not because someone has expressed a willingness to buy the thing from me. I’ve just come back from a con and I’ve heard people tell me that somebody has just recommended me to them – the words “Alma Alexander? Oh, I LOVE her stuff!” have been reported to have been uttered. And I am happy beyond words to have knowledge of their being uttered, because writing is – always has been – a joy to me, and knowing a story of mine has brought a degree of joy or happiness or enjoyment to somebody else is a big thing. But I need to sell a thousand books in a week now, just to get past the hurdle of an editor’s implication that she liked a synopsis of mine but she’s waiting to hear from the marketing people… because there’s a track record. I may be faced with changing the name I write under. I may be forced to start all over again. I may be forced to start winning that “I love her stuff” reaction from people all over again from scratch.

And that’s if I’m lucky.

Eh, maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself because I still can’t quite breathe without stopping to hack, and I haven’t been outside in days, and it’s been snowing for two days out here at the tail end of March with my blooming daffodils bowed underneath the weight of the snow. Maybe my optimism is under that snow somewhere too, having bloomed early like the daffodils and now staggering under an unexpected load of reality. But I honestly thought that being published would make things EASIER for me, not harder. Maybe I was just being naive.

I’ll go back to my chores now. I have a copy edit to finish, that of the third book in the trilogy, and I might even get it in by the deadline that I promised it by despite being sick at the worst possible time. I’ll go back to the new novel, and keep writing it, and try and keep up the hope that somehow somewhere there will be a good home for it when I am done. In the meantime… if you feel generous and are in need of something to read for yourself or for a reader in your life… please consider making my publishers’ bean counters happier. My books are still in print.

 Hello. My name is Alma Alexander, and I’m a writerholic.

This is my first real step on the Storytellersuplugged stage, so I figured I could do worse than start out by giving you this essay below – the essay originally presented as a speech for my first Guest-of-Honor gig at the 2005 Writers Weekend conference in Seattle (I could have fiddled with time references, but on reflection I chose not to – so any references to “recent” in the essay refer back to 2005…)  The essay was important in several ways – it marked a watershed (I was considered to be high enough on the writerly ladder to be considered for a GoH slot); it made me encapsulate some thoughts on what it meant for me, personally, to be who I was and to be doing what I was doing; and (perhaps most apt for its current incarnation, here) it told a few personal stories about my own journey which served as an introduciton to an audience. Those stories step up again, here, today, to serve the same purpose.

Hello, my name is Alma Alexander, and I am a writer.

This is how *I* got here, to my place among the stars.

**************

Wanting, Becoming, Being: A Writer’s Journey: From Chrysalis to Butterfly

 

 

 

 

Years ago, when I was a pigtailed schoolgirl, my school saw fit to bring in a real live honest-to-goodness writer to talk to us about her life and her work. I was fifteen. I had been scribbling stuff down since I was five (at which age I wrote my earliest preserved piece of writing, a “poem” my father still fondly cherishes the memory of), and I was a voracious reader – but up until this moment that signified nothing. I loved to read books – perhaps somewhat obsessively so, given the pursuits of my peers, but that was it, I just loved reading. I was an experimental scribbler. That was all. And then, the epiphany.

 

Writing wasn’t what I DID. Writing was who I WAS, and writing was the only thing I wanted to do. No, the visiting writer didn’t hand me a pair of rose-tinted spectacles and tell me fairy stories about her art. On the contrary – she was blunt to the point of  being painful, and told us of the misery as well as the joy. The days and weeks and months and sometimes years of waiting, waiting, waiting. The hurtful things people say. The rejections. The dismissal of your passion as a “hobby” that will never amount to anything. The constant reaching for that brass ring, which some never ever get to touch at all. The sense of a published book being somewhat equivalent to winning the lottery.

 

But she said all this with the light of angels in her eyes, and it brought home one very important thing to me. A writer is someone who is heartbreakingly, achingly, indelibly and hopelessly in love with language and with words. Writing is something you do not because you are searching for validation or monetary success (although it does come, to some) or a meaning for your life. A writer is someone who is able to transcend all the pain and all the frustration and all the crashing failures that lie strewn beside the path of the writing life – and get up, sometimes broken and bleeding, and cradle the precious Word in a cupped hand like a thirsty man in a desert does water, and go on.

 

 

I went on to study science at university, and I even got a master’s degree in molecular biology – but underneath it all, throughout that brief detour that my life took, I knew one thing about myself – I was, I would remain, a writer. I learned that on one rainy evening when I was fifteen years old, in the company of one of the truly Anointed.

 

You are all here because an epiphany along those lines happened to you. And it is my turn, in my own way, to pass on what was given to me.

 

You meet an artist, someone who works with clay or with pigment on blank canvas or with charcoal on paper, and if the artist is any good at all you immediately know that you are in the presence of something extraordinary, a different way of seeing the world we all inhabit, a talent, a gift, a vocation. An ARTIST. Someone who is doing something that an ordinary common-or-garden Joe Schmoe could never do – transform an idea into an image, or a dream into reality.

 
It’s almost painful how much this dictum doesn’t apply to the writers amongst us.

 
Part of it is that the tools used are the kind where familiarity breeds contempt – we all use language, after all, we’ve all known how to string a sentence together when communicating with our fellow human beings since, well, since we learned to talk. We were BABIES, for crying out loud. We were toddlers, children, many of us learned to lisp words before we were fully potty trained. How hard can it be, to string words together on a page and get a book?

 
A writer is measured by his or her success more than any other kind of artist. Meet a sculptor at a party and your questions will center on how he works, what sort of thing he makes, what inspires him. Tell someone at the same party that you’re a writer, and the response is usually, “Oh, would I have read anything of yours?” (i.e. – “Are you published…?”) And yet, the person who asked that question is just as likely to follow it up with something like, “Oh, I’ve thought about writing a book. Maybe I will, when I have more time/when I retire/when I get around to it.” Implying strongly that this putative masterpiece is easily the equal and possibly even a superior product to the thing that the writer at the party has produced.

 
The truth of it is, writing is HARD. And pursuing a writing life is even harder. It needs perseverance, even stubbornness; an ability to take hard knocks and then pick oneself up off the floor and start again; courage; wisdom; passion; an ability to walk a tightrope between believing in yourself absolutely in the face of whatever anyone else says, and being able to accept others’ suggestions as to where there is room for improvement. A huge dollop of luck. And talent.

 
Note that I leave talent last. Talent in a writer is less easy to perceive on an immediate level than it is in a visual artist. Depending on your taste, you can look at a work of art (or “art”) and be able to judge whether or not it sucks. With writing, one page of writing is much the same as another. It requires a certain amount of application of attention to discover whether an author of a book you’re holding is  an actual storyteller or, well, or not. And publication is no real yardstick, either – there are plenty of books out there for which the only sane response is “what were they thinking?” But I guess tastes differ, at that, and a book that would appall me would be gleefully snapped up by the next reader in line. But the publishing industry is a kind of modern equivalent of that medieval quandary about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin – the more contemporary question being, how many authors can dance in a publisher’s catalogue. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of manuscripts are submitted to publishers’ offices and mailed to overwhelmed literary agents. A bare fraction of them pass muster. A mere handful is published every year.

 
But still, they come.

 
There are three stages to writerhood – to professional writerhood – the Wanting, the Becoming, the Being. And the Wanting is where all of us begin.

 
In a recent issue of  Poets and Writers magazine a newly published debut novelist writes about a life littered with “encouraging rejections” – the kind that tell you, you were THIS close, but sorry, no cigar. The kind that makes you want to scream, “Just what is it that you WANT from me???” It is a measure of the depth of mental exhaustion that this can bring you to that our author, the one in the article, relates of his own success in terms that might appall us, but that all of us who are writers are eminently capable of feeling empathy with. After two disastrous agents, our protagonist hooks up with Agent #3, who is everything that a writer could dream of. The agent says that the author’s novel will sell, and sell well, and sell fast. The agent says, phone me next Tuesday so we can discuss which houses I am going to be submitting this MS to.

 
The author is overjoyed.

 
Next Tuesday happens to be September 11, 2001.

 
In the midst of an appalled sense of watching the world coming to an end, our writer admits to a burning, unworthy thought that comes unbidden and stings like a wasp. If this is what it takes to stop me from publishing a book…

 
He got over it. The world staggered back into some sort of normalcy. The novel got published. All’s well that ends well – but there are days that all of us are watching some sort of end-of-the-world scenario and thinking “Why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through this? It will never happen. It can never happen. Look what happens when I even try.”

 
But it’s a measure of that Wanting that we struggle through these bitter dregs of what seems to be a poisoned chalice, and soldier on. It’s the Wanting. It’s the words that want out, it’s the stories that need to be told, it’s the voices in our heads telling us to go on, go on, go on. We carry on writing. We submit. We get rejected. We repackage and submit again.

 
At least one writers’ conference has had a presenter who has underlined the hard slog of it all by concrete evidence. One writer said, “These are my credentials for being here” – and unrolled a thick cylinder of paper which turned out to be rejection letters taped end to end. The honour roll ran the length of a hotel conference room.

 
Other writers wallpaper their studies with the stuff.

 
Yet others keep it piled up in boxes under the bed.

 
We’ve all got them. The rejections. The form rejections with a tick in a box which is so meaningless as to signify simply, “we hate you, go away”. The letters that are actually signed by a real person, or have a real handwritten scrawl on it:  not QUITE, but keep trying.

 
I once submitted a story to the venerable London Magazine – a literary mag hoary with credentials and credibility, a stellar market which publishes some huge names in the literary game. I, a newbie, a raw beginner of no standing and no reputation, sent in a story to a place like that – just because. If you don’t stretch, how do you know how far you are from your goal…?

 
The editor of LM, who had been in that position for decades and was a respected figure in literary circles, was prone to responding to submissions on postcards – arbitrary things of sometimes abstract nature on which he would scribble something in his instantly recognizable spidery scawl. In response to my submission, I received a postcard that read, “Not enough background.”

 
I did what you aren’t supposed to do. I wrote back to him. I said, “Well, what kind of background would you like?”

 
Another postcard arrived in reply. “We’ll take it anyway.”

 
That is how a short story of mine came to be included in an anthology published to mark the 30^th anniversary of London Magazine.

 
It was the Wanting that made me do it, honest. Break the rules, flout the expectations, talk back to the editor. I am a shrinking violet out in this cruel old world, honest I am – in everything except writing. It’s the Wanting that made me brave.

 
The story in that anthology led me to the publisher of the anthology, who referred me to an agent, who sold my first book of three fantasy short stories to Longman UK in 1995 – a book that has seen six reprintings in its ten years of existence, and which STILL brings me in a dribble of royalties twice a year.

 
Years rolled by, and I found myself in London again, this time with a novel-length manuscript under my arm. The Wanting set up its insistent call once more, and yet again I broke the rules. MS in hand, I marched into the London offices of the agent who I knew represented one of my favourite authors, and asked to speak to that agent.

 
“She’s in conference,” the well-trained receptionist replied.

 
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll wait.”

 
And I proceeded to do just that, parking myself in the waiting area with my box of papers and giving no indication that I would ever move again. The flustered receptionist sat there for a while shooting me occasional disbelieving looks, and them, when she couldn’t take it any longer, suddenly vanished into some guarded fastness behind her desk… to return with a somewhat astonished literary agent who got handed a manuscript box and politely asked to read it.

 
The agent was so blown away by the sheer chutzpah of this, that she did. She spent nearly forty minutes on the phone to me, after, discussing it with me. She tried to sell it. it didn’t quite come off.

 
No matter.

 
Ten years later, with new and potentially wonderful novel in hand, I emailed this agent, and I said, “You probably don’t even remember me, you must have had hundreds of manuscripts on your desk since that time, but this is who I am – and right now, I need an agent. Would you be willing to take me on?”

 
She emailed back that not only did she remember me but that she was thinking of me just the other day – that she thought I had a good story before, and that she was sorry that she couldn’t sell it for me at the time (it did get published in the meantime, by the way, but that’s another story…), but that she was in the process of winding down towards retiring and that she was cutting down on her list rather than taking on more clients. But she gave me the name and address of another agent who might be interested.

 
I sent the MS to the second agent, marking the envelope “by recommendation”. And sent it in. And received a phone call – from a New York literary agent! – not two weeks after I had done so, telling me that she loved it.

 
Less than six months after that, the book that became  “The Secrets of Jin Shei” was sold in seven countries and four languages. To date, that has grown to twelve languages and more than twenty countries.

 
The Wanting had done its job. I was now no longer a chrysalis. I was a cocoon. I was in the process of transformation.

 
I was Becoming.

 
I was suddenly thrust into a world of contracts and deadlines and editors.

 
The galleys of “Jin Shei” turned up in the mail, with a note asking if I could go through it and get back to the editor two days before the parcel got to me. There were consultations, rewrites, times where editorial comments and suggestions were taken and implemented and times where I wrote screeds of emails defending a particular point and making sure it was left untouched. They wanted an entire character axed from the novel and I explained why it couldn’t be done, and they said, oh, okay. Contracts piled up in my filing cabinet – British, American, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Catalan. I juggled manuscripts and editors and demands and deadlines. This was the BUSINESS end of the deal. The contracts named me “Author”, and there was suddenly a lot to do to live up to that title…

 
…and then the book arrives, after all this, and you aren’t Becoming any more. It’s changed into something different, into Being. You are holding a child of your heart, shaped and forged and formatted and designed and edited and marketed by dozens of other hands and minds but yours, your own, your story, YOUR book. And you know what? No matter how many times you go through this, no matter how many contracts there are in your cabinet, every book’s birth is something special. They smell so delicious. And there’s your name, on the cover. And you open it up and lo! You recognize the words within. They were born in your soul.

 
And you know what? You get to this point, and the fear really sets in. Because now you have to do it again. Before, you were measuring yourself against an outside bar, a set of standards given to you to meet – but from here on, you’ve MET them, and now you have to keep meeting them.

 
And the Wanting comes in again, howling, because there is another story waiting to be written.

 
And it all starts again.

 
This, this is what it is all about. A writer writes. The other aspects of this life are secondary, immaterial – the publishers of “Jin Shei” sent me on a seven-city tour to promote the book and it’s absolutely WONDERFUL to fly into a city knowing that there’s a book shop in it with your book in the window awaiting your presence to bring it to life – but it’s the words that are in your blood, not the chance to smile and sign and do readings at the local Barnes and Noble. You’re already writing the next one – in defiance of your fears, in the glory of your call to arms. You’re a writer, and you write.

 
No, it isn’t romantic. It isn’t glamorous, or glitzy, or high-flying – well, perhaps it is if your name is Stephen King and you’re an icon rather than a man in front of a typewriter. But for most of us, it’s simply this – it’s what we do. We get up in the morning and we do what needs to be done – we do laundry, go buy groceries, set the dinner to simmer, clean out kids’ rooms and cat litter boxes, weed the garden, feed the dog, take the garbage out – and then we sit down, and we open a door in the back of our mind, and we step out of that world and into another.

 
And the journey is worth every painful step of the way.

 

**********

Nice to be here. Nice to meet you all. See you next year…