Why Not? Let's Make Some Dick Jokes

I don't really believe in so-called Writer's Block.

I think that anybody who sits down at a computer really wanting to write can put words on the page. Perhaps they won't be great words. Perhaps they'll need to be changed or cut later. Still, they'll get out of you and onto the page, and you'll have written something.

Most of the time I feel that Writer's Block is really just a lack of motivation to do the work of writing. It's a person - who fancies themself a writer - sitting down not to write, but to be brilliant. We can write whenever we want to. We can't always write well whenever we want to. However, if you aren't prepared to write badly every now and again you're going to have a hard time making steady progress.

I know this. I believe this. And yet, I often find myself unwilling to write badly. It is a holdover element of my old perfectionism that if I let a word remain on the page for very long it needs to be good. It can't just be serviceable. It can't be "I'll replace it later." It can't be "Let's just get through this portion and come back to it, when the rest of the book can inform it better."

It's a bad habit, and I need to break myself of it if I ever want to get all these stories out of my head. I've decided that I will first start with renaming the problem. I don't like Writer's Block.

I'm going to call it E-write-tile Dysfunction (EWD). Yes, I am basically writing this post for the sake of that joke alone. Sue me.

I've had a bad case of EWD for awhile now, but I think I'm getting through it. My commitment is firming up, you might say. I'm ready to go at it hard and fast. Once I've covered the page, I'll take a second look and see what sticks. But rest assured, at the end of it all I'll make sure my audience is satisfied.

Yeah, I'm done now.

Talk to Me in a Different Setting

Not that you talk to me much here. Would it hurt to call now and then?

That of course doesn't apply to those of you who do, in fact, talk to me here. And elsewhere. Love you guys.

In any case, I'm the Reddit Fantasy Writer of the Day over at /r/Fantasy. Basically it means I get to shamelessly self-promote for a day and answer some questions. Stop on by if you'd like to ask me something!

Short Stories: Complete Arc vs. Slice of Life

Personally, my definition of what constitutes a "short story" is pretty loose. Observe:

A short story is A) Short and B) ... nope, that's it.

By which I mean, I don't really have any expectation that a short story will give me a complete character arc or a complete "story" in the traditional sense. Many of my favorite short works serve largely to enunciate some idea, or to sketch a picture of an interaction that is more or less fully sensible without further context.

This means that a lot of my favorite short stories can easily be pieces of a larger work - which is A-OK by me. In fact, my first introduction to Ender's Game was through an excerpt included in the anthology There Will Be War. It stood perfectly well on its own.

My freely-available short "Le Morte d'Arthur" has garnered a number of reviews, most fairly positive. The most common negative mentioned, though, is that it is "too short." Now, I'm fine with this - first of all because nobody ever says a terrible story is "too short" so at least I know they wanted to read more. Second of all because most of the elaborations mention they don't think it constituted a full story - that it read more like the first chapter of a book.

To which I usually respond (silently): "Sometimes that's what a short story is - the first chapter to a book that hasn't been written."

I find it wonderful that so many people have expressed desire for an extension to that story. I'll gladly write it (I aim to please. If there's an audience for a story, I'm going to give it to them). However, I disagree that it needs it in order to be complete. The idea has been enunciated. The picture has been formed. As a short, I don't think it requires a complete character or story arc in order to stand alone.

This has come up a lot with me lately as I write additional short stories for a planned collection. Some of them are complete stories in the traditional sense, but many of them aren't. I keep wondering whether or not to address this issue within the collection itself through some kind of authors note. I suppose it must be a consequence of being an indie publisher that makes me want to prepare the reader's expectations so much...

Overcompetance

There is an old concept in SFF called the "Mary Sue/Gary Stu." These are characters which act as self-insertion and wish-fulfillment vehicles for the author. The phenomenon is originally named for a common element of Star Trek fanfiction.

But of course, this sort of thing is not limited to fan fiction. To a certain extent, a lot of main characters are vehicles of wish-fulfillment. Indeed, I use the obviousness of the self-insertion of the author as a sort of unofficial barometer of the "maturity" of a work of fiction. The more I get the feeling that a character is living out the author's personal fantasies, the lower the story falls on the rating system (this does not necessarily indicate displeasure with the story itself, though it certainly corresponds strongly).

However, the primary problem behind the Mary Sue/Gary Stu is getting muddied. We're now seeing it applied to all sorts of characters who have a variety of talents and seem generally all-round awesome. My problem with this conceptual drift is that the problem now seems to apply to just about every protagonist ever written.

We like to read about exceptional people. They feature as the main character in a helluva lot of stories. Even the quintessential "everyman" character generally has some extraordinary skill or manages to save the day due to a sudden (and often unlikely) stroke of genius. None of these necessarily merit the label of self-insertion.

In order to restore the trope to its original meaning (or perhaps to do away with that version of it altogether, due to some stick sexism-related issues) I've come up with the concept of Overcompetance.

This is meant to do away with the discussion on self-insertion. I don't really care about it, as I assume self-insertion is happening in some ways (the good authors just disguise it well). Thus all I care about is whether the range of skills and talents displayed by any particular character feels real. At the point where it begins feeling artificial, there begins a display of overcompetance.

Obviously this is a highly subjective assessment (as is everything else in literature). I generally ascribe it to characters who manage to miraculously "discover" several new talents during the course of a book. Encounter magic for the first time and you're already really good at it? Okay. Wait, you only just started riding horses and you do it as if born in the saddle? Hrm. Hold on, you've never held a weapon in your life and after a month with a sword you can best experienced soldiers? Sorry, that's one too many. You fail the test.

Concerning That Whole "Rewriting" Thing

I've never been much of a rewriter.

I'm usually the sort of writer who obsesses over each word before it hits the the page. Thus I I rewrite less than other whose first drafts might have been a little breezier in the making. For me, completing the first draft represents the bulk of the work. I'm thinking about a lot of stuff during its creation that a lot of writers leave for the latter part of the process.

I never planned it that way. It's just the way my writing habits evolved. Polish the first draft as much as possible - fix problems that arise along the way, including going back and rewriting chapters as needed to resolve continuity issues and the like. It takes a lot longer to get a finished story, but then you only need to iterate over the writing to bring the rough parts up to the level of the good parts. Major problems should be mostly taken care of by that point.

With Clanless I'm trying something else, as I believe I've mentioned in the past. I'm attempting to focus on getting the story onto the page faster and trusting in my ability to rewrite it up to quality. I don't know if this method will be faster in the end (and to be honest, the patchy amounts of time I'm able to devote to writing make it harder to judge) but I do want to give it a try.


So far, progress has been... odd. I've skipped entire element of the story to fill in later. I have a myriad of bolded passages telling myself what needs to be added, or what will need to be reconciled if I end up going a certain direction later. I also have a number of passages emphatically marked for replacement because even as I finished them I was cringing at how bad they were. Normally, that kind of thing wouldn't stand with me, even in a first draft. All in all, I estimate I've left a good 15k-20k words to be "filled in later." That's out of 35k words written so far.

Yeah. Not my normal MO. I guess we'll have to wait for the final product to see how it the process helps or hinders - and even then, it's rather hard to control for the effect of any single variable in the writing process. Just too many to account for and "life" is not the most stable experimental environment.

A Needed Cover Makeover

The Giant of the Tidesmouth has a new cover by the always-wonderful Graham Hanks.

It may take a few hours for it to trickle through Amazon's system and be reflected on the page, but soon enough this beauty shall replace the old, do-it-yourself-because-you're-too-broke-to-pay-an-artist beast.

Let's all just forget how the other one looked, eh?

Hero Gender Bender

I undertook a fun little mental exercise the other day. The ongoing discussions concerning gender equality in the SciFi/Fantasy community (for instance, this excellent thread on Mythic Scribes) got me thinking about some of my own characters. Personally I do tend to default characters to male - that is to say, unless there is a reason for a character to be female they are written as males. This has resulted in what even I can admit is a noticeable deficit of female characters thus far. Whether this is because I myself am male or because of cultural programming, I leave to others. It is a situation that I intend to change, though.

Anyways, back to that exercise: I went through a few of the stories I have in my head and flipped the gender of some of the main characters, trying to imagine the difference it would make in the story.

By and large, in many of my works of fantasy it makes quite a difference (though not all). This was usually attributable to the societies in which these characters exist having strongly defined gender roles. So, that's a predictable and fairly boring finding.

The fun part came in when I specifically took a look at the main characters where A) the society had enough gender equality to shrug at the flip and B) the character was dear to me, personally, for some reason. There exists a particular fantasy doorstopper series I eventually want to write with a pair of main characters whose character arcs complement and comment on each other. I took the one I liked best and tried this little game.

It definitely caused some differences. Various characters interactions would need to change, and at least one would be probably more complicated. At least two romantic subplots would change because the significant other of those relationships would have to be flipped (well, I guess I could make the MC bisexual or homosexual, which choice would have additional consequences).

The end result of all this was my realization (which will no doubt seem rather banal to most people) that pretty much every consequence of changing these details about a character sprang from how their society would view it.  There is, of course, nothing intrinsic about a woman that makes her less fit for practically any task. The only possible exception is melee combat, when having a great deal of muscle mass comes in handy - but of course, there are plenty of very strong women (and plenty of martial roles which don't place so much emphasis on brute strength), so that's out as well. Same goes for homosexuals, especially concerning the romantic involvements. I've seen nothing to suggest there is some intrinsic difference, emotion-wise, between heterosexual and homosexual relationships.

What does all this mean? Well, it means that ideally a reader should identify no less with a hero of the opposite gender or a different sexuality than they would with a hero who is "like them" in these respects. The range of human reaction and emotion has no such boundaries.

That is, in an ideal world. In more realistic terms, given two heroes A and B of which A is a woman and B a man (and sure, a third hero C which is transgender), a male reader might identify more with a male character simply because he assumes the female experience is different - even if every other aspect of their story is identical.

I suppose that could be one of the benefits of well-written fiction that is aware of such issues - it will instill such awareness in the readers. Does that mean I have the guts to actually change the gender or sexuality of any of these characters? I suppose that remains to be seen.