They're All a Little Piece of Us

I've been taking my own advice at last and writing first, blogging later. Nanowrimo has given me an excuse to put my writing at the forefront for a month, which is bliss! I mean, the day job, the family, basic chores and errands are still all there. I still attend every soccer game and make dinner and wash clothes and all that.

But as soon as I'm done... out comes the laptop.

The words are pouring out like espresso drinks at Starbucks. Sometimes dark and intense, sometimes frothy and sweet. It has been years since writing felt this way.

But... it's got me thinking. The crux of all good writing for me is the characters that live and breathe and emote through my fingers onto the page. I used to think that they just sprang from my subconcious fully formed, but as I write more I realize that they are all, in some way, a little piece of me. My fantasy herione is the dutiful, insecure young woman I was when I first left home. Her ranger captain love interest is the cool, calm, capable, disciplined male person I longed to be for many years.

Yes, people, I always wanted to be a boy when I was young. Boys were fast and strong and tough and cool. I was awkward, clumsy, always sick and pretty much useless for anything but schoolwork. How I idolized the neighborhood boys. I wasn't in love with them. I just wanted to BE them.

My current heroine, Ginger, is in many ways my alter ego, though I didn't realize it at first. Smart but loveless, eager to prove herself but wary of failure, and wounded from the past but optimistic enough to believe in a rainbow waiting just around the corner. I could write her forever and feel like I have been, in numerous scenarios. Finally, I think I found her home and she's just popping off the page.

Even the villains are a little piece of me: the piece that secretly wants to control and manipulate so I won't have to be afraid any more. They also incorporate a lot of the people who have hurt me through my life or whom I've watched hurt others: The bitter, selfish neglecters, the master manipulators, and the ones so afraid of rejection that they hurt everyone near them.

None of my villains are cold, distant super-villains like Loki or Saruman or Gorden Gecko. They are intensely, gut-wrenchingly personal.

What about you? How do you see pieces of yourself in your characters?

Five Things NOT to Do in Suspense or Speculative Fiction

I've been reading more lately and I've noticed some things that turn me off of suspense/speculative stories. Both lesser-known and bestselling authors have used these tricks, so it's not just a newbie thing at all.

1. Don't hide things from the reader just to make up for a slow-moving plot.

While it's true we don't want to tell our readers everything that's coming before it happens, at the same time if there is something they need to know that DID happen, tell them. When I was in college, my writing professor called this "false suspense."

Example: A spy novel where a package is delivered, its contents examined, and great hullabaloo ensues, but we are not told for five chapters what those contents actually are. I, for one, stop caring.

2. Don't jump around in time and POV too much just to make up for a slow plot.

I suppose I could call this "false excitement" but it really is "disorientation." Back and forth we hop, from the action from the hero's point of view, to a few months earlier from the spy's point of view in which he is contemplating a run-in with a Columbian drug lord that has nothing whatsoever to do with the current situation (trust me, it really has nothing to do with it), back to the girlfriend's point-of-view in the action, then to her reliving a conversation with the hero at lunch last week.

I could see maybe in a very tense, critical moment when you need to diffuse things or the characters really are caught up in their own heads in order to avoid dealing with the crisis in front of them, but not as a regular pattern through the whole book.

 3. Don't make your hero so troubled that I don't like him or her.

This seems to be a trending fault in fantasy, and probably science fiction as well though I don't read much of it. In the effort to be gritty, authors create protagonists that come off as selfish and unlikeable. I don't care how bad his childhood was or how much danger he's in, if he acts like a jerk he's a jerk. Which leads me to the next one.

4. Don't give your protagonist such a gruesome backstory that it distracts from the current situation.

Again, the effort to be "gritty" has produced some really, really horrible setups. Am I the only person left in the world who is not immune to the horrors of rape, incest, torture, brandings, beatings, severe emotional abuse, abandonment, etc. etc. etc.? If you bring these things into the story you have to deal with them, and that means your reader must as well.

Your characters also have to deal with them, and if the characters are dealing with them, they're not able to function well. I get that not functioning well is the purpose; that you're challenging them. Okay. But when everyone is running around all traumatized and bloody before the story even really gets going, then it's not a place I want to be for 300 pages.

Maybe that's just a matter of personal taste, but if everyone in your story is tense, cranky and miserable, then I'm tense, cranky and miserable. At least put in a character for comic relief to break the tension. 

5. Don't make the pace so relentless that I stop caring what happens

There is a difference between an exciting read and an exhausting one. Something that good writers do well is pacing. Break things up with a little humor or romance between the confrontations. It doesn't have to be a lot. I'm not suggesting that you turn your hero into a sissy or your heroine into some jokey schoolgirl, but humor and affection are how real people cope with life. If your book doesn't have that, then your characters stop feeling like real people to me.

Do you agree or disagree? What are your pet peeves in genre fiction?

Still going strong

I have jumped into NaNoWriMo and found that I can swim. I can't remember when my own work was this much fun. I know it's the honeymoon week and all that, but don't spoil it for me by telling me how much I'll hate my book next week.

So far I'm at 9,818 words. I was blessed with a quiet weekend.

One thing I've caught myself doing is editing. That really wreaks havoc on one's word count. I'm accustomed to skimming over the previous day's work before I pick up where I left off, doing some cursory editing along the way. My solution to this for Nano is to color the parts I don't want to keep in gray font.

I also insert a little "+" symbol at the end of each day's writing to help me remember where I stopped so I can select the appropriate section of the manuscript to get a correct word count.

What tricks do you use?

Nano Nano!

Or, "Nanoo-nanoo," depending on what planet you are from. That's Robin Williams as Mork from "Mork and Mindy" for those of you who are too young to remember the 80's. Ahem.

I have signed up for NaNoWriMo this year, against my better judgement, but am loving it so far. I got up at 4:30 - yes, four-stinking-thirty - in the morning to write today. I got 1200 words down in about an hour.

Really? 1200 words? Like when has that ever happened before?

It's like this dam just opened inside me. I have this great story that I've been trying to write for a while now and just not been happy with any of my starts. So this time I started over again and it's just flowing like a charm. I think it has a lot to do with not trying to be perfect the first time out.

So, back to writing. I have another 800 words to go tonight! Good luck to everyone who's doing Nano too.

On Happiness

Tonight I sit by the soccer field with my laptop, alone with my own thoughts for the first time in ages. No character voices chattering, no looming work deadlines, no other people's opinions or problems ringing in my head. It feels pretty good.

I’ve been ruminating about happiness lately, particularly as it relates to the writing life. I’ve come to the conclusion that happiness stems from knowing who you are. For me, it’s knowing that I am a child of God, redeemed by the blood of his son Jesus; a wife; a mom and a writer.

I don’t fulfill these roles perfectly, but I fulfill them anyway. My perfection comes from Christ, not Christine. His love and His blood cover all my flaws.

Being a writer is something I’ve struggled deeply with, as many of you know. Creativity is both a gift and  a curse; next to my faith it is my most defining trait. But even that has to be held loosely, like money, health and love. If I try too hard to fulfill it, it becomes a burden.

It’s been a burden for a long time, but not any more. I’ve been blessed to finally find a cure for the depression that’s plagued me for many years. Part of the cure is medication and part is just the raw courage of making some tough decisions about my life and whom I choose to be close to me.

Ultimately, though,  it all boils down to this one fact: God knows me. He created me, Christine, exactly the way he wanted me. My flaws are no surprise to Him. In his eyes, I am perfect. Not because I am perfect right now, but because He sees me as He designed me to be and as I will ultimately be when I am with Him in Heaven.

My desire to be more and better are put there by Him. My striving pleases Him. He rejoices with each step forward that I make. Striving to be more holy is not to be disdained as a “guilt trip.” It is to be celebrated, because it means I am continually learning to listen to and follow the inner voice of God.

Being creative is also to be celebrated. When I use the gifts God has given me, it’s an act of worship, even if I’m writing about gargoyles or elves. All that matters is that I allow Him to shine through my work if He chooses to.

That I am available.

Because in life that is the most that we can be: available to others, to the spirit of God, to our families, and to ourselves, and willing to follow through on whatever is honestly asked of us. The hard part is knowing which requests are genuine need and which are born of selfishness or deceit. But God helps us with that, too.

“If you love Me, keep My commandments, and I will pray to the Father and he will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.” John 14: 15-17

For a very long time I didn’t understand the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. Now I know that it is the Spirit who is with us and reveals all truth to us.

“For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received …the Spirit who is from God that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.” 1 Cor. 2:11-12

I look forward to the fulfillment of this promise: 

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” 1 Cor. 2:9

Sunday Snapshot

Hey everyone, it's time for a Sunday Snapshot! We haven't done this in a while so I'm really looking forward to reading your contributions. Post the last paragraph or several lines of dialogue that you wrote. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't even have to be good. It just has to be yours.

Here's mine. It's pretty bad first draft but perhaps it will encourage y'all to share, too. I really do like getting a little peek at all the different things you are writing.


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Berol pushed to his feet, prodding his nearest companion with his foot. His voice was deepening at last, rumbling in his throat without cracking as he shouted. “Up, elves! We will sleep in our own beds tonight.” 

Defining my Brand

I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) over Labor Day weekend. My head has been spinning with ideas and questions ever since. Just to clarify, I'm not a sci-fi writer but the conference covered all speculative genres. I met lots of awesome people, drank more than I normally do, stayed up wayyyy too late, and attended quite a few panel discussions.

The main thing that's been bugging me is "Where do I fit in?" Most of the stuff covered there was very dark in nature. I was tempted to ask one publisher as he went over the rollout of upcoming titles, "Do you publish anything that is not about violence, death and apocalyse? I'm just curious."

I describe my fantasy novel as "The Lord of the Rings with girls in it" or "Tolkien meets Jane Austen."  It is an adventure story with magic and swords, but set in a society that has a strict set of rules within which the hero and heroine are trying to find their identities. I had to give the hero a POV because he's so repressed he rarely talks. I had no idea for the longest time how these two bumbling souls would ever get to the point of declaring themselves to each other. But ultimately it's a hopeful book about redemption and the triumph of faith over darkness. One friend who read it said it is "deep, with lots of layers."

But the point is that while I know there must be an audience for it, how do I find it? And how do I find an agent or publisher that will take it on? I've scoured bookstores for similar types of stories and can find nothing, though I've read a few self-pubbed or small press books like it. It seems that the active bloggers and facebookers I interact with are all writing things with a lot of sex, a lot of violence or just dark, brooding themes. They're good people and I love talking to them but it would be hard for me to promote their books and I doubt that they would like mine.

I had an interesting conversation in the shuttle on the way to the airport with someone who encouraged me not to write for the Christian market. I told him I have no intention of it. Like John Grisham and J. K. Rowling, I am a writer who happens to be a Christian, not a Christian writer.

How do I find a community of like-minded writers who can point me in the direction of their publishers and agents? Is my story even publishable? I have no idea.